- Kelly O
In this week’s Worn Out column, Stranger fashion expert Marti Jonjak interviews Walter DeMarsh of Mobeta Shoes in Pike Place Market. He’s a local shoemaker who learned to make shoes after he broke his leg wearing a pair of poorly made pair of custom shoes. Yikes!
Decades ago, to accommodate the discrepancy in Walter’s own leg lengths, Walter’s shoe repairman uniformly elevated one sole, resulting in a “tippy, ugly, and dangerous shoe that was slightly better than nothing.” Walter fell from it and broke his leg, and he soon after plunged into a shoe-making career, hoping to help those like him, also forced to ride a poorly-made-shoe-strewn “conveyor belt to hell.” Walter’s work is intense and expensive: Repeated measurings, fittings, and tweakings are always necessary in order to accommodate the individual’s particular walking movements, patches of tendons, and pressure points where the “metatarsal heads sink through flesh.” At minimum, a set of custom lasts costs $550, and the basic first pair of shoes is $625.
Read more about Walter’s process here.
