Forgive us for such a long preamble. For some time now, all of us on staff had wanted to prepare beautiful shoes for the ladies and gentlemen we serve. In the course of being asked for sweets and dishes, flowers and cosmetics, jewelry and accessories, we kept hearing the same thing: "I can't find shoes that fit my feet — and when I do, they aren't very pretty."

Easy to put on, easy to walk in, kind to the feet all day — and pretty. Shoes that lift the heart and put a spring in the step. If we could offer shoes like that, surely they would be a delight.

There is a saying in Japan: to dress well is to endure. The resolve to dress beautifully in spite of the heat, the weight, the pain — we find that resolve noble, and beautiful. But those words belong to the person who chooses to endure, and to no one else. They are not ours to say to the people we serve.

We don't believe you have to suffer to be happy.

So we began by writing to companies that make lovely shoes — as far east as Tokyo, as far west as Fukuoka, and, following what connections we had, across the sea to China and Vietnam. "Would you make shoes that are comfortable and pretty?" we asked. No one said yes.

The problem, we imagine, was quantity. Shoes are made on the assumption of mass production, and unless you can move a full lot, the order never happens. We had half suspected as much. It was the first wall we ran into.

Perhaps, then, made-to-order was the only way. We decided to make the shoes ourselves. One of our staff apprenticed at a shoemaking workshop, going once or twice a week, and after about four months under his teacher he finally produced a pair fitted to a real pair of feet. When we worked out the numbers, a single pair made to fit one person's feet came to something like 100,000 yen.

The experience showed us just how well made, and how inexpensive, the shoes of the world really are.

One hundred thousand yen for a handmade pair is a fair price. It is not, however, a cheap one. With clothing, small, medium, and large will usually do; with children's clothes, sizes every ten centimeters are enough. Shoes, as you know, come in centimeters and even millimeters — and still there are people who cannot find a pair that fits.

Those who have never had trouble with shoes tend not to notice until someone points it out: feet differ not only in length but in width, and, more than that, in shape itself.

This is only our impression, but women's shoes may in fact be cut a little narrower than the average foot. We have taken no proper survey; we only know that more than half of the women we spoke with while developing kutsukazari described their own feet as "a bit wider than normal." And a maker cannot stay in business selling comfortable shoes if the silhouette and the line — the beauty of them, the prettiness — are not there to make someone pick them up.

And yet a shoe you cannot wear means even less.

In other words, ready-made shoes are built to fit, and to sell to, as many people as possible — so anyone who happens to fall within the majority, and slightly on the narrow side of it, simply has more to choose from. Manufacturers go to enormous trouble over this, and they make wonderful products. Each additional width means another last — the wooden form a shoe is built around — dozens more part variations, more complicated production management, and greater inventory risk. It cannot be easy.

Even the cheapest pair of shoes rests on that delicate balance. The more we came to understand how hard it is to make shoes, and to place them in someone's hands, the deeper our respect grew for the makers who were already doing it.

Having made shoes ourselves, we understood their structure and where the forces fall. Ornament belongs mainly on the instep and on the heel counter. Whatever we put there — a ribbon, a flower — must not fall off while the wearer is walking. Our first attempt was a worked metal plate shaped rather like a money clip. In fact, we ordered money clips from Amazon and tried them.

We tried tie clips as well. Neither would follow the natural curve found at the heel of most shoes; they lifted away inside the shoe, and the wearer could always feel them. Worse, they left scratches and dents on surfaces of leather and synthetic leather.

However pretty the result, damaging the shoe defeats the entire purpose.

Not to harm the shoe. To affect the fit as little as possible. Never, ever to come off. Not to break. And to be light, easy to work, and inexpensive besides. What we arrived at was a J- or U-shaped hook — an attachment formed in resin. Simply slipping it into place felt too precarious on its own, so we reinforced it with an extremely thin hook-and-loop fastener, 0.7 mm thick, patented by a certain manufacturer.

Fix a flower, a ribbon, beads, or any other material or handmade piece to this attachment, and ornament can be added to the instep or the heel alike. And because it is made not of metal but of soft resin, or of a slightly firmer rubber, it adapts to a great many shoes, boots, and sandals.

It has almost no effect on the fit of the shoe — the very problem we set out to solve.

That is how we arrived at kutsukazari. From there, however, we stopped moving for about a year.

We tested the idea of realizing shoe ornaments through an attachment, building several prototypes along the way. Even so, we did not rush to advertise or to sell. The reason is that an attachment made of resin or metal is simple enough that anyone could copy it. A 3D printer would do it; someone with a little skill could reproduce it from materials found at any hardware store.

We wish for more people to be happy and to live richly. But if the idea behind kutsukazari were imitated, how would the market move? Perhaps we were thinking too far ahead — yet we could not shake the worry that poorly made imitations would be mass-produced cheaply and flood the shelves.

We want as many people as possible to come to know kutsukazari, here in Japan, where no culture of decorating shoes yet exists. The last thing we want is for anyone to be disappointed by something fragile, or easily lost. So we consulted a lawyer and a patent attorney, and filed two design registrations with the Japan Patent Office. A design registration, here, covers the shape and appearance of a thing.

