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Nina Ziefvert of Nina Z clogs
ninaznyc.com
If you’ve noticed clogs quietly showing up absolutely everywhere over the past couple of years, you can in large part trace the whole thing directly back to Nina Ziefvert, who launched her eponymous line of Nina Z clogs in 2008 after moving to New York from her native Sweden to attend FIT. The shoes are all made with European birch and alder wood as well as recycled rubber, and though they’ve been handmade in Sweden for the past few years, Ziefvert and her business partner are now in the process of training a local cobbler to make her designs, with some models already being made out of their Brooklyn studio.
“Most business start outsourcing while growing,” says Ziefvert, “But we went the other way and said ‘Hey, let’s bring it to the studio and let’s do it ourselves,’ which in the end allows for a much more hands on involvement in production, model development, etc.”