No conversation about the all-time great women's shoe designers is complete without a very long segue into Stuart Weitzman. Born into a shoemaking family who manufactured for decades in longtime US shoemaking hub Haverhill, Massachusetts, Weitzman quickly established himself as the rare shoemaker to both the stars AND literally any woman who just wanted a fantastic pair of shoes.

For this chat, we covered why comfort matters so much and how to make it happen, why Stuart ended up in Spain after US manufacturing went kaput, that time Aretha Franklin pulled her shoes off at the AMAs to thank him, his various muses through the decades, his incredible donations to an in-the-works Historic New England shoe museum project, and plenty more.

HUGE thanks to Stuart and Historic New England for all the support in making this episode.
https://www.historicnewengland.org/

Production: Aiden McDonald x Visual Sound Productions https://www.visualsoundprod.com/

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2025 dates and location for Stitchdown's Boot Camp 3—the world's fair of shoes and boots and leather and more—coming soon.

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I had an absolute gas with Dave Mills of New River Boot, and Dave Corey of Oldspeed Manufacturing on this one. After years of being two of my favorite people on the internet to talk about footwear with, I was lucky enough to spend time with both of them last October at our Stitchdown’s Boot Camp expo—and I guess I needed more. Both Daves have in some ways followed similar paths into the craft and business, and in other ways have diverged—which I found as fascinating, instructive, and inspiring as the overlaps.

This episode is a lot of things, for sure, but the piece that excited me most is how it turned into something of a starter kit for aspiring handmade boot and shoemakers, covering everything from finding your first last and essential tools, to what the feeling is like when that first wonderful someone wants to buy a pair of boots that YOU MADE, to navigating the ever-tricky pricing question, to, of course, their most gruesome bookmaking injuries. It’s honestly amazing these guys still have hands.

Here’s Dave Corey of Oldspeed MFG, and Dave Mills of New River Boot, on the Shoecast.

https://oldspeedmfg.com/

https://www.instagram.com/newriverboot/

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2025 dates and location for Stitchdown's Boot Camp 3—the world's fair of shoes and boots and leather and more—coming soon.

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About a half hour from Reno, there’s a place called Virginia City Nevada, where everything feels like it’s 1859 and the US’s largest silver deposit was just discovered. The bars say saloon and look the part. The cemetery is definitely haunted. And of course there’s a custom hatmaker—who shares a space in one of Virgnia City’s oldest surviving buildings with bespoke cowboy bootmaker Jake Houston.

Jake Houston wasn’t the first person to fall victim to the wonderful folly of “the boots I want are too expensive, so I’ll just figure out how to make them.” One Lisa Sorrell DVD set, a few rodeos, and over a decade later, Jake has put together an impressively well-rounded business in Virginia City, making fully custom cowboy boots, while also finding vintage pairs to sell in the shop alongside his more affordable Houston Boot Company “shelf” boots made in Leon Mexico.

Jake and I had a fantastic chat about his bootmaking journey, the time he glued the lasts into a customers’ pair, the half-decade path to get those shelf boots manufactured, his insistence on sharing his bootmaking knowledge—for free—and why people sometimes get really, really upset when you tell them what bespoke cowboy boots cost.

Here’s Jake Houston, on the Shoecast.

https://www.houstonbootcompany.com/

https://www.instagram.com/houstonbootco/

Support the Shoecast, get full bonus episode access, and join the most interesting shoe-and-boot-loving community on the internet with a Stitchdown Premium membership

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Check out our site!

https://www.stitchdown.com/

2025 dates and location for Stitchdown's Boot Camp 3—the world's fair of shoes and boots and leather and more—coming soon.

https://www.stitchdownbootcamp.com/