The importance of having a solid footwear rotation is imperative to a good wardrobe. Having the right sneakers is often a make-or-break situation when building an outfit. That said, I’ll always argue for expanding that rotation into more than just sneakers. We’ve seen the resurgence of comfort-first, casual options like the Reebok Beatniks and Stussy co-signed Birkenstock Bostons. The Merrell Hydro Moc went from dad-core oddity to one of the go-to footwear options for the moodboard-savvy Instagram crowd paving the way for the runaway success of the YEEZY Foam Runner.
I love sandals, clogs, and mules as much as the next person, but if there’s one type of shoe that I always recommend for its versatility and ease of wear, it’s the classic loafer. While it can be daunting at first to switch from the casual comfort of sneakers to a hard-bottom shoe, they’re easier to wear than you think. And, of course, they’re way better looking than the majority of the safe, office-ready dress shoes we’ve all grown accustomed to. It’s the perfect shoe to slip on when it’s time to dress up or when you just want to give your grails a break.
Blackstock & Weber is largely responsible for my current affinity for loafers. Their ability to dress down their loafers is second to none. No longer did I feel like I could only wear them for special occasions, but truly as a part of my rotation right alongside my favorite sneakers. We had the opportunity to speak with Blackstock & Weber founder Chris Echevarria discussing his tenure at Stone Island, dressing Drake and Travis Scott, and of course, loafers.
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SoleSavy: Go ahead and introduce yourself to the people.
Chris: I’m Chris Echavarria, the founder and creative director of Blackstock & Weber, and we make the best fucking loafers in the world.
SoleSavy: I did some digging and saw that you initially started Blackstock & Weber back in 2017. How did you get started on that, and how did we get to where we are now?
Chris: So, just like anybody else, I had a bunch of jobs coming up. I was an agent for a footwear company. I had been working there for a while, and I got to the point where I asked if they’d be interested in making shoes for me. So I basically started there and started selling a bunch of shoes to see where the market was.
The thing about business and the thing about anything in life in general, right? You start with something, go out with it, figure out what’s good about it, what’s bad about it, and iterate. After a year of doing it, I had noticed that people would always have issues with sizing. Across categories, you’re a different size in everything. So in Chelsea boots, you are a different size from a Chukka Boot or Wingtip. So that was taking up a lot of time from the customer service end. And the other thing was, I was selling things that I didn’t like just to see if there was a demand for it.
So I kind of went more into the businessman sort of idea of what this was and didn’t stay true to who I was. I decided that I needed to move further into what it is that I liked.
Image via Blackstock & Weber
SoleSavy: So how did you land on focusing on just loafers?
Chris: I look back, and the loafer was something I could own because it was something that had radiated throughout my entire life. Going to church with my grandmother, she always had a pair of loafers that she would buy me, you know, I messed one up, and she’d buy another. That’s what I would wear to church.
When I was in middle school, I went to prep school, and my style evolved around a few things. Just growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, going to prep school, you know, working in those blazers and polos and slacks and things of that nature, so I wore loafers to school. So that was like, you know, something that I did as well. But when I left school, me and my friends would go skate.
Those are three completely different wardrobes. You have your suburbia, you have your prep school, and you have your skater. So all of those things combined just became what my style was. Just looking back at all of those things, what remained constant in my life was just this presence of loafers.
I knew that if I could take a silhouette that was already classic and tune it up a little bit and make it into something that I always wanted it to be, but it never was. I could then take that same silhouette and treat it like it was a sneaker. So treat the loafer almost as if it was an Air Force 1 and just play with different colors and materials.
We recently did a denim loafer. That’s something that has never been done before. It’s probably my favorite thing we’ve made. I don’t think it was a consumer favorite, but that shit was really pushing the envelope from a creative perspective. You can take that loafer, you can bleach it, you can do different things. I wanted to create this idea that you could be very utilitarian and DIY with a shoe that’s usually synonymous with just wearing it straight out of the box.
Image via Blackstock & Weber
SoleSavy: I know that you’ve spent some time at J. Crew and Stone Island before starting Blackstock & Weber. What were your biggest takeaways from being at those places?
Chris: A lot of major takeaways just from both of those places. You know, J crew was sort of like my first real gig. I had gotten a job at a J Crew store in New Jersey. I got a job just basically to help my mom out, you know? She had just gotten divorced. I wanted to get a job to help her out with bills around the house before I go off to college because I had just gotten into FIT to go for menswear design. So I was working the whole year.
And as I was getting ready to do that, they were opening concept shops in the city. I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out who was running those shops. J Crew had a program where you can transfer into any store as long as both managers sign off on it.
