Personal

Robert Walling

Linda, my wife of 35 years, and I have lived in Eugene, Oregon since 1999. We have five grown children, and six grandchildren.

I have worked in the footwear business since I was a college student in the sixties. I've sold shoes in full-service retail stores and as a wholesale rep. I have been a custom shoemaker and I have designed shoe collections for footwear manufacturers in Europe and in India.

Since 1984 I have been working out ways to bridge the gap between custom shoemakers and shoe manufacturers, to combine the efficiency and the variety offered by manufacturing with the shoe-fitting, the service values and the local access to production offered by custom shoemaking.

Daniel Walling

I grew up in the workshop. I have always had a passion for making the things I use in daily life, and I grew up in an environment where the tools, materials and support were always available. After leaving my job and spending the year as a stay home parent with my twin sons, as well as pursuing personal projects, I decided to join my dad in the effort to reinvent the process of shoe making to suit our needs. Those needs being the ability to make high quality, comfortable, and attractive footwear, all in house and by hand, out of sustainable and locally sourced materials, and to do all of this at a price that is accessible to as many people as possible. This has been an incredibly rewarding process for me. This process is ever evolving, and though we haven't yet achieved all of our goals I am confident that we will. I'm extremely excited to show you what we have made. I hope that whether you're interested in our shoes or in making shoes of your own you'll get in touch. I'd love to help.

Babu History

I started Babu in 2004 to implement my vision of a community-based shoe factory and shoe store under one roof. For the first four years, I focused on designing prototype shoemaking tools, experimenting with materials, working out new production methods and making many test sample shoes. Late in 2007 my son Daniel joined me in the business. Daniel's contributions sped up the pace of development a lot. Within a few months we were turning out batches of components in size-runs. At the end of 2008 we had the first public showing of a limited collection of Babu sandals, clogs, shoes and boots here in Eugene. The response was a little overwhelming. We wrote about three times as much business as I expected. At that point Linda joined Daniel and me as a partner to help us organize Babu to run in a businesslike way.
Vision

We think Babu is a prototype for a new way to do the shoe business. We believe that, someday, there will be lots of local shoe factories/stores serving their communities, making footwear suited to local conditions, climates and tastes. They will provide shoes that address the individual fitting and comfort needs of their community across a very large range of shoe sizes, foot shapes and fitting preferences. These local/regional businesses will combine size-run manufacturing and one-off custom-fitted production. They will require a capital investment of less than $50,000. For the most part, they will employ general-purpose shop tools that are available locally or tools that they make for themselves. They will recruit crew members from their local community, and train new hires to full productivity in less than three months. They will source almost all of the materials they use domestically, regionally and locally. They will offer their unique collections of footwear to the world through their inter-linked websites. They will maintain an open-source policy concerning innovations, know-how and sources, sharing information freely on a fair-use basis, and teaching new people how to set up and operate businesses like theirs in other communities.