Shoe Design of the Week – Julia’s Luxe Must-Have

Welcome to our new weekly blog, Shoe Design of the Week, where we’ll be featuring our favoursite shoes, finding out about the woman behind the shoe and what inspired her design. As we’re looking at shoes to invest in, we’ve launched with Co-Founder Julia Grinham and her latest Upper Street shoe, this stunning platform peep toe shoe in our new Luxe Metallic Suede in Green.

Over to you Julia, please introduce yourself…

Hi everyone, I’m the Co-Founder of Upper Street shoes along with my sister Katy and we started Upper Street two years ago. Both Katy and I ADORE shoes, but having size 9 and 8 feet meant we often couldn’t find the stylish, but individual shoes we really wanted for our shoe wardrobe. Katy discovered she could have shoes hand-made to her own design for her wedding and that’s when we realised we had to take our shoe secret and share it with shoe lovers everywhere. The last two years have been amazing and every day I love seeing the designs you’ve created online turmed into stunning shoes.

What inspired your shoe design?

As the face, or should I say the feet of Upper Street, my shoes need to have a WOW factor and show the beauty of the shoe designs you can create with us. We’ve just introduced our new Luxe Metallic suedes to the Studio and as soon as I felt the softness of the suede and saw how glamorous the colours were, I knew I had to design a shoe with them.

Although the green is very individual, it goes with everything in my wardrobe. I do a lot of networking and socialising for work so I need a shoe that will take me from conferences to business dinners to a black tie event. And this shoe will only improve with age, as the material takes on a vintage glamour.

Have you worn your shoes yet? What do people think?

I haven’t worn them yet (apart from modelling for my photo), but I’m attending a conference in India in June and they’ll make their debut there. I shared a picture of them on Facebook and Twitter and was inundated with friends and Upper Street fans asking how they could design a shoe like mine! I can’t wait to see more shoes designs in our Luxe Metallic suedes as they’re such a luxurious and beautiful material: once you feel them and see the colours, you fall in love.

Thanks Julia, please send us more pictures of your beautiful shoes.

Upper Street’s Luxe Metallic Suedes are only available through our Studio (they’re not on the website). If you would like to design a shoe featuring them you can:

Upper Street shoes come in a huge range of sizes from the petite 33 (UK 1.5) to the generous 43 (UK 10) with 4 width fittings. We also offer free alterations to fit and we’re so confident that you’ll love your final design that we’ll refund you if you don’t!

To book an appointment in our London Studio, email iloveshoes@upperstreet.com or call us on 0845 680 9365.

If you can’t make it the studio but still want to see our full range of luxurious materials, visit our Upper Street Swatch Store.Whether you’d like to experience the richness of our suedes, feel the silken quality of our sumptuous Italian satins or visualise our glossy patents as a shoe, you can order as many swatches as you want!

Upper Street - the made-to-order luxury shoe label where you can design your own individual shoes and have them delivered right to your door.