By The Bootstraps: Handmade Zimbabwe Shoes An Unlikely Global Hit

In a tiny factory producing handmade boots and shoes in southwestern Zimbabwe, leather cutter Misheck Sibanda is on another hectic shift as he tries to keep up with soaring global demand.

- Ben Sheppard

Orders are piling in and new workers are being recruited at the Courteney boot company that seems to defy all the odds as Zimbabwe is battered by decades of economic misery.

Founded in 1993, the firm has recently ramped up production to just 30 pairs a day, all of them made meticulously by 14 employees in a one-room workshop in the second city Bulawayo.

The city -- a former industrial hub -- has suffered the brunt of the country’s collapse since 1980 that has left behind mass unemployment and a landscape of derelict warehouses and ghostly abandoned factories.

But in one unmarked brick building, Sibanda uses his sturdy cutting machine to press shapes out of locally produced leather skins at the start of a process that turns out boots selling for between USD140 and USD500 a pair.

“We sell internationally -- to the first world, even though we are a third-world country. That alone makes me smile,” Sibanda said, deftly handling the soft leather skins.

People are tired of manmade materials, they want natural products like ours

Sibanda and his colleagues are behind an unlikely business story based on a skilled workforce, traditional methods and decades-old stitching machines to produce classic outdoor boots and shoes.

CULT FOOTWEAR