Zegna Shoes, little known fact even the couture range is made by Ferragamo, and After Sales? Well better than Tod's at least.

A visit to the Zegna store to pick up a pair of shoes that had jut been resoled brought a rather unusual an some might say unwelcome surprise, when looking at the soles, previously  bearing the 'zegna couture' legend a plain varnished sole was found.

Upon questioning the staff member as to why the shoes no longer carried the attractive markings on the sole, it was stated that zegna do not make the shoes themselves, or provide the aftercare for them.

Initially of course one might assume that this is the often found situation where a staff member is particularly over zealous, and 'assumes' something to be the case, an decides to  share his or her incorrect assumptions with the client, which results in these people logging onto style forum and sharing these wrong opinions, and being then ridiculed by long term members and experts, doggedly repeating "but the staff told me so".

However after some research it appeared to be true, initially the mainline was produced by ferragamo, and the top end Couture was by Mantelassani, however the zollaborative company that ha since been formed 'ZeFer' between Zegna and Ferragamo, now produces all the shoes.

Not neccesarily a bad thing, as pretty much everyone agrees that quality of the top end shoes is excellent, however, one thing escapes us here.  If they are able to produce shoes that continuously win praise, why can they not manage to resole the shoes with the attractive looking soles that lure consumers to buy the shoes?

There is no question they are considerably better than Tod's that we wrote about earlier here, who basically send you to a shoe repairer near a train station, however why they don't make that tiny little bit of extra effort, and why they train there staff to TELL people they don't produce the shoes, however nice they may be, is a little odd.