A labour of love: Meet the local shoemakers keeping a shrinking industry alive

“It’s so hard to see an industry just disappear that used to be so vibrant.”

The Australian shoemaking industry has experienced some major shifts over the last few decades. What was a thriving industry in the ’80s is now held up by only a handful of local makers. Embarking on a vibe check, writer Maggie Zhou finds that while the industry might be dwindling, the passion is not.

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It’s not a stretch to say that everybody knows everybody in Australia’s shoemaking industry. I’m on the phone with Melbourne designer and maker Matea Gluščević when she tells me about Bruce Miller, an 80-year-old master last-maker (lasts are foot-shaped moulds used to construct shoes) based nearby.

When I speak to Kacy Heywood, the Melbourne designer behind Kahe, she also slips Bruce into conversation (“He’s an encyclopedia of knowledge”). Darren Bischoff, the founder of Sydney’s School of Footwear, is quick to sing the praises of fellow shoemakers he suggests I interview, Bruce among them.

Despite being a niche and diminishing industry, the local shoemaking scene is tight-knit. It seems to be driven by mutual support, rather than competition. Australian-made shoes are becoming a rarity – an investment piece more than a sensible choice – so who are the people trying to sustain the practice?

The shoemakers I spoke to came to the trade for different reasons. Breeze Powell, co-founder of Melbourne-made footwear label, Post Sole Studio, says she gravitated towards the trade “out of necessity” through living with a shorter leg. Kacy recalls being three years old and desperately wanting to make shoes – she recurrently dreamt that her playhouse was a shoe factory.

For aspiring shoemakers today, a one-year course is the standard further education on offer. More specifically, RMIT’s Certificate IV in Custom-Made Footwear is the only dedicated tertiary qualification in the country. The Melbourne-based university tells me that between 2017 and 2023, there have been 80 completions of the certificate (though almost double the number of enrolments).

Breeze had a go at the course in 2007 but didn’t end up completing it, instead getting a job as an apprentice at a shoemaking company in Clifton Hill. Back in the late 2000s, Matea completed a TAFE certificate in custom-made footwear in Adelaide. She tells me the course was later cancelled because of the lack of job outcomes. Her TAFE, along with others in the country, has ceased providing footwear-specific certifications.

It wasn’t always like this. Darren founded the School of Footwear, an independent shoemaking school, in 2010. Prior to that, he spent 15 years at a government school in Ultimo learning about the craft of shoemaking, without spending a cent. Darren was one of the last students to go through the program, completing all the shoemaking courses “as they were deleting them from the curriculum”, he jokes.

Regardless of how these makers came to the profession, they all understand the current struggle of making shoes in Australia. “I hate to say this, but I doubt very much whether the footwear industry, as in production, will ever come back to this country,” Darren says.

A dwindling industry

If anyone can give me a temperature check on local shoemaking, it’s Bruce. One of the old guards of the Australian industry, he started in the trade in 1960 and can still recall its heyday 65 years ago. By his estimate, approximately 80 million pairs of shoes were made in Australia yearly from the late ’80s to the early ’90s. He says his company was making about 20,000 pairs of lasts per year in the mid ’90s. But in 2014, he stopped bulk-making them when that number dwindled to around 500.

Bruce points to the economic reforms by the Hawke-Keating governments in the ’80s and ’90s which dramatically lowered the tariff on imports as the “beginning of the end of the industry”. “The next day, all the big factories closed,” Darren says of the tariff announcements. “I just wish that day didn’t happen.”

Even though he’s technically retired, Bruce works as a consultant and occasional last-maker for some shoemakers, like Kacy and Matea. “People say, ‘Why do you keep working?’… It’s so hard to see an industry just disappear that used to be so vibrant.”

Would it be possible to reinvigorate local shoemaking here? Those in the industry are pessimistic. Machinery has changed, and different training would be needed to set up a new production line. Bruce, Darren and Matea are part of an old-school cohort of shoemakers who use paper and pencil to sketch and design shoes, rather than computer-aided design (CAD).

“The ones that might have been able to pick it up are the old blokes, but they’ve all retired or [are] dead,” Darren says. “There’ll be nobody to help us work out how to run this situation.” Matea disagrees, noting there are young, intelligent people who could pick it up. Instead, she thinks the issue lies with its backers. “Who is setting these hypothetical factories up? Who has the money, interest and knowledge to do that? Where’s the incentive?” she asks.

A labour of love

Shoemaking, as it stands in Australia, is expensive, time-consuming and laborious. Tim Gleig, the Melbourne-based founder of Two Five Footwear, estimates it takes 36 to 48 uninterrupted hours to make a pair of Two Five shoes, so he allows three to six weeks for a pair to be made.

