Born and bred in Northampton, the historical centre of the British shoemaking and leather industries, childhood friends Mark Jeffery and Guy West were surrounded by tradition and history from the word go. Perhaps not a surprise therefore that they would go on to become shoe designers, but the fact that they began their first business as 16 year olds, designing and selling their own shoes at markets in Northamptonshire and also at Kensington Market in London, shows remarkable prescience and motivation. At first, as Guy West explains, “Mark and I would buy rejects and ends of lines from his dad’s factory and other factories, customise them and sell them on.”

They quickly moved on to having their own designs made up. From the outset their intention was that Jeffery~West shoes would be imbued with all the craftsmanship, quality, and pedigree available in having shoes manufactured by Northampton factories with hundreds of years of experience, but that to this history they would welt cutting edge styles, overt elegance, fulsome flamboyance, develop innovative new lasts, and utilise an array of leathers and colours, imagination all too often lacking in men’s shoes, and particularly in shoes that are so well made they do not go to pieces if you look at them twice. There are those that have criticised Jeffery~West for seeming to play fast and loose with tradition, as West says, “You do get people who turn their nose up at us a bit because we’re making shoes in Northampton but they’re not the traditional toe-cap Oxford, or classic Brogue, but why on earth would we want to try to be Crockett and Jones, Trickers, or Church’s, they’re already doing it; if you want a classic English shoe, I wouldn’t hesitate to say go and buy one from Crockett and Jones, Trickers, or Church’s, whereas if you come to us you’re buying that manufacturing history but it’s with our handwriting, our twist, our slant on it.”

The idiosyncratic Jeffery~West design handwriting extends to the smallest detail; the punching is always diamond shaped, inspired both by Gothic and Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, which also directly informs the arrowhead wingtips.

In refusing to ride roughshod over either individualism or traditional qualities of craftsmanship and service, Jeffery~West continue to cut an elegantly shoed and booted swath through the footwear mediocrity that is almost to exclusion offered to men, and in so doing they, and the shoes and boots they create, should be cherished, just as they in turn cherish every customer, be he gentleman, or rogue, or both, that steps over their threshold into a world only limited by the bounds of ones imagination.