Feit founders are the shoe fighters

THE brothers behind Feit footwear are pursuing their passion for crafting beautiful footwear in a sustainable way.

shoes

FIRST things first: the footwear and accessories brand called Feit founded by Australian brothers Tull and Josh Price is pronounced "fight".

The name and its pronunciation is not an insignificant point. To understand why, you need to know the back story. Tull Price, while still in his 30s, is already a veteran of the footwear industry. In 1996 at the age of 20 Tull, together with Rodney Adler (an old school friend not the corporate criminal), founded the cult sneaker brand Royal Elastics, which ditched conventional shoelaces for elasticised panels. They had just $5000 start-up capital. By 2001 Royal Elastics was sold in 35 countries and was selling a million pairs a year which, according to media reports at the time, would have valued the brand at $95 million. In that same year Price and Adler sold Royal Elastics to the US shoe giant K-Swiss for an undisclosed sum. By 2008 the brand had 10 of its own stores in Asia and one in the US, but in 2009 K-Swiss sold the brand to the private investment group REH again for an undisclosed sum but believed to be a lot less than it paid for it.

Royal Elastics no doubt made its founders very wealthy, but in speaking to Price and his brother Josh, his business partner on his latest brand, it also left him with an uncomfortable feeling about the shoe industry, which brings us back to the fight.

"It's fight as in fight the system," says Tull. "We love making shoes and for some time now I've thought there had to be a better way. The system, the way it is needs to change. When you have massive marketing budgets and you're paying unsustainable rents you then have huge sales targets to keep up with that, and it just becomes this reckless pursuit of growth. It's a toxic bubble and, as everyone knows, bubbles inevitably burst."

Feit, on the other hand, is a deliberately smaller enterprise than Royal Elastics and while the business is growing it's unlikely to reach the same heights and that's something the Price brothers are quite happy with.

"We've been quietly making shows at Feit for a few years now [the company was founded in 2005] and our passion has always been the same. We use the finest materials to craft beautiful footwear with a distinctive look and an edge. It was about going back to what excited us in the first place," says Tull. The focus with Feit is on quality, craftsmanship and using the finest natural materials in shoes that are entirely made by hand. "We work with the finest suppliers and craftsmen in the world; we try to minimise wastage and we don't use any harmful chemicals in our tanning process - we use natural vegetable dyes instead," says Josh. By doing this, according to Tull, the finished hide remains as close as possible to its natural state. "The leather breathes as it does in nature. It is non-irritant, it's soft to touch and it will age nicely over time and it's also biodegradable." Hand-stitching is used only at the heel; the absence of seams on the shoes ensures comfort and means they naturally shape to the foot as you wear them. With that in mind Feit says the shoes are designed to be worn without socks.

All Feit products - the company also makes a small range of accessories such as belts and wallets - are made by hand. The shoe lasts are handmade in Italy and hand- sewn using a modified Goodyear construction developed by Feit. Traditional Goodyear construction involves the upper of the shoe being stretched over the last then stitched to a leather strip known as a welt. The sole is then stitched to the welt instead of being glued. Once a pair of shoes is complete it is signed and dated on the inside of the tongue by the craftsman. The brothers also say that the shoes they make have a "maximum capacity", which means that if they can source enough of a particular leather to make, say, only 50 pairs of shoes then that's all they will make. When they're gone, they're gone. Feit is not about pumping out thousands of a particular style just because it's selling well.

"We want to build a sustainable luxury brand," says Tull. For example, each month Feit emails pictures of shoe samples to customers who have joined their website - their biggest distribution channel - and if they like them they have 10 days to request a pair. Once maximum capacity is reached, production begins, thereby managing risk and eliminating wastage. Although the company now has a stand-alone store in Sydney and is sold through selected retailers internationally such as Dover Street Market in London and Tokyo, it remains small and numbers are limited.

After selling Royal Elastics, Tull Price moved to the US, where he is in charge of the footwear division for New York-based label Rag & Bone. According to Women's Wear Daily, Rag & Bone, which was founded by designers Marcus Wainwright and David Neville, has expanded its footwear business from just three styles for men and three for women in 2009 to more than 20 for women and 12 for men last year and has big plans for the category. Shoes and accessories are big business for luxury brands and retailers. Shoes can defy downturns and carry higher and higher prices (Feit's shoes start at about $400) which means they deliver high margins to retailers. This explains why major department stores such as Selfridges, Barneys and Saks have invested heavily in expanded shoe departments in the past 12 months. But despite that, the Price brothers say Feit is a reaction to the mass market and the over-saturated nature of the footwear industry. "We're not really about revolutionising the industry; we're just about reconnecting with the traditional art of shoemaking and what we think is a new way of doing things," says Tull.