Walking through the Santoni factory doors, past the swanky art pond, it’s immediately clear what this company is about. On my left, hangs a photo of mum and dad Santoni — the founders — flanked by campaign photos of Santoni shoes. Right in front of me, stands a round wooden table displaying some of the company’s best-known shoe designs. Behind the table is another pair of sliding doors; once through, I’m presented with the desks of the students of Santoni’s Accademia dell’Eccellenza, a newish venture looking to foster the next generation of local artisans. Behind those, a green wall (as in made entirely of plants).
In succession: history, shoes, sustainability, future — all displayed in the sleekest of manners. Let’s unpack them one by one.
The history
Following a couple of difficult decades after World War II, ’70s Italy saw an economic boom, during which many Italians launched their own businesses. Two of those entrepreneurs were Andrea Santoni, the then head of production for a shoe company based in Marche, and his wife Rosa, a seamstress. They started small, with a couple of machines they set up in their garage. Andrea would bring in the business, which at the time was formal men’s shoes with leather soles, and Rosa, along with a couple of other seamstresses, would stitch them up.
“Over the years they made enough money to build a new house. The first two floors were a 5,000-square-foot shoe factory, and the top two were where we lived. I lived there until I got married. My father and mother lived there until they passed away,” says chairman and executive president Giuseppe Santoni, son of Andrea and Rosa, who took over the business as CEO in 1990. He’s speaking from one of his executive meeting rooms that sits directly on top of the modern day factory — just like the old days.
We’re in Corridonia, a small town in Italy’s Marche region, known as the Italian home of footwear manufacturing. Italy is built on family run businesses, just like the one I am visiting today. Both Santoni’s son Gabrio and his wife Alessia work in the business and join us for lunch a little while later in the factory cafeteria.
“In the ’90s, we moved to this location. We bought this piece of land and we built the first factory, which was 15,000 square feet. At the beginning, we thought it looked huge. We didn’t know what to do with the space. Now, we have 300,000 square feet. And as we grew the company, we grew our offering,” Santoni says. “In recent years, I think the challenge for Santoni was to transform the company from a manufacturer to a real luxury brand. I think we have achieved that. The new goal is to make Santoni a lifestyle brand.”
The shoes
To do that the company is investing in categories beyond shoes — like bags, belts and other leather goods. There is also an attempt to dress celebrities if the brand’s Instagram is anything to go by, but shoes are annoyingly hard to tell apart on red carpet photos. Even with Santoni’s trademark orange soles and ombré colourways.
“We began with very formal, leather-soled men’s shoes. Then, in the late ’90s, we started to do sneakers. And around 2010, we introduced women’s shoes and leather goods,” says Santoni. In terms of product split, men’s shoes still make up 70 per cent of the business while women’s and sneakers make up the rest. The split between wholesale and direct-to-consumer (DTC) is 70 and 30 per cent.
Echoing the wider industry trend, one of the goals is to grow the DTC business, both online and in store, to a more even split, “but of course that’s a process”, he concedes. The company’s results for the first half of 2024 showed 8.6 per cent growth versus the same period last year, with sales of 60 million compared to 55.2 million in 2023.
Before the interview starts, I am treated to a detailed tour of the factory and its different production stages — checking and cutting the leather (which mostly derives from a tannery in Tuscany), stitching and colouring (which are mostly done by hand, except in sneakers and the lower price ranges), and finally, packaging. Over 500 artisans put the shoes together; although, of course, modern methods that involve some pretty cool-looking robots are also used. It would be impossible to manage the production of 2,000 pairs per day without this support, after all.
The production floor operates in a small islands model, which means a group of 12 to 15 artisans will bank together to share tasks for a specific part of the production process. Each ‘island’ is also tasked with checking the work of the previous island, adding a level of efficiency to its quality control. Santoni was inspired to introduce this way of working after visiting a series of car manufacturers about six years ago.
