Origin: The wrap

For anyone attuned to our work, there is a design element that asserts itself with almost a ritualistic persistence — the wrapped sole: a deliberate act of encasing the very base of our shoes in leather. It stands among the most prominent features across our pieces.

The wrap did not emerge from a place of deliberate artistic statement or pursuit. It was born, quite simply, from limitations.

In our early days, about seven years ago, confronted with imperfect finishing — an unavoidable consequence of limited access to advanced tools and refined techniques, and creating within a context where the sophisticated structures that cushion designers in other geographies simply did not exist — we came to understand that to produce anything meaningful demanded an almost defiant resourcefulness.

At the time, our footwear insole and sole finishes carried unmistakable imperfections due to these insufficiencies. And so, in an act that was equal parts necessity and ingenuity, we began wrapping our soles and insoles in leather to cover those defects. It was a solution, simple yet profound: a way to conceal what we could not perfect and to mend what fell short of the standard we envisioned.

The origin of the wrap was forged in this crucible of insufficiency — proof that creation often begins where lack presses most sharply against will, compelling the mind to invent what the hand alone cannot yet perfect.

A testament to how limitation can become the first and fiercest author of form.

Constraint does not simply sharpen invention; it draws us into an elemental confrontation with the limits of our context, our tools, our circumstances — and asks: what will you make of this?

Your imagination is forced to bend, fold, compress, and sometimes fracture, until it finds an unexpected passage.

There is something almost ascetic about this practice. It requires the discipline to forego fantasies of what could be if only you had more — more machinery, more material, more time, more resources — and instead wrest meaning from what is immediately at hand.

Resourcefulness, in this context, is not a minor skill. It is the mind’s ability to transmute limitation into a kind of fertile tension, where this constraint becomes an active force, shaping the outcome as surely as the designer’s own hand. What is not available becomes as significant as what is, birthing something that would never have arisen in the flat ease of abundance.

This is the paradox at the heart of constraint:

It appears to shrink the field of possibility, when in truth it can deepen it. The mind must turn inward, probe more acutely, think more originally. It must innovate within its own boundaries. Meaningful work can — and often does — emerge from places of stark simplicity, even deprivation. You must contend directly with what resists you, so the work becomes a record of that negotiation.

Over the years, the wrapped sole has become a recurring thread across our works, appearing in countless variations. Sometimes it is slim and understated; other times it is generous, almost architectural, building volume and dimension that catches the eye immediately.

In hiding the flaws of our craft, we simultaneously uncovered a design impulse that was truer to us than any technical perfection.

Constraint, rather than diminishing our expression, became its fiercest catalyst. The leather that once served merely to veil production defects began to assert itself as a language of its own, speaking in lines and volumes and slowly seeding itself into the very marrow of our practice. We returned to the wrap again and again, not out of compulsion but because it had become ours.

Each recurrence re-enacts that original crucible of necessity, yet also ventures beyond it, exploring new articulations. In every variation, we honored the impulse that first gave rise to the wrap, while simultaneously expanding its expressive field.

This is how necessity became our identity: by being repeatedly chosen, reinterpreted, and revered.

And so, the wrap is far more than a stylistic expression. It is a record of how our work emerged from the unrelenting conditions of scarcity. It speaks to the human condition itself: that we are most profoundly ourselves not in spite of our constraints, but because of the creative revolutions they demand of us.