There are a lot of brands in the bootspace—inviting logo, crisp typeface, and a clear aesthetic connection to the product.
Then there’s realm of bespoke shoemaking: trunk shows and shoe competitions, which despite being generally populated with some very down-to-earth people remains out of sight and out of reach to almost everyone. A single craftsman, a single pair of hands–though there’s often a small (and very skilled!) team behind the scenes— making something built exactingly and traditionally, for you.
E. Woodford & Sons doesn’t quite fit either archetype. It’s approachable, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is relentlessly transparent about the how and why of every stage in the design, ordering, and construction process, all of which is not from the INDIVIDUAL GENIUS CRAFTSPERSON (we love those people, don’t get us wrong), but instead from a small team in Northamptonshire, England that may even prove to be part of a larger structural change in how shoemaking might function.
On the other hand, the boots are made with a hell of a lot of traditional handwork and carry a bespoke price tag: shoes start at £3,800, boots at £4,000.
From Woodford to Crown and Back Again
The E. Woodford project is the result of a long and occasionally tumultuous history that can be traced back over a century to Crown Northampton owner/founder Chris Woodford‘s great-great-great grandfather Edwin Woodford, who opened the original E. Woodford and Son shop on 45 Coldharbour Lane in 1908.
Wartime pressures forced doors to close in 1939, but the family remained in the footwear business, eventually relocating from London to the British-boot-capital of Northampton and manufacturing private label products at scale for other brands. Eventually, as big box stores offshored production in order to cut costs, orders dried up, forcing Chris’ father Andrew to pivot once again, this time to sports footwear, and eventually bespoke shoes.
Chris trained in pattern-making and cordwaining before going on to start Crown Northampton—an outfit with some serious bona fides that got its start with “jazz shoes” that proved popular in Asia, and made its name in sneakers, manufacturing what might just be the best sneaker in the world.
As Chris tells it, Crown began with an attempt to make shoes out of high quality materials at a price point where they might actually sell, and the hand-stitch line of sneakers—made with higher quality leathers, “real shoe” guts like oak bark-tanned stiffeners, and (of course) hand stitching—evolved as an attempt to produce the best possible sneakers, whatever the price, to see if they would sell.
Spoiler alert: they did.
The natural next step was to try to push things even further. Chris reached out the Northampton piecework veteran who’d taught him to hand-welt twenty-five years earlier, and hired him to train up a team of young shoemakers, tweaking the traditional processes for a modern team along the way.
One example? Handwelting is traditionally done sitting down while bracing the shoe in your lap or against your knees, but the handwelters-in-training found it easier to work standing up resting the shoe on a peg, so that’s how E. Woodford now trains and how its shoemakers work. Modernization!
From start to finish the process is… kind of bonkers.
The Process and the Boots
Well, maybe not the very start. Step one is placing an order on their website, where you can select your style, upper, leather, and color—at this stage, tentative choices that can be altered—and then pay a $500 deposit to book a timeslot in their workshop, which initially manufactured just fifteen pairs a month.
So what is there to tentatively choose from?
For now, choices are restricted to five leathers: Horween shell cordovan is available in twelve colors including some unusual ones like floral embossed bourbon (an effect added by Woodford themselves at the request of a customer), as well as marbled black and marbled color no. 8. Also on offer is Horween’s veg tan bison. Finally, there are three calf leathers: embossed Janus Calf Suede from C.F. Stead, which is available in a variety of jewel tones as well as brown, grey, and black, oak bark tanned English Calf from J&FJ Baker in black and London Tan, and vegetable-tanned aniline Spanish calf in black, chestnut, and dark brown.
There are currently eleven models, built around four core lasts: a loafer last, a derby last, an oxford last, and a boot last. A few common features stand out across the lineup. Patterns are designed with the minimum possible number of panels to streamline the silhouette and minimize the number of seams. The uppers for the wingtip oxford have only two pattern pieces (three if you count the tongue), and many models have single-piece linings to eliminate any interior seams. Hand-stitching is abundant—the Foxley uppers are stitched entirely without machines, and hand-stitching appears on the strap, apron, and backstay of the Watling loafer, and reinforces the quarters on the Daneville ‘Komrade’.