“If you look at the car industries, the production line starts from one stage and finishes at another. This has the advantage that when you have a standard, everybody does their part and then production is easy,” he explains. “But that system was invented in the early 19th century. It’s not flexible and it doesn’t work when you have a lot of models to produce, with different colours and designs. So instead we have a group of people make a part of the shoe at all times. They can be very flexible and they know how to manage either one single layer or one single customer request.”
Like any luxury brand, there are three levels to Santoni’s customer offering: ready-to-wear, made-to-order and bespoke, with the former two making up a combined 10 per cent of the business. Bespoke normally follows a one-to-one approach, with artisans visiting a customer’s house to get measurements and help them put together the shoe of their dreams. There is a special room on the production floor where the bespoke shoes are made entirely by hand. One of its walls consists of drawers, each carrying the measurements and previous orders of bespoke clients. The entry price for a bespoke pair of shoes is about €5,000, but the most expensive shoe sold to date cost €60,000 and was made of precious leather, detailed with 24-karat gold.
Sustainability
The offices in Corridonia feature a giant, living, breathing green wall, while the entirety of the 300,000-square-foot roof is covered in solar panels, which according to Santoni produce 60 per cent of the energy used by the factory, including machines and air conditioning. Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set out on the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the company is actively working towards three: decent work and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, and responsible consumption and production. In short, they’re working to counteract the criticism around their product being largely made from leather, and sometimes exotic skins.
“All the shoes that we do, all the leather that we use comes from the food industry. Those animals are raised and grown for their meat. The leather industry is just recuperating the waste,” Santoni offers. Are alligators part of the food industry? I ask. “Have you ever met an alligator?” he responds. “If you don’t kill it, it will kill you. It is also a very small part of the business for us.” Eight to 9 per cent of the bespoke business to be exact.
“In terms of the tanning process, I don’t want to say it’s totally natural, but the whole industry has made unbelievable progress in terms of water and chemical reduction. We don’t use chemical glue any more, the colours we use are all water based,” he adds. “We have a line called Rethink, using non-animal leather, but the problem with these eco leathers is that they are essentially plastic. If you take my leather shoe and throw it in nature, 20, 30, 40 years later it will disappear. Those other shoes will stay there for 300 years, and only their colour will change.”
What about natural leather alternatives? “Unfortunately, these materials are no good for shoes. Shoes need flexibility. Apple, mushroom, banana… they’ve tried it all. You stretch it [and] it breaks. You get two months out of the shoes, and you can’t repair them either. Whereas Santoni shoes… These shoes I am wearing are pretty old. I can refurbish and resole them as much as I like.”
It’s true that during my visit on the production floor I also see the refurbishment division, which essentially gives new life to old products. And it has been interesting to witness the making of a product in one single place from beginning to end. I ask him if he has any thoughts on the recent ‘Made in Italy’ scandals. “Santoni shoes are made in Corridonia, not Italy,” he says without taking a beat.
The future
Santoni’s Accademia dell’Eccellenza (Academy of Excellence) was founded in 2023 with the aim of handing down that very local expertise. At the moment, it runs on four courses a year, taking in a maximum of 18 students per course. “It came very naturally to us because it’s what we do; we’ve always hired new people, paid them and trained them, so we thought we would formalise it.”
Santoni continues: “We do this for two reasons: One, because we want to preserve this culture of shoemaking. Secondly, I always want to have fresh energy in the company. It’s a big investment because we basically hire those people on a salary, but during the full salary, we spend time teaching them. I think by next year, we’re going to have the first person from the academy that will become a maestro. It makes me really happy and proud.”
The company is also collaborating with the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata as well as local technical schools on shoemaking courses. It seems to be the final chapter of the aforementioned elevation strategy that took Santoni from shoe manufacturer to luxury brand. “We need to celebrate the hard work of our artisans,” he says. “I’ll give you an example: if 25 years ago, a girl told you she was in love with a cook, people would sneer. But today, she would say her boyfriend is a chef. That’s what we need to do here — work on the marketing. Because this isn’t mindless work that our people do, it’s art.”
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