The mayor’s white pearl wedding shoes, various manufacturing labs and a ‘time machine’, the Shoe Quarter in Waalwijk should become a place where the real shoe fanatic cannot be avoided. Five years ago, the previous shoe museum, actually indispensable in the shoe city of Waalwijk, was closed. The successor is currently being finalized. “It’s really all hands on deck now.”
“A lot still needs to be done before we can open,” says director Anouk van Heesch. “Last week the large historic machines were already installed. And now we have started the furnishing on the second floor. We work from top to bottom.”
The place to be for the real enthusiasts later? The second floor is the real shoe mecca, where very special shoes from our collection are exhibited.”
On the first floor, Van Heesch shows the so-called ‘time machine’. “This is a corridor with interactive themed rooms. You take a journey through time starting in the 19th century.”
Special in that time machine is the room where you imagine yourself in a shoe store. “Look, you see people looking in through the shop window”, Van Heesch points to a huge digital screen. “This fragment is set in the 1960s, so you see people who also stand in front of the shop window with a note pad. That’s how it went in those days: looking at the competition’s shop window to see what the trends were.”
The PR machine is currently working overtime to ‘put the Shoe Quarter’ on the map, as it is called. An example: “On Valentine’s Day we announced on Facebook that mayor Sascha Ausems of the municipality of Waalwijk donated her wedding shoes,” says director Van Heesch.
“In 2001, our mayor bought her wedding shoes, which are made of white silk and decorated with pearls, from Jean Paul Robert, a well-known address in Amsterdam South. All those years she could not part with them,” says Van Heesch.
But now the moment had come, Mayor Ausems said on Facebook: “How nice it is to donate this special pair to the Shoe Quarter.”
The Shoe Quarter in the center of Waalwijk has an area of approximately 3000 square meters. The museum in Waalwijk should attract around 30,000 visitors every year. The cost of the new attraction-to-be: 10 million euros.
The opening is on June 28.