Report – Midas Bootmaker x Skolyx

One of the most praised Indonesian bootmakers – Midas Bootmaker – has collaborated with the Swedish store Skolyx on the first RTW collection ever for the brand. Hand lasted, hand welted, handmade sole stitch (even for rubber soles), hand built heels, with real leather toe and heel stiffeners – serious craftsmanship now easily accessible widely.

As most readers would know by now, my everyday job is for the Swedish online store Skolyx, selling quality shoes, shoe- and clothing care and accessories, and our latest project is this collaboration with Midas Bootmaker. This is the workwear brand of Winson Shoemaker, who has a reputation of making the finest handmade dress shoes in Indonesia. Midas / Winson is a small workshop of eight people, who only make about 30 pairs of shoes a month. Winson Shoemaker was founded by Emil Rahmana Putra in 2014 in his garage in Bandung, and he set up a proper workshop of his own with employees back in 2017. In the beginning focus was on workwear boots, but interest in hand welted men’s dress shoes took over and is what Winson mainly have become known for, even if they continued making the more rugged boots as well. To streamline and make it clearer to customers, this year they separated Winson for more pure premium dress shoes and boots, and started Midas Bootmaker for workwear boots and casual shoes. For both Winson and Midas, it’s the very clean and crisp make that is most synonymous with their shoes and boots.

The Midas Bootmaker x Skolyx range.

The interest in workwear boots from Indonesia has boomed in recent years, where everything is still done almost exclusively by hand, so no lasting machines or Goodyear machines and McKay machines for stitching and so on, here makers sit with awl, needle, knife, hammer etc the real old school way. This is a tradition that dates back to when the country was a Dutch colony, but which has evolved and been refined over the decades since the country gained independence in the 1940s. Also other types of leather crafts are huge in the country, here focus is on more rugged goods as well. Despite the high level of craftsmanship and quality, prices are low in an international comparison, this since wages and living costs in Indonesia are relatively low. No surprise we’ve had an explosion of global interest in Indonesian boots and shoes in recent years, especially in the US real handmade Indonesian boots are highly sought after. There are around 20 different manufacturers of this type of footwear, many in and around the city of Bandung, sort of their Northampton in England or Marche in Italy. However, in almost all cases, production is very small-scale.

The making of Midas x Skolyx boots. Here the uppers are lasted by hand.

Hand welting.

Clean work. Pictures: Midas Bootmaker

At Skolyx, we’ve sold Goodyear welted dress shoes and boots for many years, from our own Skolyx brand, Yanko and TLB Mallorca, all made in Spain. We’ve also added Blake stitched Belgian loafers and premium sneakers with top specifications at a relatively low prices recently. Now, a given new area to branch out to is workwear boots. And we figured that it would be interesting to head towards the top of that sphere straight away, not least since Indonesian workwear boots basically only is available as Made to Order, often ordered through e-mail or Instagram DM:s directly with the makers. It would be cool to be the first store outside of Asia to actually offer these hand welted workwear boots as Ready to Wear, so customers could get them straight away and not need to wait months, could easily exchange sizing, etc. On top of our wish list we had Midas, and luckily Emil Rahmana Putra was positive to the project. Obviously, being the small workshop they are, it would be a rather small scale thing with only a few models with a rather limited stock.

We loved the look of Midas Service boots, especially when made on the Edlyn last which gives a classic look for that type of style, so that model was given for us, even if we decided to modify it a bit with removing some rows of stitching on the uppers to make the look a bit more clean. We had in mind a Moc toe boot with a lightweight wedge sole as well, something that Midas hadn’t done before, but together we drafted out a new pattern, and a couple of samples later we had exactly the type of Moc toe boot we had in mind, this on the high toe box last Landshaker. We also decided to up the specifications a bit from regular Midas, so the boots for this collaboration is made with real leather stiffeners for both the heel and the toe, so basically everything is done the same way as on bespoke shoes or boots.

Moc toe boot in brown pull-up leather, with lightweight Vibram Morflex wedge sole. Price for all the boots is €500 ($466 excl. VAT).

The Service boot in brown roughout, with Dainite studded rubber sole. Midas do sole stitching by hand also when done through these hard rubber soles, and it still looks really clean, very impressive.

Service boot in medium brown pull-up, a leather type with oils and waxes stuffed in it, making it durable and achieving a lovely patina over time.

For leathers, given that European or American leathers imported to Indonesia incur high customs (also added again when we import the final shoes to Sweden and pay customs for this) meaning a steep price hike, we decided to look on the domestic leathers available. Here, a lot has happened in Indonesia in recent years, today you can find really good quality local leathers, even if there’s still also a bunch of less good stuff around. So one have to know where to source from, which Emil of Midas certainly do. The brown pull-up leather (the term pull-up comes from the lighter shade that appears where the leather is stretched, due to the way it’s treated with waxes and oils, a very durable type of leather that gets awesome character with wear) used for the Midas Bootmaker x Skolyx Service boot and Moc toe is actually made by a friend of Emil. He buys local hides and his own tanning agents, then travels to a tannery in Yogyakarta where he rents some tanning drums and equipment for a short period, and stays there and tans the hides himself. The batches are therefore very limited, and when they run out it may take a long time before he can go back to the tannery and make new leather. The brown roughout leather (the difference from full reverse calf suede is that the surface is not as evenly buffed) that the Service boot also is available in comes from the Cisarua tannery, a family-owned tannery that started in 1949 and has seen growing global interest in recent years due to its good reputation of offering quality leathers.

The small collection.

The final boots are (bear in mind me being biased) really quite spectacular. Coming from the dress shoe world, I probably care more about stuff like a very precise make and clean finishing than your regular boot nerd, which is one area that Midas really stands out in. But also the fit is good and the leathers are really, really solid stuff. Certainly boots that can last for decades. I’ve personally bought me a pair of the Service boots in pull-up leather (I pay wholesale price plus 25% VAT on stuff I get from Skolyx), which I intend to use for a late entry in the Stitchdown Patina Thunderdome contest (which is like a boots and shoe ageing contest, with prizes for $15,000 in the mix). I’m normally not that fond of boots, want my ankles clear, but these I actually do look forward to wearing quite a lot. Price for the Midas Bootmaker x Skolyx boots are certainly good given the quality and craftsmanship, at €500 ($466 excl. VAT). We hope even more people will not only get to know off Indonesian quality boots, but also get them on ones feet.

Clean contrasting sole stitching, done through a rubber sole.

The heels are built by hand layer by layer, instead of as normal for RTW shoes, with pre-built heels.

The Moc toe boot is solely available through this collaboration.

Perfectly balanced shoe.

The Edlyn last really has a traditional service boot shape. Pictures: Skolyx