The last pair of shoes bought is usually the favorite pair.
Alina Ocheretyana, 25, co-owner of Kachorovska custom shoemaker in Kyiv, counts on this axiom for her business, as she holds a pair of red glossy pumps – must-haves for many shoe addicts. They are awaiting pickup from the owner.
Ocheretyana, who works from a two-room office in Kyiv’s Podil area, talks passionately about techniques of shoemaking and why Italian leather has better color patterns than the Ukrainian variety.
Kachorovska started as a tiny family business, but now it is a prosperous atelier, producing 200 pairs of quality handmade shoes a month from its production workshop in Zhytomyr, a provincial capital 140 kilometers west of Kyiv. Their clientele includes office workers, artistic people and even celebrities. Singer and socialite Anna Sedokova ordered her wedding shoes from Kachorovska.
Ocheretyana says she doesn’t own any shoes that weren’t made by the family. During the interview, she wears black oxfords with silver metallic toes, a model that goes for Hr 1,150 in the Kachorovska online store.
Ocheretyana traces the family business’s start 50 years ago and credits her grandmother, 74, who started working at a shoe factory in Zhytomyr. Later Ocheretyana’s mother, Olena Kachorovska, followed. Both made shoes at home in their spare time. Since the late 1990s, they have practiced their craft in a Zhytomyr workshop. When Ocheretyana moved to Kyiv to study in law school in 2004, she started taking orders from clients in the capital. Now almost all Kachorovska clients are from Kyiv.
A major step forward came three years ago, when Ocheretyana and her husband, Ruslan Ocheretyaniy started a Kachorovska Facebook page, which has more than 10,000 subscribers. Since then, some 2,000 customers have ordered shoes and bags from the atelier. One of its best customers owns at least 50 pairs of shoes and up to 40 bags by Kachorovska.
Yulia Savostina, the head of Pillar PR firm, owns “seven or eight pairs” of Kachorovska shoes and says they are very good quality for the price.
“Their 10 centimeter pumps are more comfortable than Jimmy Choo’s, and that is not an exaggeration,” Savostina says.
Making the shoes in Zhytomyr allows Kachorovska to keep prices more affordable. Custom-made boots cost Hr 1,300-1,500, high heeled shoes go for Hr 900-1,000 and ballet pumps sell for Hr 700. Mens shoes range from Hr 950-1,250, but only 10 percent of Kachorovska’s customers are men.
The wait for a pair of Kachorovska shoes is 45 days for the privilege of selecting the size, width, color of leather, sole and lining color. The shoemaker rejects some stylistic requests. “Some people just don’t fully understand how the shoes they imagine will look like in reality,” Ocheretyana says. Kachorovska works only with authentic leather because synthetic materials “smell bad.”
Other elements, such as heels and leather, are imported from a small Italian city of Civitanova. She says that a lot of raw materials for Italian leather factories come from Ukraine, while Ukrainian leather producers can’t satisfy the demand of shoemakers because of their poor choice of colors.
“Half of Ukrainian leather companies produce only black leather. And maybe some shades of brown. If they have red colors, it is only one shade, looking exactly like red leather boots seen on Ukrainian folk dancers,” says Ocheretyana. “In Italy, there is carrot red, coral red, vinous red, cherry red and more. When you see all that color, you just can’t wait to make something of that leather.”
Each pair of shoes in Zhytomyr goes through the hands of four specialists, from designer to cutter, then seamer and finally, the shoemaker who pulls the sewn leather on the sole.
On Sept.1, Kachorovska launched an online store with ready-to-wear shoes and bags. Ocheretyana, while not talking specific sales figures, says the store is “doing just as well as it was planned.”
Kyiv Post lifestyle editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at rudenko@kyivpost.com.
