If I ever get on a plane again, it will be in my pristine, butter-soft, white calfskin sneakers from the Italian shoe brand Santoni, a 45-year-old family company famed for its beautiful old-school shoes and contemporary luxury. They are probably the purest expression of the new fashion imperative to “buy less, buy better.”

Marche, the region where Santoni is based, hugs the eastern coast of Italy roughly halfway down to the heel. This is Italy’s shoe country. If you stand on the doorstep of Giuseppe Santoni’s factory and lob an alligator loafer in no particular direction, you will probably hit a shoemaker.

“I was basically born in the factory,” says Santoni. “I grew up there. At the time, the factory was literally the downstairs floor of our home. So I learned hands-on how to do the whole process.”

The author (right) speaking with Giuseppe Santoni.

The process in shoemaking at Santoni’s level means hand-work and increasingly rare skilled labor. In other setups, that equals sky-high prices and smaller companies serving ever-smaller groups of customers. Survival is not a given. Since taking over the company from his father, Andrea, in 1990, Giuseppe Santoni has carved out a unique niche by modernizing production in every possible way. Liberating the process from the millstone of old-school methods, in which the shoemaker did everything for a single pair of shoes—carved wooden lasts, cut leather, stitched uppers, lasted them, and attached the sole—has led to increased capacity. But as Santoni puts it, the “essence of a small laboratory remains.”

“When I was like 25 or 30, I brought new ideas to the factory, and my father let me do it,” he says. “We preserved the tradition of quality, the culture of making, but introduced a younger and fresher energy in terms of design, in terms of ideas, in terms of product.” Youthfulness is palpable in the company’s bright and modern headquarters. Many of the staff are barely into their 30s. The company runs a shoemaking academy for new employees, as much to unlearn the habits of established craftsmen as to create new ones.

Shoes from the fall 2020 collection.

Santoni’s goal, in addition to making timeless yet relevant goods, is to create memorable experiences. In service of that goal, the company plans to build near-field-communication chips into many of its shoes starting in 2021. “You put your phone near your shoes and you can read all the information about how the shoe was made, about the materials, even advice about how to clean and look after them,” he says.

Although Santoni flirted briefly with a (much-liked) capsule clothing collection for a few seasons in the late teens and continues to supply all the leather used by IWC Schaffhausen watches, the company is first and foremost about shoes. “Santoni is not a fashion brand,” its namesake says. “Sure, it’s a contemporary brand and a luxury brand. Luxury doesn’t have an expiry date.”

Hand-painting undyed leather double monk straps.

One of Santoni’s standout areas is its finishing. Almost all shoes in the factory are made on the last in undyed vegetable-tanned leather, only receiving their color—including a bright-orange trademark sole—at the end. It is applied entirely by hand. It means no shoe, even in a large production run, is the same as another.

“We come to work not to make more shoes but to make better shoes,” Santoni says. “There’s a great Japanese principle called kaizen, meaning continuous improvement. Every day is a new challenge to make it better. Our people really follow this philosophy and, every day, they try to make it better.”

This story appears in the Winter 2020/2021 issue of Esquire magazine.

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