Hear Leon Fan, one of the founders of the famous Chinese shoe store Medallion Shoes, about how they have worked to become so successful, and about things like the Chinese classic quality shoe market in general and about the increasingly interesting field of quality shoe brands and shoemakers coming out of China.
The Shoegazing Podcast is back – finally. This is the 15th episode of the podcast, after a few months of silence. Covid has prevented me from meeting people to interview for the podcast, something I prefer to do in person, since both interviews and sound quality tend to be best that way, but with the current situation with travel restrictions etc continuing, well, here we are with an episode recorded over distance. Sound quality isn’t great, hope you can bare with that, I hope to be able to solve it in a better way going forward.
Leon Fan.
In this episode we meet Leon Fan, who together with Kevin Li founded the famous shoe store Medallion Shoes, now with two huge brick and mortar stores in Beijing and Shanghai in China. They have sort of become the Chinese equivalent to the Isetan Men’s shoe department in Tokyo, Japan, in the way that they are not only setting a big mark on the huge domestic market, but also internationally. This also goes for the brand of fully handmade Ready to Wear, Made to Order and bespoke shoes Acme Shoemaker, where Leon Fan also is a co-founder. A very interesting talk about their work with building up Medallion Shoes and also Acme, rather open-hearted with things like what and how much they sell and their aims going forward, and we also talked about the Chinese quality shoe market in general and on the increasing amount of brands and makers coming out of China making welted footwear.
Listen to the episode below, or in your preferred podcast player. All episodes of the Shoegazing Podcast can be found here.
Photos: Medallion Shoes
Very interesting listen, thanks both!
Karl A: Thanks a lot!