Co-founding a premium footwear house meant owning everything at once — brand, product and market entry. Every decision was made together; the board, the mark and the specs were mine to build.
Five lines, around four hundred pairs handmade in Como — a first collection, start to finish.
Brand, price architecture, sourcing and market entryCo-founded · 2022–23
A house, not a product.
The brief was never one shoe. It was a coherent label — a point of view, a price architecture, a supply chain and a market entry that all hold together.
One coherent language.
Before a single last, a road. The label began on a fair floor and took its shape on the drive afterwards — a stretch of country we had travelled often, and the long water of Lake Como beside us. The lake gave the mark its form: the signet leans on the shape of the lake itself. The name came with it, COMVM · Pantofola di Palazzo, and with the name a palette and a material story. All of it went onto one board — the one every later decision had to answer to.
- Name
- COMVM
- Line
- Pantofola di Palazzo
- Signet
- After the shape of Lake Como
- Built
- Board · palette · tone
Taste, with the reasoning attached.
Two things came first, and neither of them was a season. A love of the shoe as an object with a history — and furniture fabric that had already lived one life and deserved a second. The palazzo slipper is where those two meet.
So the reference was a residence, never a trend — and never one particular house we were designing for. The point was the palaces themselves: their rooms, their colour, the detail somebody settled on a century ago that nobody has bettered since. Neuschwanstein holds Byzantine, Moorish and Gothic revival in one building, so the palette came room by room: Orientzimmer, Musikzimmer, Ankleidezimmer.
Article numbers were never an option — they do no justice to a sensual product. The models carry names instead, drawn from the same world the colours came from.
- Reference
- Palace rooms, not seasons
- Palette
- Orientzimmer · Musikzimmer · Ankleidezimmer
- Material
- Furniture fabric, a second life
- Naming
- Names, never article numbers
Upcycling as an aesthetic.
We built the material identity on repurposed textiles and exotic-embossed leathers — upcycling as a position, never an apology.
Handcrafted in Como.
Every pair made by hand in a Como atelier. The price architecture was ours, set against what the bench actually costs rather than against a wish. And the specs were written at the bench with the maker, not emailed after the fact — which is the difference between a drawing and a shoe. The sheets themselves stay where they belong.
- Atelier
- Como, Italy
- Volume
- ~400 units · 5 lines
- To market
- 6–9 months
- How
- Own tech drawings and specs
- Owned
- Brand · pricing · sourcing
A brand, embossed.
Identity down to the tooling — I drew the signet, and the brass stamp struck it into every piece, carried through to the presentation box. Mark, hardware and packaging, all one language.
- Tooling
- Brass embossing stamp
- Mark
- COMVM, struck in leather
- Packaging
- Presentation box
A point of view you can wear.
Taste and commercial rigour in the same object — a finished collection, in market.
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- Lines
- 5
- Units
- ~400
- Made in
- Como, Italy
Upcycling as an aesthetic position — not a compromise.