SERES Founder Vanessa Arroyo on León, Mexico's Remarkable Shoemaking Culture

My chat this week is with Vanessa Arroyo, founder and designer of SERES Footwear, a focused line designed from the ground up with high-quality natural materials in a way that’s not often seen in the women’s space.

Once known as “the weird girl in high school making her own clothes” and thrown into shoemaking almost by chance, Vanessa fell in love with the art and craft of shoemaking between New York City, Chicago, and Leon Mexico, where she found unexpected meaning in her Mexican-American heritage—and sometimes had to stop working when it was raining too hard (you'll see what she means, I kinda love that part).

As she walks us through the cobblestone streets of León, Vanessa paints a vivid picture of a shoemaking community bound by heart, heritage, and hands-on artistry. We explore how that local ecosystem fuels creativity, what might be lost as manufacturing drifts further overseas, eand how working within constraints can actually sharpen a design process.

I’m also hugely excited and quite honored to have SERES as our first-ever exclusively women’s-focused brand at our Stitchdown’s Boot Camp Chicago quality footwear expo on November 8th, 2025—if you’re reading this before then, trust me, GET YOURSELF TO CHICAGO, you won’t be disappointed by what Vanessa and our other 45 vendors have to showcase.

Here’s Vanessa Arroyo, of SERES Footwear, on the Shoecast.

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2025 dates and location for Stitchdown's Boot Camp 3—the world's fair of shoes and boots and leather and more—coming soon.

https://www.stitchdownbootcamp.com/