Ep. 20 - Patrick Frei, about making shoes with an own identity

In this episode you'll get to meet the very charismatic bespoke shoemaker Patrick Frei from Germany. He made a name of himself more widely when he won the World Championships in Shoemaking in 2018, and is seen by many as one of the greatest shoemakers around today. He works out of his workshop in Freiburg in Southwest of Germany, together with his shoemaking partner Kazuya Kimura. For those of you who have seen shoes made by the Patrick Frei workshop, you'll know they have a distinct personal character, an originality and identity one can't find anywhere else. How one achieves this is one of the main topics of our conversation, but we also we talk about his rather special way into shoemaking sort of through juggling on the streets of South America, about his interesting approach on lastmaking, about the balance between tradition and playfulness, about his obsession with small details, and much more.