What custom-made shoes can tell you

"My custom-made shoe" – this time from a different perspective. The noble kicks are getting a work in edgeways this time and describe the world from the view of a custom-made shoe.

Gosh! What a day! ... almost everything happened that a noble custom-made shoe can undergo. Hot soles, because our boss raised the heat in the foot well to an extent, that our laces felt like shrink tubings and the shanks dug in our tender leather skin like searing irons. An hour later we had to prevent our boss from suffering a femoral neck fracture when he walked down-hill on wet pavement. That was close to the limit.

At lunch, we were just resting and stood half-way under beneath a table, we got a load of hot coffee from above. My buddy, the right one, had the coffee reach his inner sole ... boy, was he mad. And, you wouldn't believe it, we were dried with a trouser leg - how embarrassing.

The evening came and our boss had arranged to meet his business partners in a hotel for dinner. When we reached the hotel, we sensed, no, we knew that when our boss would see these rotating brushes near the toilets we would feel real bad. And that's exactly what happened. Me and my buddy were already beaten up and to top it off, now these horrible blunt bristles ... ultimate penalty for our skin. But that's how it is in the life of custom-made shoes.

And whenever you think it can't get worse, it does! When our boss thought he needed to bat a bit at a tennis court. He just wanted to give it a try, just like that: For us that was plain hell. Finely ground brick-dust, that's like cement dust on a sandwich - unbearable! Finest dust that took our breath and the last fat from our surface away. We felt like a used buffing pad - terrible.

Well, the next day our boss admitted that he had screwed up, when putting us back to our buddies in the shoe rack. He promised to better himself and we heard him mutter "Damn, they were so expensive" when he was going in the kitchen.

We thought to ourselves, relax and wait and see. We felt pain in every pore. But we couldn't know how delightful the next day was for us. In the morning our boss took us and put us in a cloth bag. After a short while we were lying on a table, surrounded by delicious aromas of sharpened leather, fragrant oils and shoe polish with a touch of old wood aroma. We ended up back with our manufacturer, whose workshop isn't not far away from our boss's workplace. Those are the days of the year we are especially looking forward to. This is like wellness for us. We are getting cleaned, anointed and greased - that feels so good, what a rest! What we like most is to be mounted onto our original shape, the last. It feels like being reset with subsequent physiotherapy. We could stay there for weeks.

 

From the workshop

If you ask yourself in what workshop you can find those considerations on the well-being of custom-made shoes, you can find them with master orthopaedic shoemaker Siegmund Anschütz in Lebach. The fact that he is able to put himself in the position of the shoes could result from his understanding for its manufacturing.

A pair of shoes from Siegmund Anschütz – that is pure handicraft, especially concerning material, workmanship and, first of all, the correct fit. But he is not satisfied with the art of handicraft alone. Stylish elegance in perfection, that is the motto of the production of custom-made shoes in the shoe manufacturing company Anschütz. Siegmund Anschütz: "Due to respect and experience when working with the natural product leather, passion for detail can be seen in the handmade shoe." Since 1987 the master orthopaedic shoemaker has run the shoe manufacturing company in Lebach. He develops ideas and implements them systematically in his 180 squaremeter workshop. His customers appreciate the creativity and exclusivity of his work. And the shoes more than likely his empathy.

By Siegmund Anschütz