This shoemaker wears her passion on her feet

SEATTLE -- If you are in love with shoes, like Leanne Corcoran is, you think a lot about what’s on your feet. You might often ponder Oxfords versus pumps, or the balance of beauty and comfort, or why it is that your favorite shoes often wear out, no matter how well you try to take care of them. Shoes can be the punctuation mark of an outfit, a literal reason to kick up your heels, a source of joy. They shield our feet from the pavement and take us where we need to go; they speak, in clomps or taps or whispers, keeping us company as we walk.

Corcoran, a 55-year-old Seattleite, is someone who wears her passion on her feet. But unlike most of us, she made that footwear herself: Corcoran is a shoemaker who makes handcrafted shoes to order in her Pike Place Market studio, Leolo Shoes. They are not inexpensive — her bespoke shoes, crafted specifically for the customer’s foot and to their specifications, begin at $2,200 — but are made for the long haul.

“They will last forever,” said Corcoran, on a recent fall morning at her studio (wearing, for the record, a dapper-looking pair of her own black Oxfords). “My background is in sustainability; I am not about fast fashion.”

Making a pair of shoes from scratch is an elaborate and lengthy process, changed little over the centuries. A shoemaker first takes meticulous measurements of the client’s feet and modifies a last (a foot mold) based on those measurements. The shoe’s design is translated into a pattern, which is used to cut the leather; the upper is then brogued (the engraved lines of decoration seen on many shoes, particularly Oxfords) and hand-dyed. The two pieces of the upper are sewn together, and there’s a trial fitting at this point.

Once adjustments are made, the upper is attached to the sole with small nails or thread, followed by a steel shank, welt and cork filler, then the outsole and hand-stacked heel. Finishing touches include polishing, laces and final details. Each pair takes about a week to make, as everything is done by hand; there are no high-tech shortcuts in traditional shoemaking. There’s no question that a handmade pair of Corcoran’s shoes is an investment, but the price reflects the many hours of handwork, the high-quality leather and laces, the attention to detail, the personalized fittings. You can buy designer shoes priced at $2,000-plus at Nordstrom, but they won’t be custom-made for your foot.

Sandra Schumann, the Seattle-based director of development for a climate institute at Harvard University, owns two pairs of Corcoran’s shoes and feels they are well worth the price. “Wearing a pair that’s been shaped precisely to your foot is an experience like no other,” she wrote in a text. “Every detail, from the leather to the colors, feels thoughtfully chosen … You feel as though the shoe is part of you, a natural extension of who you are.”

Corcoran’s clientele is wide-ranging, with a nearly 50-50 male-female split, ages spanning from the 30s to 90s, and occupations including construction workers, executives, chefs, musicians and doctors.

Though Corcoran has a less-expensive line of shoes manufactured in Portugal to her specifications and sold in her shop ($700), all of her bespoke shoes are made right there in her studio. Leolo Shoes, on the south end of Pike Place Market at 93 Pike St., No. 103, is two adjacent but very different rooms, each smelling of warm leather. The first is an inviting, conventional shop, with shoes arrayed on shelves alongside numerous other wares: belts, bags, socks, key fobs, shoe-care products, shoehorns.

It’s the second room where the magic happens, on and around three scarred work tables. An enormous grinding machine, in a green that matches a pair of cheerful Oxfords on display, lurks in a corner; a bouquet of scissors and other tools blooms in a pot on a side table. Lengths of leather, in a rainbow of colors, hang on the wall, as do a dizzying variety of cutting tools. Several sewing machines, as if poised for battle, punctuate the room’s perimeter, but many of the tools on the tables are simple: pencils, hammers, glue pots.

Corcoran hasn’t spent her entire adult life making shoes; she’s one of those people who figured out her bliss a little later, crafting her first pair at the age of 46. But a love for shoes has been a constant through the years: She remembered playing with her parents’ shoes as a child, and being fascinated by their form. As a teen, she’d buy shoes at Goodwill and “paint them and do weird things to them and sell them back to my friends.” This didn’t seem like a career, though, at least not then. After an MFA in painting and a move to Seattle in 2000, Corcoran worked in the art world, at galleries and Seattle Art Museum, and as an interior designer while raising her two daughters.

But the siren call of shoes eventually won out, nearly a decade ago. Her then-spouse, noticing that Corcoran was unhappy in her work, asked her what she really wanted to do. “And I said, I want to make shoes. I just want to make shoes. She just said do it, go do it.” If Corcoran’s life were a movie, this is where the happy-ending montage would come in.

It takes a while to learn to make shoes from scratch: Corcoran began with a sandal-making class and studied shoemaking at Seattle's Pratt Fine Arts Center, traveling to Santa Fe, N.M., for an extensive workshop with the teacher, Jessica Brommer (who now teaches shoemaking classes at Leolo Shoes). But she was, for a long time, “just a hobbyist, but a passionate hobbyist.” Eventually, Corcoran built an art studio in her backyard, practicing with leather and tools, “and then the pandemic happened and I was back there every day.” Once she started actually making shoes and selling them to friends, she pulled in her mother, Maurine Corcoran, to help with sewing, which was a nice way for them to spend some time together. (Maurine still helps out at the shop, one or two days a week.)

The next step was a leap of faith: After a visit to Pike Place Market with visiting family, Corcoran thought, “What a cool place this would be to have a shop.” She put in an application and soon opened her business in a yellow storefront on Western Avenue in 2021. It was about a quarter of the size of her current space (that enormous grinder needed to stay in Corcoran’s garage, with the shoes traveling from work to home), but it was a start. A year ago, she reopened in the current space — larger, brighter and with much more foot traffic.

On a recent morning in the studio, several other workers were busy with shoemaking projects alongside Corcoran, their conversations punctuated by the constant pounding of hammers or the screech of the grinder. Shoemaking is a noisy art; hammering is needed to get leather seams to lie flat, while the grinder smooths edges. Shoemaker Emma Owens was carefully crafting a pattern for an elegant green-heeled shoe. (Corcoran plans to expand the shop’s selection of higher heels; currently, most of the shoes sold are low-heeled variants on Oxfords and derbies.) Tyler Andersen, an apprentice, was working on a project to upcycle old sneakers into handbags. Master shoemaker Arthur Derkach meticulously dabbed fuchsia paint on a pair of whimsical pink-and-green Oxfords. All of them looked uncannily focused. “Shoemaking is almost spiritual,” Corcoran said. “If you’re not present with the process, you’re going to mess up.”

Corcoran’s shoes all use real leather; vegan leather, she says, “is just not the same … When somebody creates something that has all of those properties that leather has, I will be the first person in line for it.” Her leather, she said, is sustainably sourced from tanneries with high environmental standards. It's a policy at Leolo Shoes to minimize waste: all leather scraps are saved in a bin to be donated to Our Fabric Stash, a Pike Place Market fabric store, which includes them in grab bags.

Her profession is surprisingly appropriate for Seattle, Corcoran said. “I hadn’t anticipated it or thought it through, but it’s a really good place to be a bespoke shoemaker,” she said. “There are so many people who have problems with their feet, skiers and dancers and soccer players, cyclists, all wearing those constricting shoes, a lot of bunions.” Shoemaking has been an unexpected and late-arriving career, but it’s been a joy, Corcoran said. Sometimes, a shoe looks like a dream — and vice versa.