Despite minimalist tendencies in the patterning, many of the designs are anything but. Instead they’re assertive, and some, like the Woburn monkey boots and the Foxley riding boots, are distinctly casual. There’s no question you could wear them with jeans, or just about anything else. It’s telling that the leather options lean into texture, through patterned suede and aggressively grained bison. Haute, stratospheric refinement isn’t the goal, these boots will take you as you are.
But details that make the boots more casual are approached with the same obsessive attention more typical of formal footwear. The stitching on the Stanley’s faux cap toe is hand-sewn and heavily raised, while the ‘Komrade’s’ pull tab is inserted under the quarters and then flipped backwards to expose the reverse side of the shell cordovan. It’s a technical, labor intensive detail that will be covered by a pant leg most of the time. But if that’s what it takes to show off those Horween stamps, then so be it. On the Watling penny loafer, the shield-shaped cutout is backed with a contrasting leather, and there are hand stitched chevrons on the strap and heel counter. A bit regal, a bit English, and kind of anti-elegant.
Of course they can do elegance when they want to—look at the Regent wholecut and the Redbourne wingtip—but they never make you feel like you have to. Chris says he doesn’t care you put his shoes in a display case or trudge through the mud in them, as long as you understand and appreciate what they are.
Sizing and Fit
Sizing and Fit48 hours after you order a sales assistant will reach out to discuss color and material suggestions, as well as any other requested modifications. The next step is sizing—if you’re in the UK, you can do that in the workshop, but if you’re overseas it’s a bit more complicated. Woodford mails out sizing kits which include templates to trace your feet, a swatch of your upper leather, and a special sheet of pressure sensitive, color-changing paper that creates an image of the contours of your feet.
After standing on the magic paper, overseas customers have a virtual meeting with Chris to talk through fit preferences and dial in the sizing even further (read: he inspects your feet). A sizing veteran from his time as a bespoke shoemaker, Chris starts by matching a customer with one of three width fittings on the appropriate last, and then helps identify and measure anything unusual about their feet. Another variable is fit preference—two customers with identical feet might need very different shoes depending on whether they like a snug or loose fit and what their problem spots are. All of that determines what modifications need to be made to the lasts.
If material needs to be removed from a last, it’s simply sanded off—another advantage of wood. When a last needs to be built up to add volume, Woodford uses Baker’s oak bark tanned shoulder, which starts at 5mms thick and can be split down as necessary before being wet-molded to the last and sanded to ensure that the resulting shape is smooth and fluid with no lumps or bumps. The shoulder is dense enough to maintain its thickness even as it’s wet, dried, and sanded. Each customer’s lasts are kept on file, ensuring future orders can be produced with an identically tailored fit.
As is generally the case for bespoke shoemakers, a trial pair is built to confirm the fit before the final pair of shoes is begun. For trial shoes, the uppers are constructed, lasted, and welted as if they were going to be finished (including all the handwork), but after cork is added to the insole to fill in the gaps left by channeling the welt, a heel is tacked on and construction stops there. At the customer’s request, the trial shoes themselves can completed and purchased.
Their uppers are made from the same leather that will be used on the final product, only clicked from parts of the hide rejected for finished boots (except for shell cordovan pairs, which get trial boots in aniline calf instead). Chris says that, in general, they’ve been able to get a very precise fit even when sizing remotely—after their fit trial, the customer he sized before speaking to us only need three millimeters added to the instep of one shoe. The whole sizing process up to this point takes about eight weeks.
At Last, We’re Lasting!
Once the trial boots are approved, final construction is off to the races. Uppers are “clicked” by hand rather than with a die press, with about half of the hide ultimately deemed suitable for use (Chris: “I’m not trying to get a good cutting coefficient anymore. Those days are kind of gone for mass production, especially here.”), and the rest retained for use on fit trials. The upper stitching is completed, in many cases with a traditional saddle stitch rather than by sewing machine, and any brogueing is punched by hand. Combined, these processes can take almost two full days of work on some models.
