Mephisto is an old brand. And that’s not just because the company is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year—the French brand’s sneakers just look old. They’re not aged or distressed. Rather, Mephisto’s line of luxury walking shoes look like something your grandfather or high school geography teacher would wear. Mephisto’s sneakers, like the Match and the Rainbow, are mostly done up in brown leather. If not, they’re black or white. And they retail for between $300 to $400.
It’s this aspirational aura that made Mephisto a coveted shoe over the years. That and the brand’s consistency. The shoes have become a mainstay in neighborhoods like New York City’s Upper East Side, where Mephisto’s retail operations in the city are located. But it’s also slowly become a point of curiosity for adventurous footwear aficionados.
The shoes were popular in years past with football casuals in the UK and stocked at retailers like Manchester’s Oi Polloi. Mephisto has slowly started to come out of its comfort zone. The brand has done collaborations with the likes of Concepts and Patta, the former cheekily referencing the white Apple trainers that have become a part of sneaker and pop culture lore.
Mephisto’s history goes back to 1965, when Martin Michaeli, who had spent time in New England with shoe makers, wanted to create a footwear brand.
According to an old blog site from the brand, Michaeli found the name Mephisto because: ”He needed to find a name that was not yet registered internationally. From the beginning, he wanted to sell his shoes—not only in France—but worldwide, so he looked for a name that could be pronounced the same way in all languages.”
The brand’s US CEO, Rusty Hall, denies that Mephisto’s name or logo, an M with beady eyes, has any connection to Mephistopheles, a demon of German folklore. The blog’s FAQ section contradicts that claim, though.
“After having searched for a name in several books, [Michaeli] began reading Faust from Goethe,” the old company blog reads. “He immediately liked the name of the character, Mephisto. The name was not only un-registered but can be pronounced easily in all languages.”
All that aside, Mephisto looks to be having a moment. The brand recently collaborated with Procell, New York’s curator of yesteryear’s cool. The brand has had profiles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and seems to be breaking out. Mephisto’s brown leather sneakers aren’t too dissimilar from Adidas’ line of leisure shoes that have been popularized (although still polarizing in their own regard) by the Adidas SPZL line.
So will Mephisto be big in 2025 and beyond? If it does, cool. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter to the brand. It’ll keep on marching on, doing what it’s always done: making premium sneakers for a premium lifestyle.
I had the opportunity to talk to the brand’s US CEO Rusty Hall. Below is the conversation.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
The country’s not in the best financial spot at this moment, hopefully things are on the uptick, but what’s it like being at a brand that’s not a true luxury brand in the sense of Gucci or things like that, but a highly valued, more expensive premium footwear brand through economic times?
What I’ve found is it’s very sustainable, and what happens is, in the couture designer brand, those become somewhat brands that will have those ups and downs, whether if it’s because of fashion, or pricing, or whatever. What we found with Mephisto, it’s we have a very loyal audience, extremely loyal men’s audience. And the customer sees the product as a quality base. It’s like buying land: it’s something that will appreciate over time, but certainly it won’t lose its value like a car if we drive it off a lot, either.
It doesn’t have the peaks and valleys that a lot of fashion will have, but it also doesn’t have those huge upsides, but also doesn’t have the huge downside. So it’s very consistent. By controlling our own production, you don’t have those times where it could be a quality issue because you changed factories, and changed country of origins, or things like that. So we’ve been very steady with being a European-based company, production, sourcing.
I was just looking at the name of the brand. Mephisto, it’s obviously named after a demon. I don’t really view that as something that’s tied to luxury walking shoes. So is there any insight into how that actually came about?
So that’s the misnomer of everything, that is born in the brand. The owner and the founder of the brand, Martin Michaeli, who is still very active in the business today, really was a huge proponent of brand building. Back in the day, he actually trained here in the US in his early years, with companies out of Maine, and learned his trade there, and went back, and was looking for a brand, or a name that he could pronounce really in just about every language. And he really came up with Mephisto, not from the demon side of it, but more from the ability to base the brand around. He felt like he had a global vision for the brand, so something that could be pronounced, and known throughout the globe side of it. Mephistopheles always comes into play, but it’s not from the demon side of it, it’s more from his knowledge of the European side.
Because I thought looking at it, it was like the M kind of looks like a demon with the eyes on it.
Fair. Yeah, well, not much more I can say about that. It’s never been part of that, it’s more from an iconic side, so obviously you remember it.
I know that one of the things the brand takes pride in is the creation of the leisure shoe. Is there any insight you can give into that?
