I left England feeling somewhat discouraged as I had no real idea of what I was going to do now that working for G&G was at best unrealistic. I knew that I had to get a job but hated the idea of working for some random company, getting a job that didn’t do anything for me nor for my future in the shoe industry. But like most experiences in my life, I ignored my fears, put trust in myself and the higher powers that be and knew that the right thing would eventually present itself.
Being back home sucked though. I didn’t feel the same anymore. I had experienced so much and didn’t feel like I resonated anymore with American mentality. Not to say that I wasn’t proud to be of my culture and American but I felt that by being there I was going backward and it drove me a bit crazy. If there is one thing that I absolutely hate, it is the feeling of going backward. I have to always be progressing. Self admittedly I am quite an impatient person so every day spent back home felt like an eternity of regression. So I asked myself what could I do? I wanted to keep learning, to continue staying relevant, and ultimately to do things that helped my grand desire of seeing the men of the world wearing better shoes.
I used to buy every single menswear magazine there was on offer, even the British editions which cost like $10 each. I wanted to learn and absorb as much knowledge as possible. But instead of learn a bunch, what I realized was that there was a huge lack of editorial dedicated to good footwear. There was hardly anything ever about shoes and if there was it was some shit article about wearing garbage that the magazine’s advertisers were paying them to write about. And for me, it was a complete disservice to the reader. They were essentially selling bad information. I learned a lot about what not to do reading these magazines. But thankfully they were like that as it gave me the inspiration to do what I did next and that was: start a shoe blog, one that would solidify my future.
Back in this time, there really weren’t a ton of menswear blogs. There was Permanent Style, in his early days, and A Suitable Wardrobe. And then there was Style Forum and Ask Andy About Clothes. I used to look at The Sartorialist a lot and gained inspiration on how I wanted my blog to be, in terms of how big I wanted it. I decided that if I was going to do a blog, I had to put my all into it and my goal was to make it as big as The Sartorialist as if I was going to change the minds of men around the world, I had to have more than a couple of hundred of readers.
So I decided that I was going to start this blog about shoes in order to educate, share and inspire other men around the world that wanted to learn more like I did but that had nowhere to go to get this knowledge. I decided that I would be the one to change the world of shoes, to dedicate my life to it and to never look back. And so I did.