Afterwards, the finished uppers are wetted for lasting and allowed to dry on the last in order to take the its shape as precisely as possible, aided by the fact that Woodford’s Hornbeam lasts (unlike plastic) absorb water from the uppers as they dry. That Hornbeam is shaped to spec by Springline, one of only a few remaining lastmakers who design and prototype new lasts by hand, drawing on an enormous physical library of vintage lasts for reference.
Hand lasting makes it possible for E. Woodford to use more complex shapes than would otherwise be possible. Machine-lasted boots need to be fairly symmetrical in order to ensure that the uppers are aligned on the last. Feet, as a rule, aren’t very symmetrical. In particular, the ridge that runs from your ankle towards your toe tends to sit closer to the “inside” of your foot, and slope downwards towards the outside.
The part of the last the corresponds to that ridge is called the cone, and hand-lasted boots can use an offset cone that aligns closely to the shape of the foot, because their uppers can be slowly and carefully adjusted and smoothed over the last. A rolled waist contours the insole in advance, so it hugs the arch of the foot rather than sitting flat. Lasting and bottoming use oak bark-tanned calf from J&FJ Baker for the bottom stock, welt, and stiffeners.
Minor construction improvements are hidden in places they’re likely to be overlooked. “Slip beading” (a folded strip of leather inserted between the lining and upper) reinforces the topline and prevents it from deforming. An additional layer of lining leather called a side lining is added at both sides of the arch to provide additional support (you can listen to Chris knock on the side a pair of boots at 48:30 in here). The slip beading on the tongue is done in mostly invisible green cordovan, because why wouldn’t it be? Internal counter-covers are 2mm thick kudu, because that was what had the best wear resistance.
After about 15 weeks, a new pair of bespoke shoes or boots lands at your front door.
Slow, Steady, and Well
If it’s not clear yet, Chris is single-minded to point the point of obsession about build quality (“I don’t know how to make them any better”). He’s both unabashed about claiming to use the best materials in the world, and very earnest about telling you why he thinks that claim is true. Their site is full of well produced video, not just of various stages of production, but of Springline’s last factory and the thousand-year-old J&FJ Baker tannery. E. Woodford will record any stage of your boots production for you, or bring you into the shop to watch it for yourself and give hand-lasting a try (a standard part of in-person fitting appointments).
“If it’s a mystery, it probably isn’t great. Anyone can come into my factory and see what I’m doing, and ask any question about any one of the materials… especially when someone is spending thousands of pounds on something, you should have an answer for any question that anyone has got.”
The obsession is far reaching, and extends to building a staff. In contrast to a more typical production line, where every employee performs a single monotonous operation over and over again to speed up work, E. Woodford focuses on multi-skilling—training workers on the entirety of the process, even if they’re only ever doing one task at a time. Likewise, between 4am and 6pm, employees have broad flexibility in terms of how and when they work their hours.
There are less serious ways to make things more fun too, like playing a customer’s music while building their boots, a way to mix things up while also building associations that make it easier to remember each unique order. “All I’m doing is being me at 16, basically,” said Chris. “What would I want out of a job?”
So far, the approach seems to be working, not because it has produced explosive growth (it hasn’t), but because it draws one or two people each month who are fascinated by the trade and willing to take the time to learn it.
Who is E. Woodford For?
E. Woodford certainly isn’t for everyone, and given its initial output of fifteen pairs a month, that’s probably a good thing. What it offers to those who can afford the price tag and dig the styling (other than a damn good pair of shoes) is a probably unprecedented level of transparency in the shoemaking process. Not just a chance to see where every component comes from and which hands produce them, but also to watch your boot get made, ask questions, talk to the people that make it, and even give some of the processes involved a go for yourself.
No one is spending a little over $5,000 on a pair of shoes just to keep their feet dry, and unless it’s an act of raw consumption (which we’re firmly against), the process that gets you there always involves building a connections and relationships beyond the material object itself. Bespoke has always promised to do that by creating something tailored very deeply to you. But E. Woodford, without letting that go, wants to give you a little bit of the reverse.
