SERES Founder Vanessa Arroyo on León, Mexico's Remarkable Shoemaking Culture

The Stitchdown PREMIUM Shoecast · Oct 24, 2025 · 1h 17m

My chat this week is with Vanessa Arroyo, founder and designer of SERES Footwear, a focused line designed from the ground up with high-quality natural materials in a way that’s not often seen in the women’s space.

Once known as “the weird girl in high school making her own clothes” and thrown into shoemaking almost by chance, Vanessa fell in love with the art and craft of shoemaking between New York City, Chicago, and Leon Mexico, where she found unexpected meaning in her Mexican-American heritage—and sometimes had to stop working when it was raining too hard (you'll see what she means, I…