How Andrew McAteer Went From Restoring Antiques to Turning Out Coveted Handmade Shoes (2024)

Andrew McAteer is handy.

It’s a quality he may have inherited from his father, who turned a barn attached to the family’s property on the North Shore of Long Island into a workshop for home improvement projects. With time, it became McAteer’s workshop, too.

Today McAteer has a studio of his own in Queens, where he makes wallets, leather accessories, and shoes by hand. Under the Andrew McAteer name, the handmade goods are sold directly through his website and stocked by specialty boutiques as far afield as London and Tokyo. It’s a remarkable reach for the former furniture maker and antiques restorer, who has operated as a one-man business since 2013.

“I don’t do much in the way of outreach or promotion or anything like that,” McAteer tells Robb Report. “It’s all grown organically.”

The odyssey that would lead to the business’s founding began when McAteer finished high school and accepted a job with the New England Carpenters Union in Vermont. Gigs with a French-Canadian tile setter and a cabinet maker in Northwest Pennsylvania followed until McAteer found his way to Hudson and sought work with one of its foremost antiques restorers.

“They gave me an 18th-century tall case clock that had been in a car accident and said, ‘Well, fix it,” McAteer recalls of his learn-on-the-job education. “It was sink or swim, you know.”

With these skills in hand, McAteer later returned to New York to work for a furniture maker in Long Island City. After working on “campaign furniture” made with leather straps and canvas slings, he decided to try his hand at making bags and belts and brought the experiments to Freemans Sporting Club. The since-shuttered store bought them, and Andrew McAteer the business took off, just shy of its founder’s 30th birthday.

Many of his early designs were borne out of practicality. For instance, a pair of leather slippers that could be worn while camping, or a toolbox made from vegetable-tanned leather to keep him organized. In 2020, McAteer pushed himself out of his craft comfort zone by making hard-soled leather loafers. But unlike traditional footwear makers that would utilize a stitching machine to welt their shoes, his would be entirely welted by hand.

“There’s a lot of prep work on the machines and getting everything just right, but then when you’re actually sewing it, it doesn’t take very long,” McAteer says of the typical industry approach. By contrast, he carves a “holdfast” around the edges of the sole, and then laboriously threads every stitch between the upper and the outsole using a curved awl. It’s a painstaking process that requires between two to three hours per individual shoe, a significant chunk of the two to three days McAteer spends on a single pair.

“It’s time-consuming but you end up with something that’s more durable,” he says, adding that he regularly resoles shoes for customers.

McAteer’s specialized background has trickled down to his present work in interesting ways. When he introduced a horsebit loafer, McAteer used his past experience in metalwork to design the hardware from scratch, carving his own wax molds and partnering with a Manhattan-based foundry to cast the bits in solid bronze. Afterward, McAteer filed and polished the metal in his own studio.

While only the slippers and loafers are presently displayed on his website, McAteer can make around a dozen styles of footwear, including fisherman’s sandals, a desert boot and casual canvas shoes (an oxford style teased on Instagram is expected to launch in the next six months). Clients often message McAteer to express which shoe style they would like, kicking off an exchange in which McAteer will ask for their typical sizing and whether they have any fit issues. In the case of a trickier fit, McAteer might request a foot tracing from a client, and make adjustments to his lasts accordingly. Orders are typically fulfilled in eight weeks.

Lately, what McAteer makes in Queens has been showing up around the world. His loafers have been stocked by indie retailer Standard & Strange, which operates stores in Oakland, New York, and Santa Fe, and he’s made home goods including a leather basket for LA’s Commune. Internationally, his toolboxes have turned up at The Conran Shop in London, while Tokyo’s L’Echoppe has stocked his sandals.

McAteer, for his part, remains at his workbench in Queens.