Red Wing, the century-old maker of work boots in Red Wing, Minn., memorably stumbled when it came out with women’s pumps as part of a lifestyle collection but the company’s classic styles, meanwhile, have become fetishized by fashion insiders. Other companies have wrestled uncomfortably with fashion’s embrace. Clark said that the company has more business than it can handle at the moment, but that it is not planning to increase production. It was one of the first heritage brands that J. Not much has changed in the way shoes are made there, except that Alden has become a hot line, sold by boutiques like Epaulet in Brooklyn and Leffot in the West Village. Its closest neighbor, a FootJoy factory in Brockton, closed two years ago. Alden is the last remaining shoe company of the hundreds in New England in the 19th century. “We are not interested in being a hot line,” said Bob Clark, a vice president of the Alden Shoe Company, founded in Middleborough, Mass., in 1884. It frightens a shoemaker to describe a high-quality shoe as trendy. But it has also created a dynamic that is challenging for them to navigate, as designers adapt their products for a more fashion-conscious customer, as younger workers are trained on decades-old machines, and as executives wonder how long the newfound popularity of heritage brands can last. That has generally been perceived as a welcome development by those companies, some of which had been struggling financially or were, until recently, at risk of extinction. Over the last few years, as heritage brands have been rediscovered by a new generation of customers, especially young men, labels once seen as relics of American work wear now have an unexpected cool factor, stocked by stylish boutiques and obsessed about on fashion blogs. It has not been lost on workers at Allen Edmonds, or those at about a half-dozen shoe companies that still produce in the United States, that the craft of shoemaking is experiencing something of a renaissance. “If bellbottoms can make a comeback, why not expensive shoes?” “The quality comes from the individual workman,” he said, picking up another shoe. It can be tedious work, he said, but enjoyable because customers appreciate what he does: making handcrafted shoes that, once completed, will cost $325. More than 400 pairs of shoes pass through his hands in a day, in a process that involves 220 steps from leather to lace-ups. Since January 2010, the company has added more than 118 employees and increased its work shifts, the results of a turnaround that has surprised even veteran shoemakers like Mr. Its outlook was as dark as, well, shoe polish.Īnd yet, this year, Allen Edmonds is on track to produce 500,000 pairs of shoes, up from 350,000 last year. During the disastrous fourth quarter of 2008, in fact, the 90-year-old company laid off more than 8 percent of its work force. Not that long ago, there was a saying around this 50,000-square-foot plant, one of the last on the north shore of Lake Michigan that is still making shoes: When someone in his 60s retired, or died, there was one less Allen Edmonds customer. “So I guess I know just about everything,” he said. It is a job he has done for the last three of his 11 years working in the factory. He quickly spun the shoe around, working freehand, as a thin, flexible strip of leather was stitched along the bottom perimeter by a frighteningly forceful piece of machinery. In his hands he held a partly assembled black cap-toe dress shoe. “IT takes about a year until you’re good at this job, and three years until you know just about everything,” said Joe Merrill, a 34-year-old inseamer for the Allen Edmonds shoe company.
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