Continuing on the theme of what distinguishes shoes in different price ranges, this time in a proper in-depth manner. Together with the shoemakers and cobblers at Skomakeri Framåt in Stockholm shoes from Loake, Carmina and Paolo Scafora have been taken apart completely to the smallest detail to look at how and what they are made of.

The shoes in question are donated by the reader Anders Nordqvist just for this purpose. These are a pair of Loake 1880 double munk shoes which costs about €310, a pair of Carmina plain cap toe oxfords located at around €390, and a pair of penny loafers from Paolo Scafora for about €850. The first two are Goodyear welted, the latter hand welted with a machine made sole stitch. All are very well used and worn. Below they are picked apart piece by piece, and I describe in the captions what we see. The idea was that I would have sawn the other shoe of each pair in the middle for cross-sectional images, but did not manage to solve that, hopefully it’s enough image material (unfortunately the picture quality is lower than normal, since I had computer problem and just had the low-resolution copies of the photos left) below to provide a good understanding of the different shoe construction anyway.

To make a quick summary when it comes to these three pairs, it’s quite clear that you get what you pay for. There was really nothing that seriously surprised Carina, Åsa or me, when taking into account our previous knowledge about the brands and what they cost. There were some small surprises, like the fact that Carmina had leather board heel stiffeners, mostly because I heard different though, because it’s quite reasonable in terms of the price range. That Scafora had toe stiffeners in leather surprised a bit as well, had thought they would use celastic. But otherwise they were done generally in the way you would expect. In a way Paolo Scafora, being hand welted in a very small factory, isn’t representative for RTW premium shoes for +€800 where most are Goodyear welted, and hence in some ways more similar to Loake and Carmina, but things like thicker insoles (than cheaper Goodyear welted shoes at least) and leather heel stiffeners you’ll find on most of those shoes as well.

Many thanks to Anders Nordqvist who donated his shoes for this, and Carina Eneroth and Åsa Rasmussen at Skomakeri Framåt who spent a number of hours of work to fight the shoes apart and go through what they found. We’ll see if there are more shoes from other manufacturers disassembled in the future.