La Rificolona

La Rificolona is the bespoke shoe workshop of Tom and Mayumi Nakata, a husband-and-wife team on the third floor of an old building at 1-3-5 Tamondori, Chuo-ku, Kobe (room F). The two met at Kobe Design University and spent fifteen years in other careers — he as an in-house designer for a bicycle importer, she at a car dealership while making plush toys — before shoemaking, taken up as a shared hobby, took over. In 2013 they moved to Florence, learned the language and the trade at a shoemaking school, and were taken on by Calogero Mannina, who saw the square-toed trekking boot they had made together and told them to make it in his workshop near the Ponte Vecchio: Tom worked there as a craftsman for two years, Mayumi interned at a repair workshop outside the city and sold in the Mannina shop, and they are counted among Mannina's last apprentices. Back in Japan they converted Tom's grandparents' empty house in Tokushima into a home and workshop, launched the brand — named after the Florentine lantern festival — with order events at Kansai select shops, and moved to Kobe in spring 2020. The house is deliberately unisex, one range of lasts for men and women, with many clients who have small feet, and deliberately unorthodox about construction: hand-welted, Blake, Norwegian and Bolognese among eight methods, by hand or machine as budget and design dictate, in leather or cloth, from pumps and loafers to boots. Tom measures, makes the lasts and bottoms; Mayumi cuts the patterns, closes and makes the uppers; both design together and repair and re-adjust what they have made. Three order lines: pattern order from the sample designs (from about ¥91,300 incl. tax in 2023, four to six months), semi-order on an adjusted house last (from about ¥135,300) and full bespoke with a personal last, trial shoe and original pattern (from about ¥190,300, eight to twelve months), with full hand-sewn welting as a supplement. Open 9am–6pm with irregular closures; always message or email before visiting.