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.

In this episode we will go all in on the nitty gritty of shoe care. We do this together with Anders Sundström, who has developed the new premium shoe care range Paul Brunngård, for the Swedish company with the same name. Paul Brunngård is the largest shoe care company in Scandinavia, but previously focus has been on more basic shoe care products and eco-friendly stuff. Now they wanted to develop their own range of premium products, a task given to the shoe care expert Anders Sundström. We will talk a bit about Anders background and his work with developing the nicely designed Paul Brunngård shoe care range, and then go into the details of what shoe care products contains, how the various ingredients affect leather, the good and the bad, and so on. If you like when the podcast nerd in on things, this episode is for you.

It's time for the second special edition Q&A episode, where you listeners and readers of Shoegazing.com gets to ask questions to some big names from the quality shoe industry. This round it's the most famous of all Japanese bespoke shoemakers that is answering your questions, Yohei Fukuda. Since about 14 years his bespoke shoes and nowadays also top class RTW and MTO offerings has been a holy grail for many shoe lovers around the world. Hear him give his best advice to aspiring shoemakers, talk about how the demand for bespoke shoes is in Japan, answer questions on how much time that is spent on making his shoes, reveal the secrets behind his amazing photos, and much more.

This episode, number 22, will be featuring no other than Jean-Michel Casalonga. He is the main lastmaker and workshop manager of Berluti's Paris workshop. The French company Berluti is one of the bigger quality shoe brands in the world, nowadays more of a full fashion menswear brand , owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH, with stores all around the world. Berluti has two workshops making their bespoke shoes, one in Paris above their original Rue Marbeuf store just next to the Champs Élysées, led by Jean-Michel, and one outside Angers in Western France, led by Anthony Delos. Hear Jean-Michel Casalonga tell the interesting story of how he in a relatively unorthodox way managed to get his place at Berluti, hear about his love of lastmaking and how he wants to raise its status in France, about how it is to run a large bespoke workshop doing all in-house and the pros and cons of this set-up compared to the use of freelancers, and much, much more.

In this episode you'll get to meet the very charismatic bespoke shoemaker Patrick Frei from Germany. He made a name of himself more widely when he won the World Championships in Shoemaking in 2018, and is seen by many as one of the greatest shoemakers around today. He works out of his workshop in Freiburg in Southwest of Germany, together with his shoemaking partner Kazuya Kimura. For those of you who have seen shoes made by the Patrick Frei workshop, you'll know they have a distinct personal character, an originality and identity one can't find anywhere else. How one achieves this is one of the main topics of our conversation, but we also we talk about his rather special way into shoemaking sort of through juggling on the streets of South America, about his interesting approach on lastmaking, about the balance between tradition and playfulness, about his obsession with small details, and much more.

In this episode we are meeting a proper shoe collector - André Simha, from Geneva, Switzerland. Known to many as andrel42 on Instagram, where he shows off his seriously impressive shoe collection, with around 300 pairs of welted shoes from literally all over the world. For over four decades he's had a big interest in classic shoes, and owns everything from the most famous brands down to very obscure new makers very few have heard of. We talk about what it is that drives him to continue to buy new shoes, discuss practical things like storage and shoe care, gets his experience of various shoemaking countries and brands, and much more.

In this episode I talk with Rezső Kuti of the Hungarian brand Vass Shoes, certainly the most famous shoe brand of the country, who've been making hand welted fully handmade shoes since the 1970's. Rezső worked as Sales Manager for the company for about a decade and built up its internationally successful MTO programme, he then spent a couple of years as Factory Manager for Heinrich Dinkelacker's Budapest factory and started the brand Passus Shoes, before re-joining Vass as Sales Consultant about 1,5 years ago. We of course talk a lot about Vass, about the reasons for the brand's fame around the world, about the massive challenges that the covid situation has put them in and how they've run a lot of sales simply to not have to lay off their shoemakers and staff, etc, but also about the Hungarian quality shoe business in general, with a long heritage and a characteristic style as a base, where most still do everything all by hand.

The Shoegazing Podcast is back, this time with a new type of special edition episodes that will pop-up every now and then, called Q&A Specials. Basically you listeners and readers of Shoegazing.com get to ask questions to some famous names from the classic shoe industry. This round is with Daniel Wegan, the Swede who made a name of himself working at the bespoke department of Gaziano & Girling in England for ten years. He placed second in the World Championships in Shoemaking 2018, and then won the title in 2019. Last year he left G&G to start his own bespoke brand, Catella Shoemaker. In this Q&A Special though, it’s you who have decided the topics. A big thanks to all who sent in questions, couldn’t fit in all, but we got a lot covered in the near hour we talked, among other things Daniel’s view on the current boom of more casual footwear and how he thinks this will affect his business, a breakdown on why bespoke shoes cost so much, about preventing work-related injuries as a shoemaker, how he works with the bottom of the lasts, why he is often wearing cheap New Balance shoes himself, and much more. Enjoy the listen!