Selvaine

Start me at the beginning. When did you first set foot in one of those New England factories?

1968. I cut patterns and made lasts for the brands you grew up on. A last is the wooden foot-form the whole shoe is built around. Get the last right and the shoe breaks in around a man's foot over one summer and serves him five years. Get it wrong and it fights his foot until it falls apart.

For a long stretch nobody touched the boat shoe last. The shape was drawn in 1935 and it was right. You don't improve something that's right. You just keep cutting it true.

Then 1986. The suits showed up. Wall Street bought Bass Weejun first. Then the boat shoe names. Then Walkover. Men who'd never made a shoe in their lives buying the names that meant something.

They didn't buy them to make them better. They bought them to wring them out. By 1995 the work was in China and the New England plants were closing one at a time.

You watched the lasts get thrown out.

A Massachusetts dumpster. Wooden forms, metal forms, the work of decades. The new factory overseas didn't want them, so out they went. Same name went on the new box. Different shoe went inside it.

That's the part that still bothers me. They didn't kill the brand. They kept the brand and killed the shoe.

I told you the truth. The lasts are gone — you can't dig them out of a landfill. But the shape isn't gone. I carried that shape in my hands for thirty years. I can draw it true again.

So that's what I did. I rebuilt the shape — the low line, the moc toe, the way it sits on a foot. That's what you're selling. Not the old factory. Not the old hide. The shape.

And here's where I take over, because I won't let an honest man take the heat for my shoe. Let me say plainly what it is.

It's built overseas, the modern way, like nearly every boat shoe on the market today. The upper is a man-made, leather-finish upper — not full hide. The laces are a waxed cotton, not rawhide. The sole's bonded, not welted, so don't expect to resole it for a generation.

It is not the $300 hand-sewn pair from Quoddy or Rancourt. Those men are the real heirs to the old craft, and if that's what you want, buy theirs. I'll tell you so to your face.

What it is: the old shape, a sole that grips a wet deck, a build that won't rot or crack when you soak it — at $45, the price the original used to cost. That's the honest trade. The story's true. The shoe's honest. Both at the same time.

I'm 71. I figured the shape died in that dumpster with everything else I built. Putting it back on a man's foot at a price he can afford — yes. That was worth doing.