Inside Manifattura Berluti, the giant shoebox where luxury craftsmanship comes to life

Berluti's shoes can take up to 50 hours to make at its manifattura in Ferrara. Photo: Berluti

In 1884, a young and hungry Alessandro Berluti left Senigallia, the small Italian village where he was born and raised, for booming Paris. The city was in the midst of a creative and artistic revolution, and Alessandro, who was 19 at the time, was eager to hone his skills as a craftsman.

Over the next decade, his keen eye for aesthetic lines and impressive hardwood skills won him a legion of high-profile and celebrity clients, helping to cement his place as one of the city’s top shoemakers. By 1895, he had created his first signature bespoke shoe – the Alessandro lace-up – and upon inscribing his name into the leather, Maison Berluti was born.

Almost 130 years on, Berluti remains one of the world’s top luxury shoemakers, known for its technical virtuosity and savoir-faire. And although Maison Berluti has kept up with the times, the brand’s spirit of craftsmanship remains unchanged.

Berluti’s century-worth of expertise comes together on the outskirts of Ferrara, where Manifattura Berluti stands proud amid the Italian countryside. And the workshop, which the brand’s parent company LVMH commissioned Parisian architect Barthélémy Griño to design in 2012, is anything but industrial.

Much like the nature of the work that happens within, the structure has been designed with the utmost craftsmanship, fittingly taking the shape of a giant shoebox. Inside, interwoven beams mimicking intricate shoe-lacing let light into an open atrium. The cedar wood from which they are built has been specially selected to age in the sun, much like Berluti’s famous patinas.

Within this 8,000-square-metre shoebox, more than 250 employees initiate the meticulous process of crafting a pair of Berluti shoes, which can consist of up to 200 individual steps and, for some bespoke designs, 50 hours of labour.

While staff at the manifattura hail from around the world, many were born and raised in Ferrara, and come from shoemaking stock who have passed their skills down through generations. The brand works hard to engage new generations in the craft too, and here in Ferrara, there are plenty of young people busy at work.

“It takes around 400 hours to learn the craft,” plant director François Berthet tells me as we start our tour, a rare privilege as it’s not often the manifattura invites guests inside – not even Berluti customers.

We pass by rows and rows of lasts – the wooden models shaped like feet around which the brand builds its shoes. At first, they all appear identical, but upon closer inspection, each has been individually carved from hornbeam to suit a different style of shoe, and many are bespoke replicas made from the precise measurements of a customer's feet.

Much of the work happening inside the manifattura is centered around the launch of the brand’s newest and most ambitious sneaker style to date, the Playoff, which features more than 80 individual pieces of leather – each of which requires its own process. The start of this procedure, as with all Berluti shoes, is a 2D hand-drawn design that is traced and placed over the last, before the pattern is scanned digitally.

Stefano Gavioli, who heads the shoe modelling division, demonstrates the painstaking process that follows to work out the exact measurement of each of the 80 pieces of the shoe’s upper, before they are sent to be digitally traced onto the leather.

I smell the leather room before I see it. Inside, rows upon rows of skins are stacked high on top of one another in colours ranging from vivid red to bottle green. On the table, a roll of tan Venezia leather lays flat. “We only use the best quality leather,” Berthet says. Less than 10 per cent of what the maison’s leather buyers see is up to Berluti standard.

The brand’s signature Venezia leather was perfected by Olga Berluti in the early 1990s. The calfskin undergoes a tanning process exclusive to the maison, giving the resulting shoe remarkable suppleness, flexibility and traction.

Laser pattern cutters are programmed to detect and work around any defects in the animal’s skin when tracing all 80 pieces of the Playoff’s upper, ensuring only perfect leather makes the cut, with as little waste as possible.

“Of all the ways to cut the leather, the most important thing is the eye of the craftsman,” I am told. “Everything is checked manually and it still falls to them to ensure the optimum quality of the leather and to avoid any defects.”

Each individual piece is then hand-fed through machines to determine its thickness, before the process of assembling the upper begins. The stitching for the Playoff, Berthet says, is among the most complex of any Berluti shoe to date. “It’s art.”

The completed leather upper is left to rest before being hand-glued and stitched to its sole, and once assembled, it makes its way to the patina room. Along with its bespoke creations and quality leather, one of the hallmarks of Maison Berluti is its unique array of patinas, which are displayed on shelves full of colourful glass bottles covering the back of a busy room on the upper floor of the manifattura.

Here, artists hand-paint the leather with surprisingly tiny brushes, ensuring optimum precision, a process that takes up to 160 minutes, on average. And because the leather of each shoe is organic, the colour recipe has to be tested and amended every single time to ensure it takes.

It’s in this room that customisation also takes place – from individually created patinas to leather tattooing. I am led to a corner of the room where a faint buzzing rings out as a man hunches over a tan and black backpack, on which he is tattooing a bespoke design of a falcon – I hazard a guess the client might be from the Middle East, which of course they do not disclose.

Customers can choose from Berluti’s book of designs when tattooing their leather products, and while custom designs can be accommodated, they require pre-approval by the brand.

“We have four in-house tattoo artists,” Berthet says. “Each design takes around 16 hours to do and is done with the same gun used to tattoo human skin.”

It’s a fitting note to end the manifattura tour on. I am reminded of a quote I read by Talbinio Berluti, Alessandro’s grandson, who in 1959 said: “The spirit of the maison is found where the artisan’s respect meets the artist’s defiance.”

Watching the respect that goes into every step of the process, from handling the smallest piece of leather to hand-painting every stroke, to the artistry of tattooing leather and creating custom patinas, it’s clear how the brand gained its reputation as one of the world’s top men’s shoemakers.

It’s this unrivalled savoir-faire, perfected and passed down through the generations, that continues to ensure Berluti remains just as timeless as Alessandro’s first Oxfords.