A few months back, back home in LA for my dad’s birthday, I realized with a jolt that I hadn’t gotten him a gift. As my mom will happily tell you, he’s not the easiest guy to shop for, mostly because he’s perfectly content to shop for himself. (Who can relate?) So I drove over to Abbott Kinney, in Venice, on the sort of aimless shopping mission that never quite works out as you hope it will. Except this time it did. I parked the car, got out, and stumbled upon and into the Sabah House: a small shack, tucked behind another store, stuffed to the rafters with mellow leather slip-ons. I zeroed in on an espresso-colored pair, made from a firm, waxy leather that screamed Dad. He loved them.
As Sabah founder Mickey Ashmore explained to me a few months later, he’d found some traditional Turkish shoes he loved while working in Istanbul, and before moving back to New York, asked a cobbler named Orhan to make him a pair with a few tweaks. His friends dug them, so he commissioned Orhan to make a bunch more and started hosting events. “I had a party called Sabah Sunday, and I did this for a whole summer,” he said over the phone from London, where he was opening a new Sabah spot. “By the end of the summer, I sold more shoes and had more fun and made more money than I made in my pretty serious finance job. I was like, ‘I think I got something going here.’”
He did indeed, thanks in large part to his design. In the age of the generic, nonthreatening Silicon Valley sneaker, the Sabah is that rarest of birds: a low-key slice of minimalism that nonetheless has a distinct personality. The shoe itself is a few pieces of vegetable-tanned leather, attached to a water buffalo insole with a bit of glue, the whole thing stitched to a rubber outsole with a single piece of waxed-cotton thread. (“When I started, we had one stitcher, and his last name actually meant shoe stitcher [in Turkish]. He was a sixth generation shoe stitcher,” Ashmore said. The workshop now has a training program in place.)
The end result is a little bit slipper, a little bit slip-on. It’s a house shoe that’ll work just as well out on the road. They’re your loafers after a long Turkish business trip. They’re kind of irresistible.
After that summer, Ashmore quit his job, went back to Turkey, geared up production, converted his East Village townhouse on weekends to a genial, come-hang-a-while-and-maybe-buy-some-shoes proposition. Things took off from there, though not at the return-on-investment pace aggressive outside funding would dictate. “I’m thinking about this as a family business that will be around for a long time as opposed to a start-up that's kind of just hustled it to where it is,” Ashmore said. “We never got funding or any of that stuff.”
Ashmore opened a handful of stores around the country. He traveled widely with his gospel: comfy weekend shoes don’t have to suck. Eventually, the New York operation outgrew his home. “I looked at a lot of different types of spaces, from traditional retail, to live-work, to where we ultimately found,” Ashmore said, referring to the brand’s recently opened airy loft in Soho. “And the thing that I realized in considering all of them was, what made our original space special, in addition to being quirky and great design, was: it was a destination. So, everybody that came in was coming in with an intent.” He’s been pleased with the results: “It's a lot less [sales] volume, but the experience is deeper, and I think slower, and that's something that we value. Not that it's better than the opposite. It's just what we like, and what our business has been built on. So, we have customers coming in on Saturday, and they'll buy some shoes, or just come hang out and play backgammon, and have a beer, and they'll invite their friends by, and there's just this mix of almost like, community center, or home, meets shop.”
The more I talked to Ashmore, the more I thought about another Manhattan shoemaker: Belgian Shoes, an upscale loaferie nestled into a leafy stretch of 55th Street on the east side. The shop is only a few miles away from the Sabah studio downtown, but it might as well belong to a different universe. Belgian Shoes makes—isn’t it obvious?—Belgian shoes: traditional loafers, complete with a little bow. For the longest time, they were mostly seen on masters of the universe. (Bernie Madoff is said to have owned more than 300 pairs.)
Where the Sabah space is wide-open and bright, all blonde wood and tall windows, Belgian Shoes is tiny, a little green-carpeted cubbyhole in Midtown. It’s not a community center, it’s a shoe store. Nor is Belgian Shoes selling an idea of Instagram-friendly durability: these are fancy, delicate shoes mostly meant to be worn indoors by people who won’t shrug at replacing a pair for upwards of $400. Of course, the two worlds have bent closer to each other in recent years. Belgians, in their own way, are ever-so-slightly punk; Sabahs are inching their way right on up into the establishment.
But there’s something else refreshing about both propositions, too. I thought back to something Ashmore told me: “I'm not a start-up. I don't think about scale. It's a family business, but we've grown it,” he said.
That’s rare, and worth dwelling on for a moment. These days, when you talk about a small company that makes one single product, and claims to make it better than anyone else, and sells it directly to its consumer, you’re usually talking about a very specific kind of company: one that’s optimized to the gills, venture-funded, start-uppy, driven to simplify your life, rather than make it interesting. You’re talking about the best toothbrush, or the best underwear. You’re talking about podcast ads.
In grounding their specificity in customer service, in community and place, Sabah and Belgian Shoes alike might not be perfectly positioned to take over the world. Instead, they’re comfortable operating a pair at a time, evangelizing, creating repeat customers offline. I’ll confess that I’m taken, too: I’m usually wearing socks, but sometimes, I realize, I need a little bit of slipper in my life.
