Love Jules Leather had handcrafted and sold just a couple dozen pairs of boat shoes when Sitka reached out in the fall of 2011 to see if we’d be interested in designing and ‘crafting a run of collaboration boat shoes, to be sold exclusively in their Victoria and Vancouver B.C. flagship stores. We said… yes.

That winter, over the better part of two months, we hunkered down in our Whistler based garage-converted-studio and assembly-lined as best we could 50 pairs of navy and tan boat shoes. It was an extremely steep learning curve in production as until that time, every pair of shoes we’d produced was one-of-a-kind. Making a lot of the same all at once was an education in time management, patience, and perseverance. Back then, we had little to no machinery – these boat shoes were literally handcrafted from start to finish.

At the time Sitka reached out, we were a leather accessories company that’d made just a handful pairs of shoes. This collaboration was not only the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but a gentle push down the path towards more shoes, less belts, bags, and the rest.