Three pairs

Two women met at shoemaking school in Japan, went off into separate careers, and found each other again years later, both having just become mothers.

One of them, Aki Honda, described what happened next as a feeling that welled up in her: that she wanted to make something with her hands. She said it was a feeling she only understood once she became a mother.

She had spent years in shoe product planning, watching things get made in their thousands because they happened to be in fashion, and had come to doubt the whole business of it. So she made the thing she actually wanted instead. She showed it at a trade exhibition in the autumn of 2010, and the people who saw it said they wanted to make one themselves.

She made three pairs for her own child. Some years later she said this about them.

No glue, no solvents

Ordinary shoemaking runs on adhesive and the fumes that come with it. Umeloihc took all of it out of the process, and the reason given is the kind of thing nobody invents for a brochure: so that a pregnant mother sitting down to make a pair would not feel unwell doing it.

The leather is tannin tanned, the slow way, with plant matter instead of chromium, because this is a thing that sits directly against a baby. Every stage of the making stays in Japan.

The recipe

That is their word for the instructions, not ours, and it is the right one.

In the box: the recipe, the uppers, the soles, the insoles, the laces, the needle, the thread, and a set of non slip pads for tiled floors. The holes are already punched through the leather, so the stitching takes no strength at all. You pass the needle through and pull it tight. Nothing else is needed and nothing else has to be bought.

It takes an afternoon. Most people finish a pair in around three hours having never done anything like it before, and at the workshops Umeloihc run in Japan couples tend to take one shoe each.

One more detail, and it is the one that gets people. The box the kit arrives in is the box the finished shoes live in afterwards, which tells you exactly what these are for.

The shapes

Proper shoes, these, not slippers.

Nico and Gura are chukkas with open lacing, the plainest and the most useful of them. Mic is the same shoe with the ankle rolled down, which gives it the look of something you would wear up a hill. Boo is a Jodhpur boot with a snap buckle, so it goes onto a kicking foot in one movement. Gil takes Ghillie lacing.

Teo is a T-strap, the belt cut from undyed nume leather that will darken as it is handled. Moku is a monk strap with the same belt and a generous tongue. Koma is a ballet shoe. Wi gathers at the ankle and finishes with a ribbon. Kurt is cut whole, the upper made from a single piece of leather, with a big pull tab at the heel. Ake is a moccasin.

What we carry

Eleven kits, in three sizes.

9cm fits a baby of around six months, which is the pair for before anybody is walking: a naming, a first outing, a photograph that gets kept. Ake and Wi.

12cm is the standard size, for the toddling stage around a year old. Nico, Teo, Koma, Mic, Moku, Kurt, Gil and Boo.

13cm is that same stage on a bigger foot. Gura.

Babies vary, and if you are buying ahead, size up.

On the walking itself, Aki Honda put it better than any of us are going to. Starting to walk, she said, is the moment a child becomes a person. It is the proof of growing. The first pair is the thing that carries them through it.