It doesn’t matter whether people work in completely opposite areas of the shoe industry. You can learn a lot about business, fashion and good shoes in personal conversations. In this issue, we had two personal conversations with men who couldn’t be more different from each other, at least when it comes to their taste in shoes. However, they both become very passionate when talking about shoes. Accordingly, it was beneficial to talk to them and read or listen to the interviews.
The journalist Annette Gilles spoke to Andreas Murkudis. He runs three high fashion stores named after him in Berlin and in the interview demonstrates his instinct for which colors and shapes harmonize with each other. He is committed to valuing products and wants shoes that are luxuriously priced to also offer luxurious performance. That’s why he chooses the brands based on the fact that a shoe should ideally last a lifetime if it costs a high three-digit amount. In an interview in this issue, Murkudis reveals which brands, in his opinion, deliver what they promise and where the price-performance ratio is less optimal. While for Andreas Murkudis sneakers are a bunch of plastic, for Mischa Krewer they are the world. They are symbols of the scenes in which he moved in his youth. He and his colleague Oliver Baumgart have been part of the world of sneakers for 20 years. First with the shared blog Sneakerized, then with our own shoe store 43halb: online, in Frankfurt and for a long time in Fulda, where it all started.
In the current edition of the schuhkurier podcast “On a Word!”, Krewer told me how he grew with the sneaker hype. With a family of dealers in the background and some retail experience, but above all the self-confidence that we wanted to open a cool shoe store, it became the success story 43halb, today with 70 employees. Krewer and Baumgart have always shown a good feeling, especially when it comes to marketing, storytelling and finding the right partners. How much this search for the perfect story lies within him can be seen in Krewer’s second passion, the clamping blocks; Some actions also emerged from this. In the podcast he talks about what they are and how many shoes he has today.