The morning we arrived, Marco was already cutting. He has been the first one in for thirty-one of the workshop's forty-seven years — earlier than his brothers, earlier than the machines, earlier than the espresso, even, which he makes himself in a stovetop pot from a tin he has owned since 1994. He apologised, briefly, for the smell of leather. Then he handed us a coffee and asked, very politely, whether we'd ever held a paring knife.
This is what one might call a particular kind of welcome. Not the welcome of a brand. The welcome of a workshop. A small, unembarrassed insistence that you understand what you are seeing before you are allowed to see very much of it.
The cut, and only the cut.
The brothers — Marco, Giovanni, and Luca — make twelve pairs of shoes a week. Not twelve hundred. Not twelve thousand. Twelve. Each pair takes the better part of three working days, and only one of those days involves what most people would call shoemaking. The others involve cutting, lasting, and an enormous amount of waiting.
"The leather has to be ready. Not us — it. We are always ready."
The leather is bought twice a year, in person, from a tannery outside Pisa that has been operating since the nineteenth century. The brothers travel together. They argue about colour, hide thickness, and whether or not the seasons will change the way the calf takes wax. Then they buy six months of stock, and they drive home.
— Giovanni, the middle brother.
Sitting at the bench, watching Marco cut, you begin to understand the economy of it. He doesn't talk while he works. There is no music. There is no email. There is, occasionally, the kettle. He moves through the leather with the kind of quiet that has been built up over a great many mornings exactly like this one.
Twelve pairs, by name.
The pairs are sold to a small list of customers, most of whom have been with the brothers for over a decade. There is a waiting period that nobody quite manages to specify, but that is widely understood to be measured in months rather than weeks. There is no website. There has, until now, been no real way for new customers to find them.
This is, in some part, why we are here.
Lavish Gains met the brothers in the autumn of last year, in a way that would have struck a more efficient brand as inefficient. We sat with them for a day. They cut. We watched. They asked us about our customers. We told them. They went home and thought about it for two months. Then they wrote — by post, of course — and said yes, but only twelve pairs a year. Lavish, you understand: not twelve thousand.
What we ask.
We ask members to be patient. We ask them to choose carefully. We ask them, in advance, to understand that what they are buying is a pair of shoes that someone has cut, lasted, and finished for them — by hand, in a workshop in Florence, by three brothers who do not own a website.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you would like to belong to, the door is open. We will let you know, gently and personally, when the next pair is ready.