Reviews of Crown Northampton’s Harlestone sneaker can’t seem to stop asking if they’re the best sneaker in the world. A few say it outright. Almost all of them flirt with the phrase. But Crown Northampton’s Chris Woodford? He’s not so sure.
“We get this quite a lot, and my immediate thought, because I’m English, was ‘I don’t’,” Chris told us. “I make a really good sneaker, maybe the best cup-sole sneaker in the world? But I can’t say it’s the best thing ever made.”
Crown Northampton’s new hand-cut, hand-lasted, hand-welted, hand-stitched wholecut Ernest model, is an attempt to change that. The retail price? A dizzying $1,500+. And they’re barely breaking even.
“When you’re a tiny company, it just starts with a conversation. Off the back of that conversation I spent six months with the guys here working out how to, like, welt the shoe. Because if it’s going to be the best, it needs to all be hand-made. Like all of it.”
The Materials
In some ways, the materials were the easy part. The British shoe industry has been in Northampton for 800 years, so everyone they needed was already nearby. The iconic lastmaker Springline, just across town. A few hours away, J&FJ Baker was tanning cowhides from Devon with oak bark from Wales in the same pits that had been used, repaired, and rebuilt continuously for nearly two thousand years. These were the same suppliers who provided the material’s for Crown’s bespoke E. Woodford line—Chris and his team already had the relationships they needed.
The Construction
The real challenge, Chris told me, was the construction. They were already hand-welting for Crown’s handmade shoe brand E. Woodford, but they didn’t want to just put a sneaker upper on a boot sole. Cup soles wouldn’t do either. They felt like they’d pushed them as far as they could go on the existing Harlestone and Everdon models.
Off to the drawing board. On our call, Chris pulled out a box full of early attempts at the new construction they’d needed to design. One was rejected because the rand wouldn’t sit flush against the upper, another because it included a seam between the rand and the welt that tended to awkwardly pull apart. He talked me through half a dozen variations without putting a dent in the box.
In the end, the design Crown settled on works like this: like any other hand-welted shoe, the leather insole is channeled, soaked in water, and pinned to the last to dry and take its shape. It’s then sewn to not one but two strips of leather: a welt (the outer strip) and a rand (the inner strip). The rand is folded upwards and before being sewn to the upper with a sidewall stitcher—the only machine used in the Ernest’s construction—forming a sort of mudguard that wraps around the full circumference of the shoe.
While your local cobbler might not be up to the task given the unique construction approach—”If a cobbler can hand stitch the sole, yes they can do it,” said Chris. “They’ll just need to get a couple of very curved needles or we could advise what they need.”—these shoes are absolutely designed to be recrafted a large number of times—and Crown can certainly do it for you.
Cork fill is added to the cavity in the insole to smooth everything out. After that, a leather ‘through,’ a sort of midsole clicked from dense vegetable-tanned bends, is added on top of the cork and the welt is folded down over the through and pinned in place. From there, Lactae Hevea outsoles go on last, and a curved needle is used to connect the welt, leather ‘through,’ and the rubber outsole. The end result is that the welt—unlike a typical welted shoe—sits parallel to the upper and perpendicular to the outsole. It’s a design that seems to use plenty more stitching and much less glue than its handful of existing competitors in the sneaker market.
Chris told me they’d initially had trouble channelling the outsole for stitching. The soft gum filled in the cavity almost immediately, making them difficult to stitch. So they worked with Lactae Hevea maker Reltex to develop a modified sole material that added sawdust fill to the rubber so that the channel would take. “That was another thing that took flipping ages to work out how to do.”
This video, while not showing the entire process, gives a really good idea of how these things are put together:
For the uppers, Crown uses J&FJ Baker’s calf on an asymmetrical pattern that wraps over on itself to form the shoe’s single quarter, secured by four hand-stitches. In this case “the best” meant a wholecut pattern with a seamless heel, because they’re the most difficult to execute, requiring that the upper be hand-lasted while wet so that the flat leather could take the curve of the heel while drying on the last.
“When my great-great-grandad used to make shoes in London,” Chris tole me, “he entered competitions to be the best shoemaker in his road at the time… they always did wholecuts because it’s the hardest thing to get to sit right on the last. The leather needs to be really nice and it’s hard to get that curve and everything right with it, especially around the back.”
The Leather Selection
To that end, the clicking is exacting: only one pair of uppers is clicked from each hide, where it’s densest and most consistent along the backbone.
