Tuomi Kenkä - Ladies shoes with a passion

About a month ago I visited another finnish ladies shoe factory: Tuomi Kenkä. It's located near the shoemaking institute I go to, which was more than convenient.

Tuomi-Kenkä Ky started it's business way back in 1965 and was formed by Mr. Kullervo and Mrs. Kirsti Tuomisaari. They were first making ski boots and women's boots. From the 70's onward their line consisted mainly of women's shoes, and have carried their business that way to date.
Sadly, their production is now minimal, and they only do very small patches to special shops, hoping to sell their factory.

 Lucky for me, Mr. Tuomisaari is generous with his time and we met with him and Mrs. Tuomisaari at their factory, hoping to find some nice leathers to buy for myself.

Mr. Kullervo Tuomisaari, the owner of the factory, standing besides the hundreds and hundreds of leathers of all colours.
He was luckily patient, when I took my time in the leather heaven abyss :)

And one could find almost ANY colour from here. Mr. Tuomisaari is known to have always purchased quality leather, and I could see that from his storage. Most of the leathers were about 15 -20 square-feet in size, so that means they were box calf sized, if I'm correct.

Mr. Tuomisaari gave me a full tour through his factory. Here's the clicker's station. Clicker = upper cutter in shoemaking slang.

Boxing station of somesort. You can see the actual manufacturing line in the background.

A couple of models were still sitting in the office.

And I did buy a few skins of leather :) Sadly I've no images of them now, I'll post them later. Anyways, after about four hours I bought two pairs of lasts and a nice bundle of leather, had seen a bunch of cool machines and was eager for some coffee.
It was time to go back to school:

The rest of the days I was pretty much wrestling with this: The black knee high boots I've introduced earlier, have had some problems at the fitting, and I was trying to solve them under tutoring. The result was about 7 prototypes, and a decision to make them alltogether differently ;)

My battlefield of study..

So, anyone wanting to buy a shoefactory, or machines, or visit to buy some leathers, please contact Tuomi Kenkä: +358 2 572 2022.

Btw, this post was not sponsored ;)