Hasta La Ideas

Footwear designer Tracey Neuls explains why she shies away from “disposable fashion” and reveals that many customers consider her shoes “their best kept secret” in this movie Dezeen filmed at the Designed in Hackney Day PechaKucha, part of a series of talks and discussions we hosted in August.

Neuls starts her talk by saying she considers her work to be more akin to design than fashion, before explaining how she tries to create timeless pieces that customers “grow old with” rather than “bored with”.

She describes how she begins the design process by moulding the shoes from plasticine  and why she believes that approaching design like a child adds to the timelessness of the pieces.

Explaining her approach to manufacturing, she reveals that her shoes are made by families who have passed the trade down through generations, unlike most shoes which she describes as being “designed like a kit car, created by selecting pre-fab components”.

Neuls has two shops in London – one on Marylebone Lane, near Bond Street, and one on Rivington Street in Shoreditch – and she describes how a ”no shoes on shelves” policy in her shops provides a different approach to retail, where unique installations “complete the story of the shoes” and make her customers feel special.

She concludes the talk by showing images of the collection she designed in collaboration with designer Tord Boontje, which features autumn leaf motifs.

Neuls has been designing shoes under her own label Tracey Neuls and TN_29 for almost 12 years – see all our stories about her here.

We’ll be publishing movies of the talks over the coming days and you can also watch architects Studio Weave talk about how architects should be wary of “thinking that they know how to do everything” and James Bridle talking how his projects are designed to look like “the internet has escaped out into the streets”.

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

To find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day, see our highlights reported here. See more stories about design and architecture from Hackney here.

The post “Customers grow old with our shoes,
not bored with them” – Tracey Neuls appeared first on Dezeen.