About · established 2022 · Manchester
Two people
and a unit.
Apogee started because a friend of ours who buys for a chain kept telling us about pallets going to landfill. Not damaged stock — cancelled orders, over-runs, the wrong colourway for a market. We rented a unit on Tariff Street, bought the first pallet on a credit card, and opened on a Thursday because that was when the shelving arrived.
The argument
An outlet is only worth anything if you believe the box.
There is nothing clever about selling shoes below retail. Anybody can put a red sticker on a shelf. The difficulty is convincing somebody who knows what a pair should cost that the reason it is cheap is boring — a cancelled order, a dead colourway, a warehouse that needed the space — and not that it came out of a container in Guangzhou.
So we do the dull thing. Every pair arrives on a brand invoice with a name on it. Every box is opened on a bench by two people. Every pair gets a six-digit number that ties back to the invoice line it came in on, and that number is printed on your receipt. If you ever want to see the invoice, ask, and we will put it in front of you.
We hold six lines. We could hold forty, and we would make more money, and the whole thing would stop meaning anything.
We check the stitch.
Two people open every box. Stitch count, stitch pitch, tongue label, sole cement, the weight in the hand and the smell of the glue. Nine minutes a pair, four hundred and twelve pallets so far, and eleven pairs sent back.
How we work
Six rules we have not broken yet.
Brand invoices only
Never a marketplace, never a private seller, never a middleman with a story about a friend at head office.
Two pairs of eyes
Nobody grades alone. If the two of us disagree about a pair, it does not go on the shelf.
Grade it honestly
A, B or box-damaged, marked on the shelf. We do not re-lace to flatter and we do not steam out a crease.
No holds, no list
What is out is what we have. First person standing in front of it gets it, including on drop day.
One price
The number on the label is the number at the till. No members' rate, no code, no email sign-up discount.
Say when it is gone
The stock figures on this site change when a pair leaves the building, not on a schedule.
Drop 01
And then we made one ourselves.
Three years of opening other people's boxes teaches you what a good one costs to make. APOGEE 01 is three hundred pairs, cut and lasted ninety minutes from this room, in one colourway, because one colourway was what we could afford to get right.
It is £240, which is more than most things we sell, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is what the shoe costs. There will not be a second colourway and there will not be a restock.
- Pairs
- 300. Numbered 001 to 300 on the tongue lining.
- Upper
- Waxed nubuck with a foil-backed midnight panel that goes matte as it creases.
- Lining
- Unbleached cotton drill. No foam, no logo, no printed insole graphic.
- Sole
- Cup sole, stitched and cemented, gum rubber, cut on the Coalfield last.
- Made
- Rossendale, Lancashire. Ninety minutes up the M66.
- Price
- £240. One per person, in the unit, from 10:00 Friday.
Unit 12 · Tariff Street · Manchester M1 2FF
Ask to see
an invoice.
We mean it. Bring a pair you bought here, give us the number on the receipt, and we will show you the line it arrived on.