Alex Aldana makes shoes by hand, using the same methods his father brought to Orange County decades ago.
The family craft hasn’t changed much since it started with his grandfather in Leon, Guanajuato—a part of Mexico that’s long been a center of leather goods and these days is home to manufacturing plants that turn out brand names from Nike to Steve Madden.
“Everybody that was born there had something to do with shoes when they were little,” says Aldana, sitting on a stool in the back of Shoe Rite, his small shop at Borchard Avenue and Main Street in Santa Ana. “This is a job we’ve been doing generation after generation.”
There’s no guarantee of a next generation, though.
“Unfortunately, this is a thing that’s disappearing,” Aldana says.
Shoe Rite is a relic in itself, a throwback to a bygone era when shoes were handmade. Even much of the machinery in the shop was handmade—passed down to the third-generation.
Computer-aided design programs will never be used here. Aldana, 31, prefers a No. 2 pencil, masking tape and cardboard to map a shoe’s dimensions, just like his father and grandfather did.
“I like doing it the old-school way—that’s how it was always made from the beginning,” says Aldana, who made his first pair of shoes in a flame design when he was a 17-year-old student at Santa Ana High School.
“They were wild, they were black and white,” he says. “I remember, because that was the first pair of shoes I made myself with my dad’s guidance.”
Alex’s father, Vicente, died three years ago from colon cancer.
His older brother, Jose Jr., owns Shoe Rite and helps Alex, the head shoemaker, with the workload, along with Jose’s wife, Lida. The shop has stayed in business over the past decade in large part because it handles all of the repair work for a next-door Red Wing Shoes store.
Repair work is the shop’s bread and butter these days.
“Thank God we have that,” Alex says.
There was a time when the shop had bigger and more notable clients. Shoe Rite made work boots for Western Foods in Northern California. It also filled custom orders for pop star Vassy, and George Esquivel, a hometown hero in the fashion industry who got his start making shoes in his Buena Park garage for up-and-coming rockers, including Fullerton’s Gwen Stefani and Lit. Esquivel’s Los Angeles shop, Esquivel Designs, now caters to the entertainment’s industry’s top names, including Taylor Swift, Kevin Kostner and Pearl Jam.
Shoe Rite still turns out a dozen or so custom pairs of shoes a week for customers who come from as far north as Los Angeles and as far south as Dana Point.
Process
The Aldana brothers can produce a pair of shoes by hand in 12 hours. The process starts with defining and cutting dimensions. Then comes the creation of a pattern, cutting and sewing the leather, mounting the shoe on a foot-shaped last, stitching a welt or strap around the bottom, and gluing on the sole and then the heel.
The company gets its standard cow or pigskin leather from a San Fernando Valley supplier. It orders exotic leathers—alligator, ostrich, snake and sting ray—from Texas.
A finished pair of wing tips, stilettos or cowboy boots typically cost between $150 and $300 here. The price would be double at retail, Alex Aldana said.
The repair side of the business is a tougher sell at about $65 to resole a shoe—a price many of its customers in Santa Ana aren’t willing to pay when they can buy a new pair for $20 at a big-box store.
“People don’t appreciate the hard work that’s put into this,” Aldana said. “When it’s a custom shoe, it’s more intimate.”
The company also paints purses, shoes and jackets, custom jobs that start at about $45 for smaller items. Aldana is trying for a new revenue stream with a first leather jacket and is tinkering with prototypes of leather bags, purses, laptop bags and wallets.
Then there’s a prototype therapeutic shoe Aldana is working on for a designer at Nike that features a brace within. He’s been working on the project on and off for about nine months.
“I’ll learn whatever I need to,” he says.
Father-Son Dream
Aldana is still chasing his father’s dream of running a factory that turns out custom-made shoes by volume.
The son’s part in the dream started more than 20 years ago, when Aldana, two brothers, his mother and aunt joined their father in California. The family settled in Santa Ana, where his father worked out of the garage at their home. Aldana would join his father on door-to-door walks trying to drum up business. Jose Sr., armed with a small tool kit, would charge $4 to fix a pair of broken stilettos.
“Just like every immigrant, [he] wanted a better life for their family,” said Aldana, who often envisions his father sitting on his wooden stool, working on shoes. “From time to time, I just look at it, and it brings me back, and I see him there in this little space mounting the shoe. That’s what motivates me to keep on.”
The family briefly went into large-scale production at a warehouse on Whittier Avenue in Costa Mesa in the late 1990s doing work for Esquivel and Diego’s Boots.
The business faltered after a four-year run, prompting the move to Santa Ana.
There are many days on the job when no money is made at the little shop on Main Street.
Other Jobs
Aldana has sworn off the profession before, taking more lucrative jobs—he was a rigger on the open sea for awhile—but always comes back to the profession that defines him and his family.
“We don’t do it for the money, we do it for the art,” he says. “I could stay here for hours, designing, creating, playing with patterns until I make something.”
Some days he climbs the ladder in the back corner of the production studio to a makeshift second floor space where his father’s machines have sat idly for years.
There’s enough machinery up there to open three repair shops.
Some, which date back more than two decades, were custom-made by his father, including a sander with a manual crank.
“Whenever I’m having a bad day, I come up here and just look at it—it gives me hope,” Aldana says. “If my dad did it with this and we have all the machinery, why can’t I do it? My dad still wants me to do what he wanted.”
Aldana is both a realist and an eternal optimist. His profession, like others in today’s technology-driven economy, is dying, but he hopes to revive the art in younger generations.
“I know at the end I’ll end up doing this, it doesn’t matter where I go,” he says. “There’s always going to be a shoemaker.”
