Clinch ⭐ Top pick

Minoru Matsuura grew up between a seamstress mother and an architect father, immersed in precision and creativity. After an industrial engineering degree, he left factory work at 25 to become a cobbler. In 2007, he opened Brass in Tokyo, specializing in hopeless repair cases. Five years deconstructing vintage footwear taught him what modern manufacturing lost in the name of efficiency. In 2012, he created Clinch. Every detail is designed with the wearer's long-term experience in mind.

Clinch's story begins in a repair shop. In 2007, Minoru Matsuura opened Brass in the Setagaya district, west of Tokyo. The brand does not create anything, it resuscitates. Goodyear welt shoes that other shoemakers consider irrecoverable arrive at his workbench: torn welts, destroyed insoles, cracked leather. Matsuura dismantles them, analyzes them, rebuilds them. He goes so far as to refit his clients' shoes on his own lasts, giving them a second life with a transformed silhouette.

Matsuura's journey is not that of a classic shoemaker. Her mother was a seamstress, her father an architect. A graduate in industrial engineering, he first worked in a factory before leaving everything at the age of 25 to become a shoemaker for another craftsman. Five years of intensive repair teach him what the manuals don't say: how shoes age, where they break, what ancient techniques better protected the foot.

In 2012, with this intimate knowledge of shoes through deconstruction, Matsuura created his first pair of boots, a model with a laced toe. Then comes a boot engineer. The Clinch brand was born, its name borrowed from the shoemaker's gesture when he drives the nails through the leather and they curve over the steel plate of the last, forming a hook which locks the assembly.

Today, Matsuura and four artisans work between two small Tokyo workshops, alternating between manufacturing and repair. Production never exceeds 800 to 1000 pairs per year. The leathers, mainly vegetable horsebutt, are hand selected by Matsuura for their ability to form a natural "roll" on the upper. The shapes are sculpted by him. The Clinch engineer boots, in particular, are considered among the most beautiful in the world by collectors. Standard & Strange, in Oakland, is one of the few dealers outside of Japan.