Shoes Of The Week - Alden Collaborations

While I have lots to write about for my trip to Paris, it needs to be organized and the posts are going to be longer ones, so bear with me on these things. For the meantime, I wanted to talk about Alden and how they seem to be such busy bees with their collaborations with other brands. As I have stated in many earlier posts, I believe that this idea of collaborating is the way of the future in the shoe industry. While it has always been about, it seems that it has really taken off, since 2010. Obviously, as most of the world went into recession a few years back, companies had to start thinking about alternative channels of distribution, and it seemed that collaboration gave the best of both worlds, for all parties involved. It gave the designers/shoe brands something new to create and an alternative way of making money, it gave the collaborating brand something different from their usual, and maybe stale collection and all-in-all the collaboration gave the customer another option, in case they were not liking anything at that present moment. That being, I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the new saddle shoe models that Alden has been producing for the likes of Unionmade (pictured above & below) as well as Blackbird (very bottom), which is a very popular boutique located in the neighborhood where I grew up, Ballard, Wa. And while I feel that Alden has done a good job of going relatively outside of the box with the likes of these color combo's, I am hoping that the next time I see this shoe, it might be in green or red or some other non-traditional color. We shall see...

Enjoy your Friday and check back soon for my trip to Paris posts....

-Justin, "The Shoe Snob"