Baloni Footwear

Our place is in Wajidpur Jajmau, over in Mona Nager. If you’ve ever been to this part of town, you know it’s the heart of the shoe making world around here. We’ve got a small setup where we focus on footwear. It’s not a clean job by any means. There is always the smell of leather glue and the sound of hammers hitting soles. We spend our days sitting on low stools, working on different parts of the shoes. Some of us do the cutting, others do the stitching, and then there’s the finishing. It’s a lot of manual labor and your hands get pretty rough after a few weeks of it. We don’t have a showroom with glass cases. The finished shoes just go into cardboard boxes and get stacked up near the entrance until the truck comes to pick them up. It’s a bit dark inside the workshop, but we have enough lamps to see the stitches properly. The floor is usually covered in scraps of rubber and leather bits. We just sweep it all up at the end of the day. It’s a simple life, making shoes for people to wear. We don’t worry about big brand names or anything like that. We just make sure the soles are stuck on tight and the leather looks decent before the boxes are taped shut.