November 7, 2014
South of Arden
Today we are featuring these outstanding shoes sold by South of Arden. You won’t want to miss trying these on at our San Francisco Holiday Market this weekend!
South of Arden is a brand new shop created by Kelsey Otsuka, Merrilee Hale and Paulina Santos Torres that features and supports Latin American designers who currently may not have the means to reach the US market but are driven and yearning to expand. The designer that will be featured at our Holiday Market is Josefina Basso, an Argentinian shoe designer Kelsey met two years ago while shopping in the Buenos Aires bazaars.
Josefina Basso is a talented Argentinian shoe designer with humble beginnings. Unknowingly, her passion for shoes began during the numerous visits to her grandmother’s shoe factory, where she loved dressing her dolls in all the shoes. After university, she spent about seven years making her way through small workshops learning the whole shoe making process, which served as her guide and inspiration to creating her own shoe designs. In 2012, her passion for shoes propelled her into creating her own line and and has been running a successful small business ever since. Josefina and her partner operate out of their apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
All of Josefina Basso’s shoes are hand-crafted in Argentina and made with genuine leather. This is the first debut of the designer selling her line outside of Buenos Aires. The shoes are a fun combination of traditional oxford style paired with gorgeous jewel tones and bright hued leathers. We can’t get enough of them!
To stay true to their eco-conscious nature, the team at South of Arden never use packaging for the shoes for shipping or actual shoe boxes to store the shoes. Instead, they only have hand-made shoe bags that serve as the perfect carrier bag for traveling and can be used to tote around other things as well.
We are so excited South of Arden is bringing the talent and hand-crafted shoes of Josephina Basso to San Francisco for our first Holiday Market of the season! Be sure to follow South of Arden on Facebook and Instagram to learn more about potential Latin American designers they will be bringing to the US. See you all tomorrow!