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The famous British shoe brand Church’s Footwear is going through tough times. After a disappointing 2020 they raised prices with around 40-50% last year to try a new approach, which resulted in a drop in sales with another 57%. This means that they’ve dropped a whopping 81% of their turnaround in just two years time, and losses are huge. Question is if they can turn things around.
The Norwegian menswear store Cavour expand their already great selection of shoes with a new private label range of hand welted shoes, made in collaboration with Chinese Xibao. Superbly sleek looking shoes available to get off the shelf.
The well-known British shoe store Pediwear is sadly closing, after 46 years in the business. Now they run a closing sale at up to 50% off on everything in their store, including Carmina, Crockett & Jones, Tricker’s, Cheaney, TLB Mallorca, Carlos Santos, Barker, Paul Sargent, Heschung, and many others. Reductions will continue to increase until everything is gone.
The famous Japanese bespoke shoemaker Yohei Fukuda is about to seriously open up Europe as part of his business area. He will have trunk shows on July 1-2 in London, and on July 8-9 in Geneva, and the plan is to return there and likely also Paris every six months going forwards. He’ll take orders for RTW, MTO and full bespoke.
Experienced bespoke shoemakers know a lot about shoes, and it’s a positive development to see that more and more of these also take the leap into offering Ready to Wear and/or Made to Order to a larger and larger degree. Latest one is the German bespoke shoemaker Korbinian Ludwig Hess who has developed a fully handmade wholecut slipper offered below €800.
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We are very pleased to announce two new editions to the London Super Trunk Show on May 7: Acme Shoemaker, the highly praised Chinese maker of fully handmade RTW, MTO and bespoke, and the German brand Modum who aims at bringing affordable bespoke into the digital era with 3D scanning.
Today the online charity raffle Shoes for Life was launched, where entrants can win their dream pair of bespoke shoes from a number of French bespoke shoemakers, at the value of €7,000, plus plenty of other shoes and other prizes at a value of over €10,000 in total. The contest is organised by the French shoemakers’ association CSNB together with Gustave Roussy’s institute for fight against cancer, to which all the funds from the contest will go to.
The famous Swedish shoe store Skoaktiebolaget will be closing their brick and mortar shop at the end of February, after being an important player in Scandinavia and internationally ever since they opened a decade ago. Now they will be an online store only with a much more limited offering. This will mean a big sale starts in store on Tuesday January 25 to clear a lot of the stock.
I’m pleased to introduce a new place online to talk about classic quality shoes – the Shoegazing Discord. A chat server aimed at complementing forums and Facebook groups with a space for quicker talks and shoe discussions.
After the news that the oak bark tanned sole leather tannery J. Rendenbach were to close down, many people hoped for some sort of solution for the products to live on. Now it’s announced that the fellow German tannery Kilger has bought the recipe, took over equipment and tanning liquids and more, including the J.R. brand, and will already next year offer the new soles.
