A Vintage Legacy In The Modern Era:
When creating Legacy Bootworks we wanted to create an homage to the menswear of times past, both rugged and refined, while pulling them forward: a union between timeless design, practicality, and sartorialism. This is what defines Legacy.
While Legacy is our future, Tread Heavily was where we started. We were able to bring to life several pairs of custom shoes for customers in our home of Texas and across the United States. However, custom ultimately limited our ability to serve our friends and customers - men looking for a quality pair of shoes without breaking the bank.
After some soul-searching, we've made the hard choice to shift away from custom to better serve our community. Taking the lessons we learned, we set up our small workshop and created an entirely new collection from scratch. While this is more difficult than simply utilizing any of the innumerable Spanish Goodyear-welt factories already optimized to ship off-the-wall options to entrepreneurs immediately, it was done to ensure our offerings never come across as cookie-cutter.
It has taken countless hours of study, design, and prototyping, but has led to a unique launch collection we are very proud of.
High-quality footwear is not a new idea, nor is attainable footwear, but few have been able to harmonize the two. Creating a collection is often an exercise in compromise: do you cut corners to reduce cost (and quality), or do you perfect every imperceivable aspect, increasing waste and cost to the customer?
Our approach has been nuanced: maximize quality while eliminating extraneous activities to remain attainable:
Rather than being built in a factory, every piece is made in our small, dedicated workshop. Every pair of boots and shoes is welted and lasted by hand, every upper from Chicago's Horween tannery or full-grain Italian hides, and every pair built on Italian vegetable-tanned footbeds. Wallets and other accessories are saddle-stitched by hand in-house, and we've created a close network of small businesses around the workshop to support us from our shoe bags to our studded soles.
I want to thank all of you who knew us as Tread Heavily and welcome to those of you joining us now.
- Ali, Collector/Owner
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