Relating to Style
At Gwendolyn Carrié there is a firm belief in the need for refined understatement so accessories complement the wearer and not overshadow or define them. While always ensuring our products are distinctive through the use of unusual materials such as our signature fish skin leathers, we wish to steer clear of branding through obvious logos. Our designs are for women who are confident about their individual style and not led by fashion.
Relating to Comfort
Coco Chanel once said "Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury." At Gwendolyn Carrié, we are passionate about creating elegant and feminine shoes that are also comfortable to wear. We invest a significant amount of time working with each of our suppliers to ensure an ergonomically-sound structure and our craftsmen work entirely by hand to ensure the highest quality standards and utilise a specially developed padding in all our shoes for real comfort. In addition, we only use the finest quality natural materials on the upper, lining and sole to allow the foot to breathe.
Click to read more about our craftsmanship
Relating to Only Using the Real Thing
We believe that luxury goods clients expect luxury shoes made of exotic leathers to be made of real skins rather than stamped imitation exotic leathers. The vast majority of printed or embossed exotics (crocodile, python, lizard or ostrich skins) are made from relatively poor quality cow skins which have been filled with polymers and other materials. Such inferior 'leathers' tend to be extremely tough and unforgiving on the feet. We carefully select our suppliers of exotic skins for both their commitment to never trading in unfarmed endangered species, as well as their technical expertise in tanning these skins to keep their unique properties while rendering them as soft and malleable as possible so as to ensure comfort.
Relating to Individuality
An important theme at Gwendolyn Carrié is the desire to keep our products individual and thus exclusive. We carefully restrict the number of shoes and accessories produced in any given colour and style, no matter how popular. Thus most of our shoes are 'demi-couture' often with no more than 16 pairs every made in that colour or style and sometimes considerably less. We also prefer to retail our products ourselves to best serve our clients, however we do work with a handful of carefully selected independent stockists who appreciate our values and share our commitment to service. In order to preserve exclusivity, we would not consider selling to two stockists in the same city and would not sell the same item to two retailers in the same country.
