There are a lot of shoe industry secrets used to romanticize shoemaking. All of those videos you watch about the 300 steps to make a pair of shoes and shoes that stay on lasts 2 weeks to 30 days are simply inaccurate. It’s like a fictional motion picture showing you something that could be real but is sensationalized to create theater. Frankly, I don’t know why they do it either? I never liked those videos that show you someone clicking by hand and then once the tape stops rolling they break out the leather stamping and/or laser-cutting machine. It’s just like saying ‘handmade.’ Why can’t machine-made production shoes be seen as good? Why can’t we just tell the real truth instead of fabricating ideas that are not really practiced? All we are doing is harming the industry and the client in reality.
Let’s just look at this logically for a second. Let me break it down with an analogy from when I was shining shoes professionally. When I used to offer mirror shines on shoes the work probably took me a total of 1-2 actual hours on a specific pair. But it was the height of inefficiency to just do a pair at a time. The smartest way of working is having a row of shoes and doing step by-step on each pair one after another. The reason (like in shoe production) is that the shoe needed to sit/rest after each application so the polish set into the pores of the leather.
Once I was done with that 10th pair, the first one was now ready for its second application. Therefore, I never lost a second of “production time” through pointless waiting. At a certain point when I became so busy, I had to start telling the customers that it would take me 2 weeks to have their shoes complete. Did it really take me 2 weeks? No, of course not. But I had 50 other shoes to do first and I never allowed someone to jump ahead of the line. Never did I sacrifice one customer for another. That’s a bad practice that only leads to a bad outcome. That’s also why most factories won’t let you jump the queue and make your pair faster than someone else’s.
So when a shoe company tells you that your MTO or new order might take 3-6 months it is not that it actually takes that amount of time. It’s that you have to sit behind the queue of people ahead of you. And of course, this timeline is directly correlated to how busy/popular that shoemaker/factory is and how big their workforce and order backlog is. So don’t complain about it because just like you, everyone else wants a pair and is patiently waiting as well.
A shoe can be made in 48-72 hours, in a factory, or even bespoke. Is it best to make it that fast? No, of course not. It was rushed and not done to its best ability. Realistic shoe production time is maybe 2 weeks. And that is mainly a lot of time sitting on a cart going through the production line.
No one really puts their shoes in a room to “sit on the last” for 15-30 days. That’s laughable and is pure shoe industry secrets fiction. Maybe it spends 2 weeks in the production line and thus on the last for about half of that. Maybe. The most time spent in those 3-6 months is spent with the upper fully sewn and sitting in boxes full of other uppers waiting to get onto the production line of finishing. That is about 2 months right there as those uppers wait their turn to enter the queue of production. That is the reality of it. And that is the reality of all production. Not just shoes. But when there are humans involved things inevitably take longer. More mistakes are made and sometimes things need to be repeated. It’s life. It’s business. It’s production.
I do understand why the shoe industry secrets exist though. It is because most people are so used to the Amazon way these days that shoe companies have to fictionalize the process for people to understand why their shoes can’t be made from one day to the next. Our expectations have become almost unreal in this new day and age. Just know that your shoemaker is always trying to make their shoes as quick as they can for you as there is no better marketing than that of a person wearing your shoes on the streets of the world and promoting their brand.
—Justin FitzPatrick, The Shoe Snob
Shop · Marketplace · J.FitzPatrick · Patreon
***Republished and rewritten from the original post in 2020. Shoes in the photo have nothing to do with the subject, just eye candy for you to look at while reading 😉 ***
Great Blog. I order my bespoke shoes from mrdapper.shoes He is a Great Bespoke shoemaker
Thanks Luis!