He Spent 4 Years Making 60 Pairs. Here's What That Taught Me About Every Shoe You Own.
What one independent brand's four-year journey reveals about the real economics of footwear
You’ve thought about it. Every sneakerhead has. You pick up a box, flip it over, see $180 or $220 or $280 printed on the side, and somewhere in the back of your mind the question shows up...
How does a shoe that costs maybe $40 to make end up here?
It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is more interesting than the cynical one.
I recently talked to Mark Strong, the founder of Saint65, a small independent sneaker brand out of Nashville. Mark spent four years making his first shoe. Sixty pairs. One colorway. Hairy suede uppers, Vibram soles, leather laces sourced from the same Tennessee tannery that makes Rawlings baseball glove leather.
Four years. Sixty pairs.
And when I talked to him about the process on the Sneaker History Podcast, everything I already knew about this industry from 20 years on the inside started clicking into place in a new way... because hearing it from someone doing it for the first time, with no safety net, makes it land differently.
Here’s what Mark’s journey actually taught me about why your sneakers cost what they do.
Samples aren’t free. And you need a lot of them.
Before a single pair gets made for sale, a brand has to make samples. Lots of them. Mark went through six to seven samples across multiple factories before he was happy enough to go to production. Each one costs money. Pattern creation, materials, labor, shipping across continents... you’re looking at anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 just to get started, and then $150 to $200 per additional sample after that.
Nike isn’t doing six samples. They’re doing dozens, across multiple colorways, across multiple silhouettes, with teams of developers and material scientists involved at every step. That R&D cost lives in the price of the shoe. Every single time.
Minimum order quantities change everything.
This is the one most people don’t think about. The price per pair drops dramatically when you’re ordering in volume. Mark was making 60 to 70 pairs at a time. At that quantity, his cost per pair was significantly higher than it would have been at 300 or 500 pairs. The factory has fixed costs regardless of how many shoes come out the other end, so the fewer you make, the more each one absorbs.
To me this is one of the most important things to understand about independent brands. When you see a small brand charging $200 for a shoe, they’re not padding their margins. They’re covering the reality of making a small run with no leverage. Nike charging $180 for a retro is a completely different economic equation... they’re making hundreds of thousands of pairs and the cost per unit reflects that.
Materials sourcing is its own full-time job.
Mark wanted Italian hairy suede. He wanted hemp tongue material dyed with Tennessee-grown indigo. He wanted baseball laces from a tannery an hour and a half from his house. Getting all of that to one factory, in the right quantities, at the right time, coordinated across multiple countries... that’s months of emails, WhatsApp messages, and waiting.
The big brands have entire teams dedicated to materials sourcing. Relationships with mills and tanneries built over decades. When they want a specific leather or mesh or foam compound, there’s a person whose entire job is making that happen. For a brand like Saint Sixty Five, that person is Mark, at his kitchen table, tracking down a Vibram sole distributor in Portugal.
That infrastructure has a cost. And it’s baked into every shoe.
Factory relationships take years to build.
One of the things Mark kept coming back to was transparency. He wanted to know who was making his shoes, what conditions they were working in, whether he could get a video call with the factory floor. With a smaller order, that’s harder to get. The big clients with the big orders get the access, the photos, the behind-the-scenes content. The small guy waits weeks for an email back.
This isn’t unique to sneakers. It’s just how manufacturing works. But to me it signals something important about the real cost of ethical production... it’s not just about where the shoe is made, it’s about having enough leverage to actually verify what’s happening. And that leverage comes from volume, which comes from scale, which takes time and money to build.
The story inside the shoe costs money too.
Those baseball laces on the Saint65 SV1 “Radici” traveled from Tennessee to Portugal and back before they ended up on the finished shoe. The indigo-dyed hemp tongues almost didn’t make it into production at all. The GPS coordinates of Nashville are embossed into the lateral window. None of that is accidental, and none of it is free.
When a brand puts real details into a shoe, details that connect to a place or a person or a moment, that’s hours of sourcing, sampling, and problem-solving that never shows up on the hang tag. It just shows up in the price.
And honestly... it should. That’s the part worth paying for.
So what does this mean for you as a consumer?
Next time you’re looking at a price tag and doing the math in your head, think about Mark sourcing hemp fabric from Pennsylvania, having it dyed with Tennessee-grown indigo, sending it to Portugal, waiting a year for a sample, losing a factory mid-development, and ultimately landing on something he was proud of at 60 pairs.
Now multiply that process by a hundred times the complexity, a thousand times the volume, and a hundred countries of distribution. That’s what the big brands are managing every single time a shoe hits the shelves.
Is every shoe worth what it costs? No. Some of them absolutely are not. The market for $300 retros with no new tooling is its own conversation... and one we’ve had plenty of times in the newsletter archive.
But the next time a small independent brand charges you what they need to charge for something they spent four years making, sixty pairs at a time, with baseball laces from a Tennessee tannery...
That one’s worth it.
You can hear the full conversation with Mark Strong of Saint65 on the Sneaker History Podcast. Find the SV1 “Radici” at saint65.com while pairs last. I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.
Appreciate the love Nick!