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Mm. Again. Not sure if I was very clear. I wrote that post very early this morning :-)
The extra $5 per pair of shoes was for the Chamula Huaraches which are made in Mexico and retail at $125. That’s obviously the end consumers retail price, not the wholesale price for retailers.
Yuketen shoes are obviously far more expensive to manufacture. The cost of Cordovan itself from Horween and the labour costs of workman and work women who have made shoes their entire lives in a small workshop in Maine. The loafers are made on handmade lasts that are developed specifically for each shoe of which not many pairs are made. The transportation of the different components of the shoe from around the US to get to the workshop... The actual heel, the hand cut leather sole. It all adds up... it’s a premium shoe and Yuketen don’t have the sale economies of scale as a large brand. I can’t find any Horween cordovan shoes for much less than $650. So it’s not just Yuketen charging that much. Even Allen Edmonds, which are pretty entry level in the world of Made in the USA, charge $650 retail for their cordovan shoes and the cordovan is imported.
I think it’s an interesting conversation to have anyway, when some people would spend $1500 on a resold pair of limited Nike’s, or several hundred dollars on a pair of Yeezy’s at retail, it makes me feel that $1000 on a pair of handcrafted cordovan loafers is a straight up bargain.
JB-
Ah, cheers, that makes more sense.
I was struggling to understand how such a low cost was translating to a > $1k shoe but selling at $125/unit makes more sense in that context.
So it's the scarcity of the material (and the workers to work with it) and the time required which bumps the price up.
I wonder if cheap overseas and machine made shoes have been partly responsible for higher prices. When I was younger I knew a lot of people who worked in shoe making but all that's left now seems to be the high end stuff.
aggi
I was wondering about the cost from your previous post.
He was paying something like an extra $5 a pair to get the required qc so I can't imagine the cost there is that much. Is it the materials that cost that much? I have no idea how much leather costs and how that would contribute to a thousand dollar RRP.