Today’s Favorites – Allen Edmonds Randoms

I have always appreciated Allen Edmonds. While many of their styles, could be considered on the ‘old-manish’ side of the design spectrum, they still do make many cool and wearable shoes, such as the one’s posted here. But one thing that you start to notice, when you handle many bespoke or higher-end shoes, such as John Lobb or G&G, is that the leather quality and construction are not the only things that separate the price-points. The attention to detail, is what does it for me. While these shoes, are indeed nice, they definitely lack that shape (those immaculate curves), that truly represents the foot. This leads me to believe that the lasts they use are pretty shapeless, like a blob. But if you look at the lasts of say G&G, they have curves that play not only into the shape of the foot, but draw out the beauty of the pattern (style of the shoe) as well. This is one way you can tell an expensive shoe from a cheap one. In my quest to start my shoe line, I hope to change this, but I can imagine that altering the lasts of an existing factory’s stock (or creating new one’s), will only add to the tooling costs, which will add to your cost of production and which inevitably make your retail price higher. As always, there are reasons why things are the way they are, but we shall try to change that….