The initial plan was an all-white sneaker, including the welt and rand. But undyed leather isn’t white—it’s tan. A white final product requires a layer of pigment thick enough to hide the leather’s original color, which also tends to obscure the leather’s natural surface, and prevent patina from developing. It also separates from the leather fibers underneath when repeatedly flexed, forming unsightly creasing.
After sampling options from five or six tanneries, nothing performed as well or looked or as good as aniline leathers colored using soluble dyes that soak into the leather, leaving the natural surface visible and minimizing creasing.
Customization Options
The Crown Northampton Ernest is available in four colors: natural, London tan, brown, and black, with colormatched welts and outsoles. Whereas the design language of Crown’s other sneakers is generally toned down, these definitely stand out. The rand makes the sole a lot more prominent, and while you might miss the single quarter – and the two rows of blind eyelets flanking it—at a passing glance, they become more and more apparent the longer you look. To us, they look best side by side, where the line of the mirrored quarter panels on each shoe flow into one another—that’s how they’ll sit on your feet, in any case.
There are plenty of details to the design that are easier to miss than the construction and the pattern, like the hint of toe spring produced by skivving down the outsole and ‘through,’ and then removing material on the welt to maintain the proportions. In addition to its aesthetic function, it also reduces wear on the toe, ensuring the soles last longer.
Other touches appear on the last, which is sized close enough to the Harlestone that the same size should reliably fit. The extra handwork made it possible to execute a slightly slimmer design, with tighter curves and more shaping on the insole for better arch support. Ernest customers who don’t already know their Harlestone size will be sent a pair for a fit trial, a process that also includes a short call with Chris to talk through potential sizing issues and modify the last if necessary.
The…Box??
Then there’s The Box. An optional extra, it is both the nicest and most expensive piece of footwear packaging we’ve ever seem. Lined with the same calfskin as the actual shoes, it’s made up the road in Leicester and costs more itself to make than most sneakers on the market are sold for. It holds the shoes, as well as a matching belt, shoe trees, and care products—all three are included in the $350 box + goodies price.
If all of that seems to push the notion of quality into the absurd…well, that’s kind of the idea. “It’s a bit mad,” Chris said, as I couldn’t help but nod. “But it’s kind of what I need to do. The shoes take forty hours to make, so I figured if I’m making shoes that take a week to make, I’ve kind of got to have a box that matches.”
Ok Why Do These Things Cost $1500+?
When it comes to the price, there’s a similar philosophy. “It’s expensive because it should be expensive. To make the best should take that long and should use those materials. That’s a very different proposition than ‘how much can I get for my brand.'” Even at a price approaching $1,600, Crown’s margins are thin.
Not all of Crown Northampton’s models cost this much. The Jazz line comes in just below $250, with most of the stitchdown desert boots/shoes and non-Harleston cup-sole sneakers priced about $100 higher. Those are solidly built, staple shoes at a price-point that still undercuts some higher-end cemented sneakers with far lower build quality.
But Crown is set up for experimentation. They sell direct to consumer—and actually make them! Unlike many “DTC” brands that simply outsource manufacturing while eschewing third-party retailers—and retain a stable lineup of models instead of doing seasonal releases.
Chris’s technical knowledge as a former bespoke shoemaker means business discussions are integrated with the shoemaking, not separate from it. All of that gives them the time and control to make choices that aren’t immediately profitable.
“I’m not looking for what I can sell tomorrow,” Chris said. “I’m looking for what I can create for the next year and then some of it will work and some of it won’t.”
Future Ernest Plans—You Know Chris Has Some
Chris already has other plates spinning. A property up the road from the factory with a small deer farm currently discards their hides. He wants to tan them. That’ll mean working with the farm’s owner to the change the way the deer are kept and culled, and then finding someone to process them. The first hides won’t come in for at least a year and a half, and it might be a lot longer before they ever appear on a shoe. It’s a quixotic project that few brands would take on, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from Crown Northampton.
There’s a seasoned eye behind those decisions. It’s been a long time since shoes made in England could compete on price. And making really nice shoes isn’t enough.
“I could make the best thing in the world and no one would ever see it,” Chris lamented. “That’s what tends to happen with artisanal people. They’re pretty good at what they do, but it’s not really in our character to shout about it.” But telling those stories draws customers that appreciate the ethos, regardless of what they end up buying. And that in turn makes it financially viable to make decisions that mercenary pursuit of short term growth would rule out. We also get the sense that those sorts of projects are part of what draws people to work at Crown and keeps them there.
The Ernest is one of them—slow and expensive to make, with limited scalability. If you see them sold out, it means one of the cutters whose been learning to hand-welt just stepped up to welting full time—and there’s a new job opening in Northampton.
