Shoegazing Podcast

For this episode I met John Chung, who runs the shoe shine bar, shoe and leather goods repair shop and shoe store Mason & Smith in Singapore. He won the world championships of shoe shining in 2018, and has for many years been an ambassadeur for professional shoe shining in particular and caring for your shoes in general. Mason & Smith has not least been pioneers with shoe shine videos on Instagram and TikTok, reaching a very wide audience globally. I talk with John about how he decided to skip university to instead refurb and sell thrift store shoes to eventually build up his shoe shine business, about why Asians dominate the professional shoe shining scene, about what professional shoe shiners do differently to regular people caring for their shoes, and more.

This around it's time for another Q&A Special, and the one who gets to answer all the questions is the American / Japanese shoemaker Seiji McCarthy. He's based in Tokyo since many years where he runs his very successful shoe brand that primarily makes classic American styled bespoke, MTM and MTO shoes. You can hear more about his journey in episode 25 of the podcast. Some of the questions he'll answer are on why there’s not more American bespoke shoemakers making classic American style shoes, how his workshop is set up, if lastmaking skill is affected by more makers offering handmade MTO shoes, and much more.

For this one, I met up with Daniel Bucheli of the Swiss shoe company Majordome. It was founded in 2012 in Zurich, they now have stores in the hometown as well as Lausanne, Bern and New York. Majordome started off doing only Goodyear welted Made to Order and Made to Measure shoes, and still today custom orders account for about half their sales. Even if the brand has a foundation of more classic styles, what they are most known for today are their more unique designs, these are often more casual models that work with contrasts, but never over the top, always highly wearable. Stuff like their boat shoe model, casual oxford, blucher boot or galosh sneaker are all ones that have a distinct Majordome character. Check out their Instagram to understand what I mean, if you're not yet familiar with them. With Daniel Bucheli I talk a lot about the design aspect and how a brand can find its own aesthetic language, and of course a lot more.

For this episode, I met up with the Australian born, UK-based, shoemaker Sebastian Tarek. Apart from running his own bespoke shoe brand and doing outwork for various London-based bespoke shoemakers, he has also for many years been involved in teaching shoemaking both at colleges and in other ways, and is highly engaged in the topic of education. With focus on the UK but also looking at it at a wider perspective, we talk about how the ways to become a shoemaker has changed through the years, what the possibilities are today for those who want to learn to make shoes by hand, and what needs to be done to preserve and develop shoemaking education in the future. Among other things.

In this episode we are putting the spotlight on an integral part of the shoe industry, that aren't that known to the wider audience since it doesn't deal with the regular consumer: the leather wholesalers. One of the leading such for the shoe industry in the UK is Euroleathers, where Rob James is a Director. Earlier this spring I visited him and the family business in Northamptonshire, had a tour of the warehouse, and sat down with Rob to talk about the company, about wholesalers part in the shoemaking sector, about leather quality, about what types of leathers that are quickly on the rise, and much more.