What Does it Cost to Make a Shoe?
It’s true of almost everything you buy. Someone, somewhere, will say that you got taken advantage of because they claim the materials only cost a few cents, and everything else was just pure profit for the company. Of course, if that were true, everyone and their mother would be a shoemaker. So, if doesn’t cost pennies, what does it cost to make a shoe or boot?
In an effort to keep from boiling the ocean, here I’ll focus on stitched footwear. Keep an eye out for a follow up on sneakers later – the differences are actually pretty interesting.
Materials
It makes sense to start with the materials that go into making the shoe, as this is what is normally quoted by the friend who knows everything. Let’s take a look at each part of the shoe, and see how it stacks up. One note: while it’s true that the bigger brands are able to get discounts on these materials by buying in bulk, it isn’t as much as you would think.
Upper
On average, a pair of stitched shoes or loafers will take around 3 or 4 square feet of leather. If you’re looking to make a boot, add on another 2 feet. Much of this will remain as scrap. You might be able to get some coasters or a watch strap out of it, but if your intention is shoe making, that is just waste.
This is one area where there is a huge range, almost more than any other part of the shoe. If you just want a material that used breath and to sit in a field and you don’t care what split you get, leather can be as cheap as around $4 per foot. Of course, that leather isn’t worth attaching a stitched sole to. Let’s look at probably the most famous leather maker in footwear: Horween.

The prices here are a bit more stable. While the exact price per foot will depend on the size of the side and the weight of the leather. It’s safe to assume Chromexcel will run you about $13.05 a foot. Essex and Dublin are both about $14.73 a foot. Normal Shell Cordovan is around $41.25 a square foot. If you want something in a unique color, costs go up from there.
Feel free to check out other costs here: https://www.thetanneryrow.com/shop-leather
Going with suede or a less-well-known-but-still-reputable brand will bring the cost down to around $9 dollars. Then again, how many pairs of shoes have you bought simply because you saw that Horween logo?

The leather on an upper doesn’t stop there. For most high-end boots or shoes, they are going to be fully lined. This can result in another 3 feet of leather for a pair of shoes. 4 for a pair of boots. This leather is generally much thinner, and the price will reflect that. You’ll generally see something like 2/3 oz kipskin calf, at around $7.50 a square foot, or deerskin, which is just slightly less at around $7.25 per square foot.
To recap, just for the leather on the upper, a mid-tier lined shoe will run around $75 dollars. For a shell cordovan boot, this could balloon all the way to just over $300 or more.
Midsole
Here things can change quite a bit based on shoe construction. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll look at a normal goodyear welted shoes, but know that this price could go up or down a bit based on construction. For more information on how different styles are made, check out our series on shoe construction here.
Starting from the upper, the first thing you’ll need is a midsole layer. In general, this is going to be either cork, leather, or both. For leather, it’s fairly easy to make the calculation. A leather midsole runs around $15 for a quality pair, and around $30 for a double thick pair. There are more affordable alternatives, ranging from Alibaba “leather” to Vibram rubber, but it’s rare that a stitched shoe would come with these.

Cork is much harder to price. The cork itself is cheap, less than a dollar per pair. However, the machines used to cut up at heat the cork are thousands of dollars. For a large brand such as Allen Edmonds or Alden this will result in significant savings over years, however even mid-sized brands often avoid using this material due to these costs. To split the difference, I’ll call the cost even with the leather midsole.
A shank is another cost that needs to be considered. It is true that some of the major footwear brands do not include one, however in most the comfort of a shoe and it’s durability are significantly increased with the inclusion of a shank. Metal shanks cost approximately $5 for a pair, with wooden shanks running around half that.
All in all, for a goodyear welted pair of shoes, expect to add $15 for the midsole, ticking up to $30 for a thicker boot.
Welt
This is one area where it’s really easy to opt for an affordable option, and we’ve seen some really well known and otherwise well-respected brands use cheaper leather here. For these, the welt generally costs around $10 per shoe.

Again, you can go even cheaper using Alibaba – some even use plastic or canvas welts – but $10 is the “cheap” side of what you’d actually want to use. Alternatively, some higher end storm welts can run more than $30 or 40 dollars per shoe, but you’re unlikely to find this on an average pair.
This one is pretty easy, $10 dollars for a shoe or boot.
Outsole
Having looked at the upper and midsole, the last major part of the shoe is the outsole. Here, there are a lot of options, and many of them could be the “right” one based on what you’re looking to accomplish with the shoe. Knowing that, rather than pointing out the higher and lower ends, I’ll include a few options.
The most classic, the leather outsole, typically uses a generic brand. These run around $20 dollars per sole. If you’re looking to get something higher end, Joh Redenbach was well known, but would have more than doubled your price to around $50 to 60 per sole.
When it comes to rubber soles, two classics stand out: the Dainite studded sole, that the Itshide Commando sole. Both of these can be found for around $25 to 30 dollars. That being said, it’s worth noting that it’s actually pretty difficult to source these without a business account. Neither brand will sell directly to a consumer, and if you’re looking to pick up an individual pair prices could easily double.