More from a walking standpoint, obviously born out of Europe. Here in the US, everything’s concrete, right? So born out of Europe, until the, really, early ’70s, late ’60s, everything was leather sole, slab sole, dress-shoe oriented. Casual shoes weren’t even a thing.
But Mr. Michaeli really kind of looked at that, and said, “How are people going to become more and more transient, more and more travel-oriented?” And he felt like building the best walking product that can circumnavigate cobblestones, to bricks, to steps, to whatever, all over Europe, and that’s really where the comfort side of it came. Comfort became a tagline back in the late ’70s. But it was really driven from the need, from a consumer base need of circumnavigating all the different terrains in Europe.
One of the things I think is interesting about the brand is that, at least in New York City, when you look at it, a lot of companies want to go into SoHo, or go into Lower Manhattan, but the majority of the stores are all Upper East Side, rather than huge shopping districts. Was there any insight into why the choice for that?
Yeah, absolutely. When we first opened our first store on Third Avenue, I mean, the intention was: our consumer is affluent, but they’re transient. They have homes on the East Side, they have homes in Colorado, they have homes in Florida, they have homes in Arizona, whatever. This goes back 15, 20 years where the internet was not as prevalent, but they’re used to shopping close to their homes, close to their needs, and neighborhood shops.
Our original Mephisto store was located in Aspen. We started as a small shop in Aspen because of the travel, and our consumer was going to shop where they see us. So I think the Upper East Side was a slam dunk for us. We obviously had some good partnerships already on the West Side. SoHo is very transient in nature, and it’s certainly appealing to us. But for the normal Mephisto consumer, we really felt like it was ideal to be closer to them. We have three stores on the East Side, and they’re all within a mile of each other, a mile and a half of each other. But as you know, New York, that could be two million people.
It feels like you guys kind of got the designs right at first, and didn’t really change much and kept the design language pretty similar. What was the choice or the reasoning behind that?
Consistency. Quality. We still make all of our shoes out of our own factories there in Sarrebourg, France, and in Portugal. As you probably know, if you watch the shoe business, or watch the industry, we’ve lost a lot of those artisans that we have always had with handmade product. So consistency and design really does two things for us, it gives our consumer the security of knowing the product and understanding the evolution of the product. It’s not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary. We have people in our factories that have been with our factories for 50 years that are still making shoes. And because of the process, we don’t get too far away from our DNA of the brand.
So just to try to explain to someone, what makes a Mephisto shoe a $300, $400 sneaker?
Basically the components we put into it, the time we put into the product of the components, the design, the hand stitching. We still have over 60 processes to making every pair of shoes that we do. It’s not automated, it’s not a cookie-cutter. We build our soft air construction into every footbed that we make, whether it’s designed into the shoe. So I think that Mephisto, the quality of the shoe is consistent with the quality that you could have found in the shoe 20 years ago, where I don’t think you can say that with a lot of other brands that share that consistency.
I know you say consistency and not following trends, but obviously you’ve done a limited number of collaborations over the years. You’ve done shoes with Concepts, that homage the Apple one. They were kind of tricky about that one, because you couldn’t really say that it’s Apple, but Is there a push for the company to get into that limited-edition sneaker space.
Well, we’re definitely doing more and more collaborations. We just finished one this last week with Procell. And again, touching on the DNA of the brand, as well as the authentic part of Procell. So they deal with a lot of brands where that’s their business, they’re looking for that DNA, and authentic brands, whether it be footwear, or clothing, or hats, or whatever.So we really look at collaborations as a means to do two things for us. One, it does expose the brand to a different client base, or customer base, that has appreciation for quality, has an appreciation for authentic vintage DNA. And then the other piece of that is, it pushes our side to innovate new materials, look at what new materials can bring to the brand, new materials, new design techniques, new constructions to some degree, although we really kind of focus on our four original constructions. But that’s what the collaborations do. And we had two or three working… Probably over the last five years, six years, we’ve had two or three working every year that we probably come out with. We may come to fruition with one to two of those rather than all three. And because we want to make sure it’s the right partner as well. But Concepts was a great one. Obviously several years ago we did one with Alex Dymond out at Nordstrom. Procell.
So we’re excited by the interest in the brand, and we think a lot of that’s caused by the collaborations that we’re doing, and also obviously a lot of the outward buzz going around the brand now. But we always look at collaborations as an opportunity. The brand has never been about chasing the fashion side of it, it’s more, how do we expand our knowledge base.
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