Salvatore Ferragamo first made his name by developing comfortable, attractive, period-appropriate cowboy boots for Hollywood:
“The West would have been conquered earlier if they had had boots like these,” said director Cecil B. DeMille.
Then he developed the arch:
He enrolled at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, to study anatomy.
There, Ferragamo tested his theories about weight distribution and the human skeleton. And he realized that he, like everyone else, was making shoes wrong. By measuring the foot while flat, they were creating shoes that supported the ball and the heel only. But human feet, when they are wearing shoes, need arch support. Ferragamo began building it into his shoes, and suddenly his customers began telling him he made them the most comfortable shoes they’d ever worn.
After establishing a successful shoe shop in Los Angeles, he went back to Italy:
Over the years, to increase his inventory, he had begun to sell some machine-made footwear — made on his own arch-friendly lasts — but had never been satisfied with the quality of the shoes. He began to wonder why the factory model couldn’t be applied to handmade shoes. In Italy, where labor was cheaper than in America and shoemaking a more widespread artisanal craft, he could hire other cobblers to work for him, creating an assembly line on which every stage of manufacture would be touched by human hands.
Italian shoemakers weren’t won over easily, however. Ferragamo went first to Naples, where the cobblers laughed at his proposal. He tried Rome, Milan, Turin, Venice and Padua with no luck. Finally, he settled in Florence, all but bribing shoemakers to work for him by offering the highest wages around. With 60 men in his employ, Salvatore designed an 18-shoe collection. Then, after sailing back to New York, he invited the city’s top department-store buyers to his room at the Roosevelt Hotel to see his new shoes.
George Miller of the I. Miller department store was first to arrive. “You have nothing, nothing!” he proclaimed. “Go back to Hollywood.”
Ferragamo then called Manuel Gerton of Saks Fifth Avenue and braced himself.
Gerton was in a rush, but Ferragamo could see that his eyes were alight. “You have done something new, Salvatore,” he said. “You keep these shoes away from everyone. I want them.”
And so Ferragamos became the first Italian shoes ever to be exported and sold internationally.
The Great Depression and sanctions imposed on Italy almost killed his business. Then he developed the wedge.