Officina delle Pelli has been supplying quality leathers and furs to the fashion business since 1980. A young and dynamic company founded by Mauro Tonelli, it is duly capable of satisfying its clients form the pret-a-porter to the haute couture lines with fine materials develped from stat-of-the-art methods of tanning, finish and workmanship. It is not by chance that Officina delle Pelli supplies major fashion houses with leathers and furs for their clothing, leathergoods and footwear lines. Clients profit from the continuous research for new means of “interpretation and concept”...

Since 2002, Conserve, a non-profit organization, has embarked upon the path of assisting the marginalized urban poor through the development of a model that utilizes urban plastic waste to produce high-fashion products. The genesis of these products lies in their endeavour to help clean up the urban environment while providing income for the poor. Conserve has trained people from urban slums of Delhi to process waste into recycled sheets, using a proprietary...

To complete this analysis, we would like to conclude with some final considerations in favour of technology. The first one is based on the assumption that technology is certainly one of the most powerful modernity factors in nowadays shoemaking. Making shoes is an old business, with traditional rules and, most of the time, traditional vices that shoe companies, mostly used to work as they normally do and very reluctant to give up this old habits in favour of an unknown and unpredictable future, very seldom seem to be willing to abandon.

Having outlined the most relevant technologies available today to support the design process, we now focus our attention on the manufacturing of the shoes. If giving a complete description of what are the possibilities and detailed functionalities of the design tools, was a complex task, summarizing in a few pages the whole range of diverse technologies that enter into the manufacturing phase is virtually impossible.

In order to start dealing with the technologies that are used in this process, we must give a definition of where its boundaries are; by design process of a shoe we mean the sequence of phases and operations that go from the first style concept of a new footwear, through its complete design (engineering of the shoe), to prototyping its components, making the first samples and running preliminary production batches to accurately estimate time and costs of production. These various operations, possibly iterated a few times and repeated for each new product and for each new collection, define the so called “product development”  process. We will not go in details in describing the goals and nature of each of those activities; we will rather concentrate on listing the most relevant technologies that are nowadays available to support this part of the work.

The upswing of the Düsseldorf trio of shoe trade fairs drawing to a close on Sunday – GDS/GLS and global shoes & accessories 14 from 16 March – has continued. The three days of the trade fair were characterised by a busy, satisfied mood, good turnover, avid interest in the presented trends and, above all, packed stands. Compared to the previous year’s event the number of visitors was up by approximately three percent – with 34,000 visitors...