The north of the country has been shoe country for well over a century. São João da Madeira took up footwear in the eighteen hundreds when its hat trade faded and still calls itself the capital do calçado. Felgueiras, an hour inland, accounts for around a third of national output and holds several hundred component workshops on its own. Between them the region turns out something like eighty-five million pairs a year. Pedro Maçana had noticed that the best shops in Europe were full of that work and empty of Portuguese names on it. He was well placed to notice. He had spent eighteen years at Decathlon, the last of them as a director, before moving his family back to Porto and enrolling on a footwear design course at forty-two. Daniel Gonçalves was on the same course, a product designer and the one of the two who had always been obsessed with sneakers. Daniel designs the shoes. Pedro runs operations. They raised more than eighteen thousand euros on Indiegogo, shipped the first pairs at the end of 2019 and opened a small atelier inside Hello, Bonfim the year after.

A sneaker is a dozen separate things, and Wayz can tell you where every one of them was made. The vegetable-tanned leather is tanned about forty minutes south. The suede comes from across the river, still inside Porto. The outsoles are pressed fifty minutes inland, in a works that opened in 1991 with four rubber presses and a thousand pairs a day and now turns out twenty-five thousand; they are seventy per cent recycled rubber. The insoles are made in the old hat town, down the coast road. The laces are spun from cotton in Porto itself. The box is recycled cardboard from a place nearby. Then the parts travel back inland and the shoes are stitched together in Felgueiras. Draw a circle an hour wide around the room where the shoes are drawn and the entire shoe sits inside it. Very few brands could tell you that, and the ones that could tend not to. Wayz publishes the name and the town of every workshop it uses.

Because the outsole is stitched and not only glued, a worn one can be cut away and a new one put on. Wayz will do it from Porto and charges for the labour; anyone who would rather use their own cobbler can buy the parts and have it done at home. The insole lifts out and is sold on its own. So are the laces. So is the brush for the suede. It is a shoe sold as a set of parts by people who know who made each one, which is the same thing as saying it was designed to be kept.