For Matea, it’s a three-month process for a custom pair of shoes, from conception to delivery. There’s back-and-forth liaison, fittings and multiple mock-ups. Unlike tailoring for apparel, stitches and silhouettes can’t be easily changed with shoes, so alterations can sometimes mean starting from scratch.

Post Sole Studio, which Breeze founded alongside Myra Spencer, is one of the few remaining Australian footwear labels manufacturing women’s contemporary shoes locally (as much of what’s made here is predominantly industrial work boots). A small team of three, the label is currently made up of Breeze, her sister Ruby, who helps out with production, and Yoshi, who manages customer service and the store. “Everyone touches each pair we make,” Breeze says.

They’re now in their eleventh year and operate as a well-oiled machine. “Every fortnight we collate orders, then cut and prep the uppers before sending them out for stitching,” Breeze says. “Once they come back, we do more prep – lacing, gluing, attaching bits and pieces, and making the insole. Then, the uppers are lasted, prepped for the sole to be applied, and finally finished.”

Despite the tight production, it’s far from an easy job. Breeze has seen countless small-to-medium-sized factories close down or move offshore over the years, as materials have become difficult to source locally and prices have skyrocketed.

From her time at Post Sole Studio, Myra is pragmatic when it comes to shoemaking in Australia. Although making local would be her top choice if the industry still existed in the way it did in the ’80s and ’90s, she’s become more open to offshore solutions.

“I think, realistically, the only way forward for most brands to manufacture footwear is offshore,” she says. “It’s not something I want to encourage but the infrastructure at this point no longer exists locally… I don’t think it’s as simple as saying Australian manufacturers don’t have the skills to produce the same quality shoes. But the demand hasn’t been there for the industry to flourish, and as a consequence, the skilled labour that did existchas, and is, slowly dying out.”

Many makers who started in bespoke shoemaking have pivoted and stretched their creative endeavours to make it more viable. Kacy is one of them. Despite her three-year-old dreams, her fashion label is now predominantly known for its unexpected twists on Australian-made, ready-to-wear apparel.

In 2018, she released two pairs of handmade shoes. “I didn’t make any money off them. The cost of actually making the footwear, compared to what people [were] willing to pay, just wasn’t worth it,” she says. Kacy still loves shoes and releases footwear under Kahe, only now the pieces are manufactured overseas.

Matea is another creative who has switched up her offerings. Despite receiving press coverage from appearances at Australian Fashion Week and an endorsement from Julia Fox (a fan of her chopine shoes), Matea found the hype didn’t translate to tangible orders. “Due to extremely minimal sales, I essentially haven’t been able to have even a quarter of a minimum wage for three years, let alone make a profit.”

She now runs Cakey Sportsman – an eccentric ready-to-wear label offering apparel, accessories and footwear – alongside her existing custom shoemaking practice.

Matea came to this new venture by recognising that she wanted to take up more “visual real estate”; shoes only make up so much of an outfit. While the label is currently made in Melbourne, this will soon change, with plans to switch to mostly offshore production.

“I’m doing Cakey Sportsman footwear because I still want to be designing my own stuff but I do want to make it more accessible,” Matea says. While she finds it frustrating “and sad, to be honest” that she has to make her footwear overseas in order to turn a profit, she tells me she’s still excited about her label’s future.

Bruce echoes this. “A lot of people, like Matea and others, have got to have a passion for it and be prepared to work for very little income. The only people that might survive are not going to be making shoes, they’re going to be designing styles.”

“You’re not going to buy a yacht out of bespoke shoes,” Darren adds, drily. His School of Footwear doesn’t exist to up skill people professionally (“I tell students straight up, there is not a job to be had”). Instead, it exists to give people a chance to make shoes they love. “There’s still a lot of us around, hand-makers everywhere,” Darren says. “I’ve got a couple of boys here that make sneakers; they sell them to their mates.”

An undying art

For many of these creatives, shoemaking is more of an art form than a means to cover one’s feet. Melbourne maker Alison Pyrke’s shoes – or “footwear propositions” as she dubs them – are experimental and delicate. In lieu of shoppable collections, her footwear is mainly limited to concepts and prototypes.

“I have primarily allowed my footwear practice to be a space to explore ideas, without the restraint of commercial viability. I have done small production runs of some pieces, but try to be mindful of my market contributions,” she says. “I have always prioritised making as a central part of my practice… I would love to be able to share facilities with others so that a culture of doing-it-ourselves may continue to be cultivated.”

There will always be people who love shoes, who’ll then go on to try and make shoes. While our footwear manufacturing industry has all but bitten the dust, the art of shoemaking is still alive. Its beating heart exists in its makers’ creativity and painstaking patience. And that cannot be stamped out.

This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 197.

For more on shoemaking in Australia, try this.