These Fashion Startups Offer The Prestige Of “Made In Italy” Without Inflated Prices

Amanda Carye stumbled on the idea for her shoe company, Idoni, when she moved to Italy for a six-month business course.

Strolling past gelato stands and chapels in Venice, she came across shops selling furlane, a slipper invented during the Second World War, when resources were scarce. At the time, Italian shoemakers—whose craft is still passed down from generation to generation—took pride in being able to make a beautiful shoe out of pretty much anything. They used old bicycle tires to create soles with good grips, jute bags for a waterproof interior, and lush recycled fabrics like velvet curtains or silk dresses for the upper. The result was a shoe that looked like a cross between a ballet flat and a smoking slipper, with a colorful exterior and excellent traction. “Old ladies remember wearing furlane when they were children, running around in the countryside,” Carye says. “The shoes are highly functional, but they are also very elegant.”

Carye’s plan was to modernize the furlane for American women, many of whom struggle to find footwear that is comfortable but doesn’t look like sneakers or (horrors) orthopedic shoes. While in Italy, she began to search for a factory where a master shoemaker could help her engineer a flat shoe that offered good arch support, stability, and cushioned insoles without sacrificing beautiful design. As Carye began the search, she found dozens of family-owned factories that had been making shoes for some of the world’s best known luxury brands, including Prada, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Manolo Blahnik. She landed on a factory in the Brescia region, two hours east of Venice, where the owner was just as excited about prototyping her ideal shoe as she was. Her brand, Idoni, was born.

Carye’s shoes go for $135, rather than the usual $600 you’d expect to pay for an exclusive “made in Italy” shoe. She’s able to set a reasonable price because she only sells the shoes on her website, following the model pioneered by Warby Parker and Everlane that cuts out retailer markups. “Americans spearheaded the buying online and direct-to-consumer business models as a part of our everyday life, which allows American companies to go back to Italy or Spain or wherever the expertise is,” Carye says. “Everyone wants products that are handmade by the most skilled artisans in the world. In turn, this model allows European artisans to find a broader audience.”

J.Crew was among the first brands to mass-market Italian-made products—namely, shirts and shoes. Back in 2011, the company released a three-part documentary short series that took the viewer on a trip to old Italian mills and factories. Alessandro Giammattei, a Florence-based shoemaker profiled in the series, had spent 50 years honing his craft. “You breathe shoes around here,” he says on screen. “It’s in the blood. We make shoes that have nothing less in quality than Prada and Gucci.” And still, J.Crew was able to sell these shoes for about $150.

These days, J.Crew is competing with a wave of American fashion startups that manufacture in Italy—Idoni, M.Gemi, Cuyana, Tamara Mellon, Oliver Cabell, Greats, and Everlane to name a few—and offer their products at a fraction of the price of traditional luxury brands. All of these companies are selling shoes and bags at what is described as an “affordable luxury” price point of between $150 and $300 per item, which makes them accessible to a broader spectrum of buyers beyond than the usual one-percenters.

Footwear startup Idoni sells luxury-quality shoes for $135.

The Changing Landscape Of Italian Factories

Luca Bagante has had a front-row seat to this wave of American companies making a foray into Italian shoe factories. He’s a third-generation shoemaker in Padua whose grandfather opened a factory in the post-war years that produced footwear for famous brands like Rossimoda. These days, he still uses this factory to produce his own shoe line, Apepazza, but he’s also started a consulting firm that connects footwear startups from around the world with the right factory for their needs. “Italian shoe manufacturing is hard to navigate if you’re not Italian,” Bagante says. “Our network is made up of a lot of independent stores and factories.”

Italy is the second largest footwear exporter in the world, after China. Italian shoes generated $7.7 billion in revenue in 2016, but Bagante says that after the 2008 global recession, factories lost about 30% of their business. He’s noticed, however, that interest from American and European direct-to-consumer brands has contributed to Italian factories’ recovery.

According to the most recent data, released in 2014, there are more than 5,000 footwear manufacturers in Italy, employing about 77,500 workers. This means that the average factory only employs 15 people. Shoemaking skills are often passed down from parent to child; some businesses can trace their origins back to the medieval period, when a shoemaking guild was established in Florence and transformed the trade into an art governed by rigorous rules to ensure quality. “When Asia came into the global shoe market, it was impossible to compete with their cost of labor,” Bagante says. “In Italy, it was very important for us to emphasize our legacy of quality. Luxury was the only option for us to express our capabilities.”

Karla Gallardo, founder and CEO of Cuyana, which makes bags in Italy, points out that superior Italian workmanship has a lot to do with the fact that craftsmen are knowledgeable about the materials they work with because their factories are often located close to leather tanneries, allowing workers from both industries to collaborate to make the best possible product. “Leatherworkers in Italy are familiar with different grades of leather and know which parts of the hide works best for different products,” she says. “We’ve found that the quality of the workmanship goes down when leathers are flown in. It often means that [the factories] are importing cheaper, poorer-quality materials, and the craftsmen don’t have an intimate understanding of that particular material.”

 

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