(RANT ALERT)
For the past many months, my days have been filled with shoes. I work at a shoe company during the day, I sell shoes elsewhere during the evenings and weekends, and I conceptualize my own shoe designs (amongst other things) during the little time I have left.
Call me a shoe snob, but selling shoes is particularly challenging. This is because almost all the shoes that are sold at a mid-level pricepoint to the general public are $#!*. Pardon my French. Though affordable, these type of shoes, (produced by profit-hungry corporations), are disposable, painful, unbreathable and poorly-crafted. But we, as society, don’t care.
And that is the debacle that I have quit trying to solve. Because sometimes I feel like I am cheating my values when I help to propel our material hunger for fast, disposable fashion and cheap, mass-produced goods. Why can’t we buy less and buy better? If I could count the number of times I’ve had to tell a woman, “No, these are not genuine leather” or “No, these are not handmade,” I would be rich.
Hmmmf!
For now, I digress…as I am also a hypocrite whilst I sit here and wear my affordable, mass-produced Converse Chuck Taylors. I will not quit my moonlighting gig, and I will continue to bite my tongue. (A girl’s gotta eat, right?). So the only thing I can do is create and produce quality-rich, well-crafted shoes (and other accessories) that I, myself, would like society to utilize, value and buy.
Would you buy better quality goods at a higher pricepoint?
