Prior to founding Otabo Custom Shoes in 2000, Howard Shaffer oversaw Nike's expansion into Beijing, China, in 1981 and was general manager of the company's operations there. In 1985, along with his partner and wife, Jennifer, Shaffer started his own shoe manufacturing company called Sabry Jen.
Sabry Jen formed one of the first foreign joint ventures in China, and was a pioneer in the country's opening to foreign investment and subsequent economic growth. At its peak, the Sabry group of companies included four shoe factories, a leather tannery and several auxiliary factories that supplied components for shoe production. Sabry produced more than 800,000 pairs of shoes a month for companies that included Nike, Adidas, Candies, Timberland, Stride Rite, H.H. Brown, Rocky Boot, Lotto and Asics.
After nearly 15 years of producing shoes in China, Shaffer decided to bring his knowledge back to the United States to redefine how shoes are made. He sold Sabry Jen to his management team, and set out to create a large-scale, custom-fit system like no other.
At Otabo, we're bringing shoemaker and customer together again. Instead of making shoes for corporations, to fill retail shelves; we make shoes for individuals - for individual feet. Let Otabo be your own, personal shoemaker.
Shoes used to be made for people, by other people. There was a personal relationship between the shoe wearer and the shoe maker. That relationship has changed overtime. Today, huge corporate factories make shoes for huge corporate brands, which sell to huge corporate retail chains. Company managers decide which shoes will be made and advertising campaigns tell customers what they will want.
The customers - the people who actually buy and wear the shoes - have very little say in what is made or how it will look, feel and fit. Shoe maker and shoe wearer never meet. It shouldn't be this way.
In redefining how we make shoes, Otabo is also redefining the standards of customer service.
For the past eight years the men and women of Otabo have been working to create, collect and invent the technologies necessary to bring shoemaking into the twenty-first century.
Our unique team of shoemakers are highly skilled, engineers and computer trained technicians, who have learned from some of the best shoe dogs (traditional shoemakers) in the industry. They have established a new standard of shoemaking, bringing together the best of old and new. Otabo shoemakers are a new generation of American craftsmen.
Guided by time tested principles of good shoemaking, we have replaced many of the hand skills lacking in our modern work force with the digital skills of robotics and computer controlled production processes.
Now, even the smallest details of your shoes are exquisitely crafted - digitally - without requiring the years of apprenticeship necessary to develop hand skills.
So, while our leather cutting is performed on a one-micron accurate water jet, and precision stitching is accomplished with the help of military vision-guided technology, the basic fundamentals of good shoemaking are all still there.
Who would've thought that a shoemaker would rank up with some of the world's leading technology companies?
Otabo, with our innovative business model and advances in technologies, was presented Managing Automation's Progressive Manufacturer of the Year award for 2005. Otabo won the overall first place award in a field of candidates that included: Ford Motor Company; IBM; Lucent Technologies; Pratt & Whitney; National Semiconductor; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi; Rexam; BioLab; and others. Not too shabby for a shoemaker.
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