More than six months after filing, one of the two was granted. The other was refused on the grounds that it resembled an existing utility model — but when we explained the differences carefully, that registration was granted as well. For one of the two, we then made use of a system called a secret design request, which keeps the registered content unpublished for three years.

△ One of the two designs registered with the Japan Patent Office. This prototype was made in resin.

The two designs recognized by the Japan Patent Office cover the curved "U" portion of the material. In other words, Kutsukazari Inc. has registered not the design of the ornament itself, but the shape of the attachment. We succeeded in securing, as a right, the very shape that arises naturally from plasticity — the property, like that of clay or rubber, of holding a form once bent.

We have since filed the same designs in the United States, the countries of the EU, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Vietnam. Alongside the phrase kutsukazari itself, we are also filing applications for new ideas that surfaced during prototyping. (It was for the sake of these procedures that we kept the second design hidden for so long, and postponed our crowdfunding campaign. To the ladies and gentlemen who waited so patiently, we offer our heartfelt thanks.)

At last, we are able to make kutsukazari for you. (And we are truly sorry to have gone on at such length.)

Having secured the rights to the attachment's design, we set about prototyping for actual mass production. We concluded that a material behaving more like rubber or clay would suit us better than plastic, which holds a fixed form. And yet, once fitted to a shoe, it had to stay put and not shift at all. Few materials have such ideal properties, and those that do are hard to obtain, or rare and therefore expensive.

What we arrived at was tin — a metal long known here in Japan. It shares something of the character of lead: very soft, yet non-toxic, so there is no cause for concern about allergies. (It is used for tableware and sake vessels.) We rolled this material into sheet less than a millimeter thick and worked at our attachment prototypes.

As you might expect, soft metals are unusual, and we had no idea what equipment would cut and shape one. Examples of applying such a metal to a fashion item are all but nonexistent, so we were, quite literally, feeling our way. Cutters and tools made for metal, it turns out, are too strong: the sheet we cut came away distorted.

Here we tried something bold once again. If the metal is soft, we thought, perhaps *** would do just as well. When we tried it, the metal cut with a cleanness that seemed almost untrue. It parted so easily — and left us with a beautiful edge.

One step forward. Next, we would try applying color.

Kutsukazari are ornaments. Even if they need the plasticity of clay in order to fit both the shoe and the foot, they cannot go on looking like bare metal. So we tried finishing the tin attachments with paint. We experimented with powder coating, acrylic, and epoxy, and every one of them produced a film harder than the tin beneath it, so the piece would no longer bend.

Instead of bending, it would give a small crack and snap.

What we needed was a paint with some give in it — one that would stretch and contract rather than craze or split. What came to mind was the rubber spray that enjoyed a vogue in the automotive world not long ago.

That material came into use as an alternative to wrapping film. Where film is a flat sheet stretched and pressed into place, rubber spray is sprayed onto the curves of a car body and left to dry.

For our attachments, we obtained every rubber spray available in Japan and tried them all. Every one failed. This is only our supposition, but most rubber sprays assume application over a broad area, so they go on unevenly — and the near right-angled edges of our attachment plate repel the paint. A film that cannot hold its surface tension simply invites friction to peel it away.

This would not do.

While we were all holding our heads in our hands, an interesting advertisement came across the Instagram feed of one of our staff. It was a product from a paint manufacturer that had reached the market in the 2020s, with a cured film that stretches to more than twice its length — rubber-like, in other words.

We had in fact obtained it once before and tried it. At the time we applied it by brush, and no amount of care would prevent streaking, so we set it aside. Now we discovered that when this paint is sprayed by a particular method, it forms a film of remarkable evenness and beauty.

This was it. There was nothing else.

From the very next day we were cutting out attachments by the dozen, spraying them, fixing on ribbons and crystals, and wearing the results as prototypes. All we had done was arrive at what we had pictured from the beginning, and yet we were quietly moved.

It did not last a week. Reports of broken attachments — something we had scarcely seen before — began arriving one after another. Attachments that had never once snapped in their unpainted state were now snapping in numbers. Whatever could be the reason?

Painted attachments were breaking one after another. At first we wondered whether the paint had affected the tin, but if anything the film should have made it stronger. Then, laying the broken pieces out side by side, we noticed several things they had in common.

First, they had been painted in matte black.

Second, they had broken while being removed.

Third, the angle of that removal was sharper than anything we had anticipated.

Tin, which looks rather like aluminum or stainless steel, is astonishingly soft, and most people handle it gingerly. But tin that has been beautifully painted takes on the air of rubber or plastic rather than metal. That, we believe, is where the cause lay.

People are swayed by appearance; there is no helping it. In painting these pieces to raise them to the standard of a finished product, we may have made them look like something other than metal — and so invited a way of handling them we had never foreseen.

We would not, of course, lay any blame on the people who used them.

Ordinarily, an experience like this would lead a company to explain its handling instructions with great care. That felt wrong to us. A product that breaks unless you treat it delicately is an inadequate product. It is a failure of professionalism. So we made another bold decision.

We abandoned tin as the material for our attachments, and began searching for a new one.

One step forward, one step back — it is maddening, and yet we are far further along than when we began. It is out there. We will find it. We started over by first believing in ourselves.