Our Story

A Lifelong Passion for Shoes

As a child, on a family trip to Italy, I wandered into a shoe shop and lost track of everything else.

My mother found me standing quietly, turning a shoe over in my hands, completely absorbed. I was fascinated by its shape, its proportions, and the care that had gone into making it.

From then on, I told my art teachers I was going to be a shoe designer in New York.

Life led me into fashion instead. I moved to London to study Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins and Kingston University, then spent nearly three decades designing collections in New York. But shoes never stopped pulling me back.

When the world slowed down, I found myself around my family’s dining room table in New York. We were all wearing the South African Merino sheepskin slippers we’d always had. They weren’t precious. They weren’t fashionable. They were simply part of everyday life.

I found myself returning to what mattered most: family, comfort, and creativity. Making things with my hands became a source of inspiration, and those quiet moments led me to enroll in a shoemaking course in Brooklyn. What began as curiosity became a four-year passion project that my friends jokingly called “Lee’s Art Project.” Behind the scenes, I worked with makers around the world, refining every detail until Pantoffel felt exactly as I’d imagined it.

When I moved to Sag Harbor, what had begun as a personal project finally became Pantoffel.

I never intended to start a company. I just wanted to recreate the feeling of comfort of my childhood slippers.

Pantoffel reimagines those childhood slippers as a shoe designed for everyday life - crafted with South African Merino sheepskin, a cork footbed that moulds to the wearer over time, a durable rubber sole, and a removable footbed designed to extend the life of the shoe.

I believe the best things in a wardrobe aren’t the ones we save for special occasions.

They’re the ones we reach for every single day.

Looking back, I realize that little girl standing in that shoe shop in Italy wasn’t dreaming about a career in fashion.

She had fallen in love with a beautifully made shoe.

Pantoffel is my way of sharing that feeling.