Santoni Proves You Can Run a Marathon in Dress Shoes

Santoni showed off its lightweight Easy shoe collection with a slate of programming during marathon weekend in New York City.

To kick off the big race weekend, the Italian footwear brand opened a two-day pop-up in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan on Friday and Saturday. Located at the intersection of Washington and Little West 12th Streets, the space showcased the brand’s Easy shoe collection as well as a curated selection of Santoni’s bestselling products for men and women.

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On Friday, the area around the pop-up transformed into an open-air stage. The result was a series of flash mobs and traveling performances starting from the Meatpacking District and making their way through some of New York’s most iconic locations, including Central Park and Times Square, before reaching the Santoni boutique on Madison Avenue.

Dressed in formal looks paired with Santoni Easy Run shoes, the performers brought the collection’s “philosophy of freedom and movement into the urban landscape,” the company said.

The activation continued on race day, when the brand outfitted three athletes to run the marathon in its Easy Run lace-up. For the company’s executive president and chairman Giuseppe Santoni, this series of activations stems from wanting to do something unexpected.

“I wanted to do something to provoke or something very out of the box to highlight our shoes,” Santoni told FN in an interview ahead of the weekend. “But it’s not like we want to start to do training shoes or running shoes. That’s not a business that we are in. What we want to do is to show up at the marathon in a very Santoni way and to prove that our quality is so good that you can run a marathon in our shoes.”

The shoes that he hopes grabs everyone’s attention are the Santoni Easy Run lace-ups, which weigh just 295 grams, and features a unique rubber sole density that makes them “one the softest and lightest leather shoes in the market,” Santoni said.

Other details of the shoe include the brand’s signature Arancio Santoni Sigillo stitching, an invisible elastic system integrated into the upper, a perforated napa leather lining, a memory foam insole and a full Arancio Santoni sole.

The executive added that this initiative further reinforces the significance of the U.S. for the brand as its most important international market and a key driver of global growth.

Santoni noted that business in the U.S. is up 52 percent year-over-year with gains in owned retail and wholesale, with good performance at retailers like Nordstrom, Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. “It’s an incredible number to mention,” he noted.

Santoni also mentioned that the brand’s women’s business is growing tremendously. “Women’s is up nearly 85 percent over last year, an incredible number,” he said. “And we are starting to have some shops where our women’s business is bigger than men’s.”

The executive noted that Saks Fifth Avenue’s New York store is an example where Santoni’s women’s business is bigger than its men’s. Neiman Marcus in Dallas is the same, as is the case at Bergdorf Goodman.

“My vision five years from now is that our women’s offering will be three times larger than men’s,” Santoni added. “But not because men’s will decline, but because women’s has the space to grow.”

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