No matter which sole you buy, you’ll need to add on a heel. These are fairly cheap overall, with the final cost depending on how closely you want to match the rest of the sole. Generally they run around $5 to $10.
For the outsole, the costs for materials alone range from around $20 dollars to $70 or more.
Extras
A shoe is more than just the leather and rubber that goes into it. A shoe can have yards of specialized thread, eyelets, hooks, nails, canvas, and more. Further, shoes will typically have stiffeners at the toe box and heel counter. Finally, shoes are often given a once over with polish or conditioner before they leave the factory.
All of these extras are fairly inexpensive, but combined add up to another $5 to $10 dollars in costs.
Assembly
Labor
The materials above don’t magically come together on their own. While the claim that shoemakers make that each shoe takes weeks of labor is laughable (check out shoegazing’s article about it here), each shoe does require about an hour of labor once the parts above are assembled. Give another 30 minutes of prep time for the above, a few minutes of quality control at the end, and a bit of dead time built in, 2 hours of labor per shoe is likely a good approximation.

But what does 2 hours actually mean when it comes to cost? Well, it means different things depending on where the shoe is made. In the U.S., the average cost of skilled labor in a factory worked was around $38 dollars an hour. This is including benefits and payroll taxes. In Spain, another hotbed of shoe manufacturing, wages are closer to $22 dollars an hour, including benefits and payroll taxes. China is a bit harder to find data on, but after a significant increase in wages over the last decade it seems like $5.51 is a good approximation.
The two hours to put together a shoe can therefore mean a lot of different things, with an expectation of around $76 dollars in labor for a U.S.-made shoe, down to around $11.02 for a Chinese-made shoe.
Non-Labor
To make a shoe today, a factory worker is unable to do much without their tools. These range from the fairly simple wooden or plastic lasts, which are fairly affordable overall, to a goodyear welting or blake stitching machine, that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s hard to place a cost per shoe on these machines, but for an individual these costs are nearly insurmountable.
Finally, these machines all need a place to live. A shoe factory can run from small to fairly large, but any location will cost thousands a month in rent/upkeep.
It would be impossible to figure out how much each of these adds to the cost of the shoe that you buy. We will leave them off the final cost for that reason, however keep in mind any total will likely end up much higher due to these costs.
Consumer Experience
Having a shoe sitting on your factory floor does your new potential shoe empire no good. You need to actually sell the shoes to a person, and then give them the product. For this article, I’ll focus on online-only locations, but brick and mortar stores will increase the costs exponentially.
First you need to have a website where people can actually buy something. Websites themselves are fairly cheap to buy but this will still work out to well over $300 a year in hosting for a mid-sized company. You’ll also want someone to built the website itself. Like the machines, it would be impossible to figure out each possibility on how this impacts costs, but these are expenditures these companies make.
Next, you need to get people to your website. Hopefully you’ll be doing that through word of mouth, but in reality you’ll need to advertise. This will change based on strategy, but to give an idea, the cost-per-click on Instagram is around $3.00 for apparel. A good click-to-conversion rate for Instagram is around 15%. In other words, if you rely on Instagram advertising, you can expect to pay around $20 on ads for every shoe you sell.
There are other options such as google ads, sponsorships, or giving pairs to people for review (see my email on the side bar if you’re interested…), but in general the prices are about the same.
Finally, the shoes need to get to the buyer. Shipping rates will change based on the buyer, but after clicking around on a UPS.com business account, $15 is around average. Of course, a small percentage of your buyers will return their shoes. When that happens businesses typically need to eat shipping both ways, but that is hard to count on a single pair of shoes.
Total
Let’s recap the costs from the sections above:
Materials: $120 to 415
- Upper: $75 to 300
- Midsole: $15 to 30
- Welt: $10
- Outsole: $20 to 70
- Extras: $5 to 10
Assembly: $11 to $76
- Labor: $11 to $76
- Factory/Machinery: Uncounted
Consumer Experience: $35
- Advertising: $20
- Shipping: $15
Add these up, and you get a grand total of an average stitched shoe falling between $166 and $526, just to make the shoe and sell it to the customer. As a reminder, this does not cover any of the machinery, website or physical store front, returns, or profit for the company.
What does this all mean? It’s pretty easy to see where the pricing of shoes come from. While I obviously don’t have access to Alden’s books, I did some back of the napkin math on the Chromexcel Alden Indy’s I own and found that the costs above add up to around $300 dollars. Counting in all the costs not mentioned here, the 25-50% cut retailers usually take out, and the ability to find them on sale or as seconds for less than $500 shipped, that seems like a pretty good deal overall.
I’d be interested to hear what you think. Which shoe brands offer great value? Which ones don’t? Let me know in the comments below.
I came across your article while fact checking some things my current employer has mentioned to myself and other fellow coworkers when questioned about raises, since the company i work for is now one of the lowest paying factories in my area, the only other factory closes in a month so, ours is soon to become THE LOWEST paying job. I’ve been in the manufacturing field for a little over 10 years now, and for the majority of that 10 it has been for the same company, in the same town, as a shoe maker. Throughout the years the company had several different contracts as well as CEOs, but for the past 5years it has been mainly military style dress shoes we produce. So I knew exactly what you were talking about as far as shanking, Goodyear welt, and especially all the extras & non labor tools you mentioned.