I ended up hunting down the manager or director of what ended up being the Liquor Store. And then, when I went to college, I had a job as soon as I touched down. As soon as I get there, I’m pretty much thrown in the trenches. At that time, Liquor Store was a hotbed for menswear in the city, and this is when it was peak #menswear and Tumblr days.
Image via Blackstock & Weber
Liquor Store was the epicenter of that shit in New York. Everybody from Japan, Italy, and everywhere else over the world. If you were into menswear, that’s the place that you had to go. So just from my time being there from working and just being around it, I met a lot of people. I developed a good relationship with Mickey Drexler, who is still a mentor of mine. We actually had breakfast last week. I think one of the main takeaways that came from that was that if you are willing to put yourself out there and you have ideas, people will surround you and support your growth.
So I started off at the store and then ended up helping out with partnerships, helping source where those collaborations were going to come from, participating in meetings at the office. People were just like trying to help me shine and bring me into conversations that, honestly, I felt like I had business being a part of. But the people that were around me saw a lot in me, and that was something that progressed into the Stone Island conversation.
Image via Blackstock & Weber
A good friend of mine that I’ve known my whole life invited me to work with him on this. So when he invited me in, he knew I had those experiences at J Crew that would fit right in with what we were going to do at Stone Island. And when we first got it, you know, nobody was wearing stone island. We couldn’t give it away. We’d have friends come by, and we’d tell them, “Yo, we have all this stuff in a box!’ And they’d only wear it because we were friends and they wanted to support us.
SoleSavy: It’s hard to imagine a world where you had to give Stone Island away. When would this have been?
Chris: *laughs* This was 2014, There were days that I would have on head to toe Stone, and it was just free shit. People would ask me what it was and when I told them Stone Island, they would just say, “Oh, whatever.”
One of the biggest takeaways was just being there; networking and being out was something that drove the culture forward. The more people we met, the more people that liked what we were doing. Just being able to see Travis Scott in his freaking infancy. The dude was doing shows for, like, 30 people. And now he does shows for seas of people. He would take us to the shows with him, we would put Stone Island on the backs of people. We put stuff on Drake. We’d drop it off to him personally. They would invite us to go to OVO Fest and do that. It was really interesting to see Stone Island sell for a billion dollars after doing that work. Being able to say that I had a part in that is really cool.
Overall, I just learned how to function in the streets and just move and shake. Get shit on the right people, work with people in new ways, and what you have to do to build a business.
So between both of those places, I learned so much to help me just hop into what happened to what Blackstock would end up being.
SoleSavy: Speaking of what Blackstock is now and what it was before, what are the biggest differences between this version of Blackstock & Weber from the initial launch?
Chris: It’s fucking cooler. *laughs* It’s a lot cooler. Nah, I think this version reflects me a bit more. I think a lot of businesses start this way because you just want to see if there’s any way that you can actually do it. The first version didn’t feel like it had as much soul just because of budgetary constraints. I didn’t have a few grand to spend on a photoshoot. I didn’t have money to shoot videos. The whole time it was me leveraging relationships that I’ve already had with people. Like my boy did the product photography. I was the person that was wearing the shoes in the photos. I didn’t have any models or anything like that. It was just me. And I was just trying to figure out if this is something that I really wanted to do long-term.
Image via Blackstock & Weber
And contrast that to now, where I’ve invested a little bit of money and more time. I’ve gotten a little bit more comfortable with associating myself with what the brand. Now the brand is a direct reflection of who I am and what my lifestyle looks like. It’s scary to do something like that, right? Because it’s essentially like you’re putting yourself out there in a way, and people can just be like, “Yo, this shit is whack.” And then it’s like, “damn, am I whack? No. I’m not.” And that’s why it’s dope now. It’s different in that way. It’s more attached to me, and it’s way more organic that way.
Nothing really comes from anything that isn’t directly related to me. I manage all the creative work. I style all the shoots. I am on set for all the shoots. I map out the shot list I put together. I sit down with our graphic designer, and I physically map out the lookbook. I do them all. But yeah, it’s, it’s just very close to home. This is the culmination of years of work.
SoleSavy: That definitely reflects not just in the product but what the brand is today. Have you thought about expanding to other silhouettes now that you’ve nailed the formula with the loafers?
Chris: Well, I’ve always seen Blackstock & Weber as a lifestyle brand. I started with footwear because it feels like something that people need. I felt like I could create a new narrative around the loafer, and I was successful in doing that. And when you’re successful in doing something, you think that you can do it with other things. I went to school for menswear design, and naturally, I want to exercise that muscle, right. So I think we’ll end up going into clothing, we’ll end up going into accessories and things of that nature. There’s a lot coming down the pipeline, and I don’t want to get too specific, but that’s where we’re headed for sure.
