Norwegian Welt
There are many ways to make a shoe.
Going for high quality footwear we are
talking about stitched constructions.
ZWIENAHT boots and shoes are made in
the absolute top-of-the-notch-, the Norwegian Welt construction, a very complicated and time- consuming technique. It even beats the Goodyear welt, the Blake and Stitchdown construction because of its balance of flexibility, durability and waterproofness.
I do the complete bottom construction by hand.
- highest quality, sustainable, natural -
The upper material as well as soles, welt and heel is made of vegetable tanned leathers.
Upper leather is hand-stained.
For outsole, midsole, insole and welt I use cow leather which is made the traditional way of bark ground-tanning in Germany.
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Costa was a Greek shoemaker, who, as a young man, in the confusion of the Second World War, drifted through various places in Southeast of Europe and made military boots. He must have made hundreds maybe even a thousand boots for soldiers and officiers, he told me.
After the war his roaming finally came to a stop in a small German town named Diez where he married a shoemaker's daughter. That's where I met him in my childhood. I can still smell the leathers, waxes and glues in his small dark workshop.
In my early twenties, turned on by a shoemaker named Peter Limmer in New Hampshire, USA, I decided to learn how to make shoes and I remembered Costa who then became my teacher.
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