Tom and I have been in Italy this past week working on some pretty exciting things and if everything works out we'll be making some big changes to the way we work next season. We've been visiting the Marche region of Italy which is a specialised shoemaking area nestled in some purely beautiful countryside, a stones throw from the beach. Each village or town is built on the top of a hill and each supplier we visited had the most incredible view. If you have to go work somewhere in Italy you could do much worse than a few days in Marche.
So, what have we been doing there? well, for a long time now we have been talking about and investigating the idea of making some of our ready to wear styles with a factory. As we grow the workload of making our production is too much for one man to do alone, not to mention the time spent ordering and shipping every single component from across Europe to the UK. I also know that more often than not we make 1 size run of our styles and when that's gone, it's gone and we don't always have what you're looking for in stock. So, the plan is to work with a small family run factory in Italy to make some of our favourite and classic styles so that we have better stock availability and also so that we don't run our shoemaker Tom into the ground! Last year we did a lot of research in Spain and Portugal and even started working on a project with a factory in Spain but it didn't work out. Fingers crossed that we have found a great little factory in Italy to make our beautiful children's shoes, and who knows we maybe even found one for the long awaited womens collection... exciting times! watch this space for more news in the next few months...
