The Pursuit of Making Shoes Taking Myriad Shapes

Can the intricate winding streets of an Indian metropolis carve the career of an explorer? How can a city that has been the focus of the satirical outpourings of numerous authors become the fancy of an archetypal small-townie? The quest for the answers to these questions can be cut short if one turns his or her attention to the journey of Pooja Thakur, CEO, Praefinio Footwear. 

It was a little, brightly-coloured radio in a colourful cover that caught my attention as I sat next to Pooja, elegantly perched on a couch in her home in an army cantonment, away from the cacophony of the metropolis. The second thing that caught my attention was a shell, which she told me she had collected from a beach long ago. I concluded my observation with the realisation that hoarding antiques was one of her favourite leisure activities. As we sat discussing the invaluable endnotes and the creative dexterity of Chiragh-e-Dair (The Lamp of the Temple), one of Ghalib’s long epochal poems, she sipped her tea thoughtfully and plunged into a reverie, going back in time to 2016, when she began her journey of designing shoes with just two shoe-makers.
Without a degree in footwear designing to fall back upon, the only thing she had to go by was the numerous pairs of shoes she had bought as part of her preliminary research, to dissect and observe their anatomy. Adding to her woes was the distance that she had to cover frequently between wherever her husband was stationed to her prospective factory. Her travails eventually paid off when she established a manufacturing unit in Delhi with twenty workers that produced footwear for almost all major e-commerce portals for children such as hopscotch.com, firstcry, and babycouture.

Her first brand was a sole-less shoe for infants called Bootie Pie. “Kids usually absorb the world through images. Hence, I wanted to make something that would engage and hold  kids’ attention while being affordable for their parents.” She recalled how as a child, all she did was drawing and painting. “I vividly recall my favourite characters from stories such as Peter Pan, Matilda, Heidi, and The Secret Garden only through their caricatured imagery. I aspire to bring this unique imaginative quality of children and its delicate nature into the entire range of my footwear.” She confesses that she felt deterred on several occasions when she had to wander about alone late on dark winter nights to collect sampling material for shoes from unsafe, ghetto-like localities, while her own home in a distant cantonment waited for her lifelessly. Today, as she launches a new brand of footwear called Pabla for kids, all these recollections bring a smile to her face.
Pooja’s road to being an established children’s shoe manufacturer now begins with sketching random designs, synchroninsing her idea of a pair of shoes with that of a shoe-maker, extending to copy-writing taglines for her brands and attending unplanned meetings with buyers. She confides with a child-like smile, “My grocery lists at home often end up becoming my idea journals for my shoe designs.” 

Apart from her work and the passion of collecting antiques, painting still occupies most of Pooja’s leisure time. This was evident from her paintings ranging from scenes at a fish market in a coastal town to the profound face of Buddha in meditation that adorn the walls of her home. She adds, “I am a quintessential small-townie and love accumulating designs and colours from small markets, preserving pickle and papad recipes inherited from mothers and cooking at home. Art to me dwells in the colourful paraphernalia of the small towns and villages of our country.” Does she have any favourite small-town markets? “Difficult to choose one, but I like Aminabad in Lucknow, Kinari Bazaar in Agra, Lakkar Bazaar in Shimla and the likes,” she adds quickly. 

She reverts to being her meditative self, emphasising that the privileged section of society should realise the significance of giving back to the economically weaker sections. Earlier, her efforts were confined to the welfare of her workforce, but now she has decided to focus them on financing the education of as many girl children as possible. I tried to delve into further details, but she was reluctant to reply because of her belief that an act of kindness should always be silent. Elaborating a little, however, she said, “I draw my inner strength from my hard-working and dedicated team who work non-stop during tough phases of production. To honour their perseverance, I started a salary system of payment in my unit because there is usually no salary system for the unorganised workforce in our country.”

And who or what is the inspiration behind her zen-like attitude while she handles the crazy commotion of the production floor and the demands of being an army wife? This has always been her father and her husband, she replies-- while the former always believed in her dreams and ideas of doing good for others, the latter stood by her unfailingly through all the ups and downs, every peak and trough, of her journey. 

“Our duties transcend us and develop a heightened awareness about our capabilities”, she concludes like a Tao monk.  

About the Author

Gunjan Joshi is a Delhi-based editor of a monthly, a part-time columnist, and an art and literature critic. An ardent lover of books and nature in general (and the Himalayas, in particular),  she admires classics in every form.  Bliss for her is psithurism emanating from old Deodar trees, reading a fine literary journal in a quaint village in coniferous surroundings and a display of archaic military chivalry.

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