While most Americans step into Manolos and Nikes that were stitched together thousands of miles away, J&A Shoe Co. cranks out 50,000 pairs of heels, wedges and thongs every month at a factory 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
Gardena-based J&A is a part of a dying breed of shoemakers that manufactures all its products domestically, battling formidable competition from corporations that make shoes overseas for pennies a pair.
"Being a domestic manufacturer, one of the biggest challenges is competing with people who don't have the same regulations that we have here," President Leah Kats Bizoumis said. "They don't have a minimum wage and restrictions that we have. . . . In America, you work your eight hours a day and go home. In China, that's not necessarily true."
But the family-owned business of 150 employees has managed to survive for nearly three decades because of its customer service and accessibility, Bizoumis said. The 3,000 accounts J&A maintains with independent stores across the nation are the product of long-term relationships with loyal customers.
"The most gratifying thing our customers have with our company is they can call us and speak directly to me," she said. "If they have a question or issue, it's resolved right away. It doesn't go back and forth by mail."
Bizoumis said her family's decades-long experience with shoe-making also gives J&A a leg up. Her Greek grandfather Stellios Katsiferes ran a made-to-order shoe shop in Athens from the 1930s through the '50s, and her father, Alex Kats -- who founded J&A in 1981 -- would bring home shoe designs to teach his daughter about the business from the ground up.
"These days, a lot of people are manufacturing shoes who don't have shoe experience, who don't understand the product," she said.
Growing up around shoe-making has led Bizoumis to be able to anticipate problems in a shoe's design and fix them before sending the product out to stores.
Bizoumis oversees the creation of every pair of shoes, drawing inspiration from earrings, belts and color schemes in window displays and then walking her ideas down the hall to the sample room where patternmakers bring designs to life with swatches of patents and embossed leathers as well as suedes.
Around the corner, the 50,000-square-foot factory buzzes with the whir of sewing machines and the clatter of metal tools as employees sew rhinestones to leather pieces and braid shoe straps by hand.