After reading your article, I’m curious to know where you got your data for the labor part of this article for skilled labor workers in the US. You stated that an average skilled US employee makes $38/hour in this line of work, and I understand that location among other things play a factor into those wages, but I’d really like to know what part of the US they make that to do the very thing I’ve been doing for 10 of the 3 decades of been alive, because as it stands today you’d have to take that roughly a third of that $38 to get the amount i make an hour. With an average work week being 40-45 hours a week for myself and the other employess & despite having 10+ years worth of experience, I don’t consider myself as skilled as some of my coworkers who’ve been there over 20 or more years now and only make about 4 or 5 dollars more than I do.
Hey –
The 38 dollars an hour comes from the U.S. Government’s BLM statistics. I should note, that 38 dollars is the cost to the manufacturer, not the pay rate. It includes things like the employer’s share of payroll taxes, health insurance costs, unemployment insurance premiums, workers comp, etc. According to the US Government’s SBA, these extra fees add around 25 to 40% on top of a workers hourly rate. In other words, a 38 dollar labor cost works out to about 26.6 dollars an hour in income for the employee.
Also, as you point out, it’s a national statistic, and takes into account multiple industries and multiple locations. For example in Maine, one of the primary locations for footwear assembly in the US, the average income for someone in manufacturing is going to be lower than the national average – around 21 dollars an hour according to BLM’s statistics. On the other end of the spectrum, you have shoe factories located within the boundaries of New York City or Los Angeles, where the rate is going to be above the national average. Of course, the average home in Lewiston, Maine is around 20% of the average home price in Los Angeles, California.
I hope this is helpful and you gather information!
Thank you for the excellent and detailed article.
I’d like to own a shoe manufacturing company here in the United States but the numbers you wrote are scaring me.
How would I make a profit?
Must I go to China? 😕😕😕
Hey June –
Definitely some scary numbers out there, and these were before the recent inflation! I’ve been meaning to redo this article, but have been waiting for inflation to cool a bit.
There are a lot of great companies out there who manage to make it work, though – Oak Street Bootmakers, Quoddy, Nick’s, White’s, Rancourt, and more. However, creating a manufacturing business gets pretty far out of my background. If you do get something started, be sure to shoot me an email. I’d love to hear more about it, and help get the word out about a new brand.
Thanks for the informative article. I’m currently trying to price a pair of boots for an apparel company for my marketing class and these high prices are a little concerning. Are these costs estimates of buying one unit, or buying in bulk? If not bulk, what discount would you estimate if buying everything at wholesale price?
Hey Keenan –
These are cost estimates for a small manufacturer, however the pricing used is out of date after the recent inflation and actually under estimate the cost of making boots in 2023 (if you are pricing out, I would use the information in the links).
Discounts are available when you buy in bulk, but you would need to order a significant amount to see those discounts. Believe it or not, the small manufacturers order leather the same way you or I would – going on Tannery row, OA leather supply, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t give a more complete answer on discounts for buying in bulk as any brand large enough to order directly from the tannery wouldn’t be sharing that information publicly. That being said, the margins on the leather are not that high, so I wouldn’t expect the discount to be all that significant.
Very detailed and through, thank you for this article! However, the price for leather and the margin of the retailer do not seem accurate. I can tell you from several years of experience in shoes and wholesale in other fashion items that:
1. The cost of leather is way below the numbers in your calculations,
2. The margin for retailers are way higher. The price the customer pays the retailer will be at least x2 of what the retailer has bought the shoes for, otherwise they can’t really cover their costs. The lowest margin is for sneakers, and even that is x2. For luxury ladies shoes, that margin will go up considerably. So if this company is spending $300 on making these shoes, you being able to buy them from a third party retailer at $500 is just not possible. The difference here comes from the production cost miscalculated I believe.
Hey Nida –
Thanks for the comment. As I’ve mentioned above, I definitely need to update this with more accurate numbers though I would be interested if you could share a bit more based on your experience. The leather numbers were given to me from a small bootmaking brand (who asked not to be shared, though readers on this site would recognize the name). They are likely in the hundreds of sq feet a year as compared to someone like Allen Edmonds who are in the millions of sq feet. As much as I tried, I wasn’t able to get what the price would from a brand like Horween if you were buying by the 100’s of hides a shipment. I should say, this was focused on higher end brands as opposed to the more main-line sneakers (Nike, New Balance, Adidas, etc.). The leather used on those is cheaper by an order of magnitude, even if bought directly.
On the second, I believe there might be a misunderstanding between us. The article references a sale price for a pair of Indys at $500, but that was meant to be a reference to discounts you are able to get from MSRP (which was $599 at time of writing, around that 50% you mention, but is now closer to $700 for chromexcel). For better or worse, almost every brand is now going online only DTC as well (or are sold through websites that have the product dropshipped), and are being priced accordingly. Off the top of my head, the only MiUSA brands I can think of that have any real presence in stores are Alden, Red Wing, and Allen Edmonds.