Today a new website on quality shoes called The World of Shoes was launched. The site will have editorial content, some films and other things, but also a substantial compilation of hundreds of brands of classic shoes.

 

Behind the site are two guys in Gothenburg, Sweden, with the intensive entrepreneur Daniel Pagrotsky as the leading man who has worked extremely hard to get the page realised, as well as his friend Hannes Rebas who provide the content and texts (with the help of a photographer for pics and filming). Efforts to get to the site has been going on for several years, I was involved myself for a long time and have helped to develop the site idea, and the earlier plan was that I should become the editor of the page. Now since it took time to get it started, and I got the opportunity to work for Kavat/Italigente instead, so I haven’t been involved with the project the last year or so. Glad to see that the page is finally launched now though.

 

The brand guide.

The brand guide.

 

The ambition of The World of Shoes is quite high. There are two full-time positions, Daniel on the marketing side and Hannes as editor, so the opportunities will be greater than for shoe bloggers such as me, Justin “The Shoe Snob” FitzPatrick or Mircea “Claymoor’s List” Cioponea who all have them as side projects alongside other jobs. The site is in English, but there are plans for versions in, for example, Japanese, German and French. It will consist of three parts one can say, where the starting page has editorial articles and films, etc. They have a compilation of hundreds of different footwear brands. They also plan to open up a marketplace with an online shop that, like Farfetch, Etsy, or for that matter Amazon and others, does not own stock, but the order is made from other stores’ or brands’ webshops. I know they wanted to launch the site now during Pitti Uomo, and had a rather difficult time to finish everything in time, so it’s a bit of a half-baked version of the page that is online now. For example, you can not click through to some of the manufacturers in the brand guide, but there are going to be a page with pictures and info of each brand, and some other flaws, but those things will hopefully be rectified soon.