SoleSavy: Kith recently started selling the loafers online and in-store. How did that partnership come about?
Chris: The homies! That was years of just knowing people. I used to work for a brand called Filling Pieces, and I met Ronnie [Fieg] for the first time when I was working for them. And my boy Lance, who’s their head footwear buyer. We worked at Gant back in the day. When I started doing this, it all came just naturally, and it’s been a tremendous success. We’re going to end up expanding on what we’ve done so far.
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SoleSavy: I thought Kith was a really good fit because of the New York connection, first and foremost. What Kith does really well as a retailer is bringing together all the different facets of style and fashion. No matter what type of style you’re into, you’ll find something familiar at Kith, and at the same time, be introduced to something totally new.
Chris: Right, yeah, for sure. I think Kith is the new Barney’s, you know what I’m saying? I think it’s a good place for people who need some guidance to discover new brands. There’s not a lot of places like that anymore. They used to be way more when I was coming up. You’d go to Barney’s, you go to Odin, you can go to Oak and see new things. But a lot of those places are predominantly online now. It’s a good thing to have in the ecosystem alongside everything else that we do have here in New York and worldwide.
SoleSavy: Getting away from that for a second, what does your footwear rotation look like? Are you loaf’d up every day?
Chris: No, no. First of all, I will say this on record, everybody that has bought a pair of loafers from us, please do not wear them every day. You’re going to want to wear them every day, but like, you know, shoes, in general, need a day to breathe. If you do not allow them a day to breathe and dry out, they will start to deteriorate on you. If you want them to last a little bit longer, let it ride for a day.
But yeah, so I do have more loafers than most of my customers because I make them. So I can wear a pair of loafers every day because I can rotate in between styles, but yo. My favorite sneaker of all time is the New Balance 996, which I’m wearing right now. I’ll beat every pair to shit. They’re a little harder to find because New Balance stopped making them for a while, but I have maybe six pairs on reserve. That’s MY sneaker. There are some days that I’ll try to wear other stuff, but like, you know, mostly I’ll slip into a 996, a loafer, or some Birkenstocks. But that’s basically the rotation.
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SoleSavy: So I’m a pretty big proponent for expanding people’s footwear rotation outside of sneakers because, in a way, having variety has made me appreciate sneakers that much more. How would you convince someone to step outside the box and start dabbling other pieces of footwear?
Chris: How do I convince people to do some shit that that is right? *laughs* I’m not here to ‘convince’ anybody. I lead by example. So the lookbook is a good way to get people to understand how you can wear this with a sense of versatility. This is something that I learned at J. Crew. You can pretty much make whatever it is, the fuck you want. But you then have the job of telling the story as to why it’s cool and how it looks cool, and what you have to wear around it or have around it to make it cool. As long as you can do that, then you’ve got something. If you can’t tell the story and you have a great product, it doesn’t make sense. If you don’t have a great product and you can tell a story, it can only go so far. The two go hand in hand. So I think it’s all about just continuing to lead by example.
Like you wearing your loafers is going to influence your homie and say, “Oh, he’s not wearing sneakers today. What does he have on? Let me check those out”. And then he’s going to be on my site or Virgil’s site at Vinny’s, and he’s going to be trying to buy a pair of loafers too, you know? So lead by example. That’s the best way to do anything. Lead by example, motherfuckers will pick it up, and if they don’t, they’ll just get left behind.
I’m glad to have helped usher in a new generation of loafers men. It feels good to be able to walk out of the house and go out and, you know, see other people wearing loafers and knowing that I had a hand in that.
SoleSavy: What else can we look forward to from Blackstock & Weber for the rest of the year?
Chris: More fucking greatness. That’s it. Greatness. There’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing that I can’t even talk about. This is the part of the interview where everybody’s like, “Just keep watching, just keep watching, stay tuned.” I’m blessed to be in this position. I thank people like you and everybody that buys my shoes. Thank you, it’s amazing.
I just hope that as we continue to do stuff and release product, that we don’t let you down. It’s important for me to continue to get my voice out there and continue to do things that I think are creatively dope.
I just hope that we continue to reach people like yourself and people who continue to buy shoes with us week after week. I’m building more of a community of homies than anything, people that just all think alike and want the same things.
So as we continue to build out, it’s all going to be things that I like and feel like other people that buy the loafers would like as well.
