St. Joseph is a Michigan beach town with a historic downtown, a couple of even-more-historic lighthouses, and a very nice view of the lake. While I was in town, it happened to choked with smoke because of wildfires burning across the border in Canada. But even through the haze you could see the appeal. Air quality warning or not, it was still tempting to camp out in the sand and watch the waves break on lake Michigan.
But St. Joe now also offers something else: quality footwear maven Grant Stone‘s first brick and mortar retail store, which opened this May.
The shop carries about a third of Grant Stone’s offerings—the goal is to keep core styles, like the Chromexcel Diesel boot and the suede Traveler penny loafer, in stock in all 42 sizes (D, E, and EEE widths for sizes 6-13). They also have a handful of boot-adjacent goodies, like care and conditioning products, wallets from Chicago’s Ashland Leather, and a small line of t-shirts and hoodies manufactured in California by a friend of several-time Shoecast guest and Grant Stone founder Wyatt Gilmore.
They’ll condition your boots for you if you bring them by the shop, and if you call far enough ahead, you can try on styles that aren’t in stock at the shop since their warehouse is in nearby Baroda, a 20 minute drive away. On that trip, your boots will pass a startling number of wineries and a cafe with excellent biscuit’s and gravy. But they won’t encounter many people. Between them, Baroda and St. Joe have a collective population of just over 10,000. Of course, it’s not technically impossible that they’ll form the 10,000-person vanguard of the coming welted revolution.
But it left us wondering—why here? And why now, when only a few years ago every third Business Insider column was tolling the funeral bells for brick and mortar?
The short answer is deceptively straightforward. Wyatt grew up in Southwest Michigan, so the store is more or less in his hometown. And while Manhattan might be the crown jewel for direct to consumer brands trying to go physical, jewels are expensive and expense is risky. Simple enough.
For the long answer, we have to go back in time. Before the people who make Grant Stone shoes made Grant Stone shoes, they ran a Xiamen, China footwear factory under the leadership of a friend of Wyatt’s dad, Randy (who himself worked for Alden for years). Wyatt himself ended up living and working there for several years, and at the time private label footwear for other brands was the game. But Wyatt and the factory wanted to make nicer shoes. You know the deal: veg-tan interior components, nice lining leathers, uppers from tanneries like Horween, C.F. Stead, or Anonnay.
Upgraded samples with top materials were made and pitched to the factory’s white label brand partners. Nobody bit. They were all chasing volume, and $200 loafers sell a lot better than $350 loafers. Or if they did bite, the first sign of economic turbulence had them retreating back to safe, reliable volume.
But it was 2016. Things were changing. Menswear was getting obsessed with techniques and specs. Selling online offered a way to reach a growing niche of people who knew the names of tanneries, understood the ins-and-outs of different construction methods, and were seeking out exactly the kind of shoes that finally-actually-Grant Stone had wanted to make all along.
Here’s how Wyatt tells it: “We made a lot of samples and gave them to these American brands. And most of them were like, those are awesome, but we have a hard budget. We have to hit this number or less, period. And so we were never able to really go through with making Grant Stone-type product with these brands.”
“That’s when Shopify started to really catch fire and become mainstream, so you could really open your own store. I starting making samples and talking to the factory owner, and my dad was still around at that time, going, hey, what if we do our own brand? We’ll use social media—only 10 years ago, Instagram was pretty new. We can use Shopify. We’ll just make some pairs. And so I started with six styles, and we put everything we wanted to into the shoe. And it started to work.”
In many ways it’s the opposite of the “great-name-to-offshored-shit” narrative that’s been near ubiquitous for the last 40 or so years. But in both cases the obstacle isn’t some arbitrary geographical line. It’s the market, which is definitively not oriented around the principle “your shoes should make you really happy.”
Wyatt estimates that 70-80% of their footwear ends up in the hands of this “enthusiast” crowd that’s basically a giant, sprawling, internet-based network of friend groups which started on forums, migrated to Reddit and Instagram, and ended up scattered across a few different platforms—including the Discord servers of certain boot publications that you should definitely not go check out under any circumstances. (Unless you want to.) (Ok fine go check it out.)
