Di Giuseppe's factory transforms raw leather into luxury shoes through handcrafted steps: cutters slice the leather, workers mount lasts and heat uppers, a Blade Runner machine attaches the lasting board, and a signature black stitching technique joins the uppers to the outsole using a thick needle.
Here are our tagliatori, means cutter. They cut the leather from the workpiece. So right now he's taking the last and he's attaching it to the lasting board. The uppers are heated up in this machine. The reason they heat up the leather is because it's much more malleable and much more stretchable when it's hot. From there it goes into the Blade Runner machine after it's been mounted to the last and lasting board. The goal of this machine is to actually attach this lasting board we saw in the previous step to the uppers of the shoe. These are shorter nails and they're used throughout the shoe. All of the nails that we saw being hammered hammered in in the previous steps in the process are now being removed because we actually have nails that are punched into the shoe all the way. Those other nails' purpose is purely to hold the shoe together so that it could be produced in a proper and consistent way. So because of this beautiful sliding mechanism that we see all throughout the factory, we have now the uppers which have glue applied— we just saw the previous step— and have been sanded down, and the outsoles which have the glue applied and are now sitting on this cardboard over here. Let's slide over to this machine, and this is where the uppers and the outsoles are going to be combined to really form a shoe. This is a particularly challenging type of stitching because it's very, very thick. The needle, it has to go all the way through a lasting work, through the base of the outsole. This is really a specialized process, and this is what Di Giuseppe is known for— their black stitching on the outsole. And in the final stack, he opens the box, preps the shoes to be packaged, puts the lid on it, denotes the box with all the key information of the sizing, and puts it up.
