CWÉN shoes. “Designed in London. Handmade in Portugal. Owned by you.”
We are proud to tell another inspirational story by the founder of CWÉN shoe brand, Karin Deine, who, against all odds, turned her dream into reality in 2020. So, let us introduce you to this newborn fashion brand.
CWÉN produces handmade shoes of premium quality, combining classic craftsmanship with contemporary design. The name of the brand CWÉN / Kwe:n / noun – is the Old English for a queen. Delicate handcrafting and ultra-modern methods work in harmony, perfectly representing the marriage of the old and the new. CWÉN shoes are crafted with exquisite detail that could only be realized by hand.
Every shoe design requires a specific production process, carefully chosen to ensure that every shoe is comfortable, beautiful, practical, and delicate.
Speaking about the workflow, Karin admits that even though the design itself is a creative process, CWÉN shoes are more a product of hard work and dedication, than just design.
Karin explains: "It's our obsession. We create shoes that you will enjoy for years. We source and use the finest materials, and each pair is made to the highest manufacturing standards.
Every pair of Cwen shoes is exclusive and begins as an idea. The idea comes to life using pencil and paper. Designs are refined as many times as it takes to balance elegance with comfort, style with substance.
Our journey to create the perfect shoe took us to Italy in search of the best leather. In the cypress-lined Tuscan foothills, we discovered it – leather fit for a queen. Our search for an expert shoemaker, someone who shared our obsession for quality, elegance, and attention to detail, led us to Portugal and a family-owned factory that's been in business for five generations. Every family member has a distinct role in the process, and everyone is a master of their craft. With exceptional skill and eye for detail, the highest quality materials come together to ensure comfort and design coexist perfectly."
How we use Infolio to manage our business
“When you have many processes that have to be coordinated, you understand that it’s impossible to proceed without a decent software to manage all those processes, especially when you manage a remote team. You need to ensure smooth collaboration. We were looking for a simple tool that would fit into our budget frames. A friend recommended Infolio because it is flexible enough that can it be used for most of our production and management needs, and is very affordable (free, in fact).
With Infolio I coordinate the main workflow, manage orders and delivery processes. This way, I have all the information in one place, since we keep all the records and order details in Infolio as well, which is really convenient.
Besides task management, we use Infolio spaces (digital whiteboards) for ideas brainstorming and central storage of photos and visual assets. It is great for content collaboration because it ensures a visual approach to the design process, which is important for us. For our small team, Infolio is almost a perfect solution.“
“This is the Kanban board with our main company workflow (in a Board view). All the high-level tasks are split between the following categories: “Brand”, “Marketing”, “Sales”, “Warehouse”, “Website”. Tasks of this board are long-lasting, represent either reference information for all to use (“About us”, “Mission & Vision”) or some long-running initiatives in the sales or marketing departments. As the CEO I like to use this board as a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in the company right now.
It helps that Infolio supports quite a rich task content, where we keep attachments, subtasks, and even visual collaboration boards. This way all the mainboard tasks essentially turn into reference points for the team.
We switch to different projects for the day-to-day management of orders and sales.
The Table view with custom fields is especially handy for my delivery management, where I keep a record of each delivery step of every order. In the task details, I save all the order details, including the shipping company, delivery status, comments, and more. I also add customer reviews there to make sure everything is recorded.
As I update everything manually, I have a strong sense of responsibility to keep the records and statuses up to date. This makes you feel like you genuinely keep everything under your control.
I am glad that Infolio has some ready-to-use templates that I occasionally like to explore. When we have to create small temporary projects for some marketing campaigns or new product launches, we make use of some templates. That way you don’t have to start from scratch.
I pursued the dream of opening this business for years, and when everything was finally ready, the pandemic started. Like many, we’ve gone through tough times, but we hope that soon everything will get back to normal and people will be eager to treat themselves to quality goods again. While we are doing our best to stay on track, we wish that our example motivates others, who are still planning to launch their business, or maybe gave up on the idea because of the global world situation. Stay strong and think positive – we’ll get through this together”.
K.Deine