That’s how you end up with something like a natural Chromexcel Traveler penny loafer. A basic, flexible style in a leather that patinas like crazy and a spec sheet it’s hard to take issue with. And also a shoe that, because of the materials and resultant retail cost, is only going to do a fraction of the volume that a $200 loafer with a cheaper upper leather and a pigskin lining might. Garnet shell cordovan Brass boots? Forest green kudu? Forget it.
But the pivot relied—in a way we rarely talk about—on a specific social scene, which gave people a fun place to lurk, research, and hang out until osmosis provided them with enough background information to understand the difference between a Grant Stone Elias side-zip and a cemented alternative, and then justify the price difference. That puts a hard ceiling on your ability to scale, and leaves you in a precarious position if said community falters.
Outside that community, Wyatt says the abundance of information available on the internet isn’t as much of an advantage as you might think. “Selling to an avid Styleforum person who’s got 15 pairs of Goodyear-welted boots isn’t very tricky. They get their size right. They don’t ask about welts. They don’t struggle with break-in.”
“Once you break through that group, it’s a very different crowd. You can’t put them in a box and say they’re all a certain way, but they don’t necessarily want to know or care why something is so heavy, or that it’s welted. And if they email you about the uppers on a pair of boots and you say, ‘actually, that’s just what this leather is like’ they don’t know if you’re telling the truth—they think you’re just covering for your product. It’s difficult to explain these things online.”
But watching Ken Kataoka videos and falling down a research rabbit hole isn’t the only thing that can get someone exited enough to want to learn a whole bunch, and maybe buy some great shoes.
The older, more straightforward way? See a cool looking boot in a shop window and duck in for a few minutes, exposing you to all of the familiar perils—the weight of a welted boot, the texture of the leather up close, and how they actually feel when you’re wearing them. And then that pleasant but unexpected impression needs to be explained—which resident in-person-boot-explainer Josh Fulton is more than ready to do.
That’s the secret project that’s underway in St. Joseph—and in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, where Grant Stone is currently running a three-week, retail waters-testing pop-up that proved immediately successful.
Once you have a physical location, you can have physical events that bring people into the boot-obsessed social world—or just into a great pair of boots—along a very different but parallel path. Grant Stone gets to simultaneously strengthen the community that’s been feeding it so far and open a whole new horizon that also provides even slight autonomy from the cultural tides of the internet.
When you stop to think about it, the internet is kind of a crazy way to sell shoes. Choosing exactly the right size out forty-two different options is a tall order, and returns get expensive when people inevitably get it wrong. Customer service, shipping, restocking, needing to B-Grade shoes that have been tried on too hard, all the labor required to manage it all. Even one return is expensive. How about thousands?
Brick and mortar retail has its challenges too. Like, “how the hell do we put together this sales kiosk that came in approximately 10-million pieces?” (Answer: someone is staying till 10pm.) As well as more straightforward problems, like what models people gravitate towards on a real shelf vs online, and how much square footage you need for a given number styles, massive overhead costs, and literally getting people into a shop.
St. Joseph is a pretty good place to work out the kinks. It seems to be going well so far. The store is just about decorated. Amber, who handles customer service and marketing in Baroda, painted a scaled-up version of the Grant Stone horse logo. Wyatt’s friend gave them a giant print of an engine close-up, which now stands next to the belts because it was too heavy for the drywall. They tracked down a Landis-L outsole stitcher, which sits right in the shop (for display purposes only, don’t get any ideas). Plus, people are a little friendlier in person. So maybe southwestern Michigan will be the boot-vanguard after all?
Wyatt at least, doesn’t seem to think it’s entirely out of the question. “This is a small beach town, and having a week like last where people are coming in and buying welted Chromexcel boots, or loafers—it’s kind of crazy. Because a lot of them have never heard of a Goodyear welt, they definitely don’t have any, and they’re still like: ‘hey, I want to try this’.”
If you’re in the area (we’re counting Chicago as “the area”) the store is absolutely worth a trip. If everything goes according to plan, New York might just be next.
