The Story of Sevilla Smith

THE STORY OF SEVILLA SMITH

After eighteen years as a film costumer, dressing actors, traveling constantly, and spending most of her time on her feet, Faye Smith found herself longing for something specific: beautiful, timeless, comfortable shoes. Shoes designed in modern ways but made in primitive ones. Shoes meant for loving over time.

 

A FATEFUL STROLL...

Faye spent three to six months a year traveling, drawing inspiration from everything around her. The strange thing about traveling that much is that you're constantly inspired, yet you start to want fewer things. You become selective about what you're willing to call yours, and you long, increasingly, for shoes that are both comfortable and beautiful.

It was an otherwise ordinary afternoon, wandering the medieval alleyways of Barcelona's Born neighborhood, when she stumbled into a small shop full of extraordinary shoes. They weren't trendy or flashy. There was something else about them, something intangible. Behind the counter she noticed a workshop: machinery, zinc tables, scraps of leather everywhere. She asked the owner, Niccolo, if he made the shoes himself.

"Of course," he said.

"Would you teach me?" she asked.

"Of course," he said again.

So began her instruction, in a small workshop with a girl upstairs strumming Bob Dylan songs on an acoustic guitar. Day after day, Niccolo taught her everything he could, working around the limits of both their Spanish: hand gestures, drawings, pictures. It was an experience she never forgot.

Back in Philadelphia, Faye kept making and kept learning, researching materials and manufacturing methods that had all but disappeared in the US. It consumed her, in the best way. She found a leather supplier in upstate New York and Missouri, soles in Pennsylvania, heels in Boston. It took time, but eventually it all came together.

 

THE EVOLUTION...

Years passed. The spirit of travel that shaped Faye's early work never left, but her base shifted to Europe, where the sourcing and craft traditions kept pulling her back. The leathers came mostly from small heritage tanneries in Italy. The components were made in Portugal. Eventually she found her way to a small workshop built in the fourteenth century, in the artisan district of Barcelona, and Sevilla Smith found its home.

The shoes were made wherever her tools and leather could travel: an attic in Philadelphia, an apartment overlooking an archaeological site, a fourteenth-century workshop in Barcelona. Each pair was a way to connect with a craft that's genuinely rare, hand cut, hand lasted, made by hand from start to finish. The designs stayed classic, the kind that can't be replicated by a factory. Customers chose their own leathers and lived with something made specifically for them.

 

THE NEXT CHAPTER...

That craft is now in new hands. We're Lauren and Ji-San, and we're thrilled to have been passed lovingly onto us from Faye and are thrilled to carry things forward with Sevilla Smith. So here we are! We are in the same workshop, using the same tools and methods, sourcing the same beautiful Italian leather and small-production Portuguese components, and using the same slow, hands-on processes that Faye built this on.

Lauren is originally from Los Angeles and grew up around makers: her grandmother was a painter who took her traveling all over the world from a young age, and her father was a fine art photographer with whom she wandered through museums and cities with for as long as she can remember. She is a practicing fine artist, and has earned various degrees in art history; arts; cultural management; and design for wellbeing. After a decade of producing global retreats, large-scale events, educational programs, and international congresses – work she loved, but that pulled her further and further from her roots in making by hand. Barcelona had already gotten hold of her once, on a trip at age sixteen, and it never quite let go. Coming back to something slow and handmade, in a fourteenth-century workshop in the Born, is far less a career pivot than a true coming home.

Ji-San also grew up in California, around skating, fashion, and sport, which shaped his eye and affinity for the hands-on from a young age. Flash forward to now, Ji-San has spent over 15 years in retail and fashion, including running his own leather goods business and serving as lead designer for a footwear brand working between Los Angeles and France. For several years, he apprenticed in a small Barcelona workshop under master shoemakers Aldanondo y Fernandez, where he first crossed paths with Faye and the shoemaker community she trained alongside. Taking on Sevilla Smith is a natural next step in work he's been doing his whole career, and a truly fulfilling way to bring that expertise back to the craft itself.

We've spent our first months here learning directly from Faye: the leathers, the lasts, and all of those little decisions that make a shoe feel just right on a foot that's ready for wandering. Faye is still very much part of this, and we're honored to keep growing Sevilla Smith forward together, as one extended family. Most of all, we're glad to keep making you shoes worth loving for decades.