From Sabah

® founder Mickey Ashmore:

"I created Sabah in Summer 2013. I had just moved back to New York City from Istanbul, where I had been living as an expat working for Microsoft since 2010. While there, I was gifted a pair of very curious looking slippers by my then girlfriend’s family (similar to the ones above!). Little did I know, that pair of slippers would quite literally change my life.

I wore that original pair almost every day and everywhere I traveled. To work, on weekend strolls around Istanbul, on trips to France & Morocco, I even wore my special slippers with a tuxedo to a fancy Turkish wedding aboard the famous Savarona steamship. They were always a hit — even with the Turks, many of whom were not familiar with this footwear as it wasn’t part of modern dress, but rather a relic of the past.

When I moved back to New York City in late 2012, the soles of my slippers had started to disintegrate. The upper leather, not being of the highest quality, was also not looking great. I contacted my friend and through her family learned more about the origin of the slippers I had come to love. I found the best maker of these shoes in Turkey, residing in a town I had never been to, Gaziantep - located in the southeast of Turkey along the Syrian border.

I didn’t know it at the time, but his family had been making this style of shoe since the late 1800s. One of the last traditional shoemakers of his kind; and the most well-reputed in Turkey. His name was Orhan. I got his phone number.

Through WhatsApp, I suggested he make me a new pair, but with a few modifications. No curly toe, no patterns across the top, and a few other changes to the silhouette and pattern, which I communicated with the Turkish I had learned while living in Istanbul. I was quickly learning new words -- footwear was not a category of vocabulary I studied. I then sent him a really high quality piece of black leather with a beautiful texture and asked him to add a rubber sole to the bottom of the shoe for better grip and durability.

A few weeks later, this special, updated pair of slippers arrived to my office on 57th street. I was working in finance at the time. They fit like a glove. I named this pair after Beirut, the first city that ever felt majestic to me. Beirut Black became my new favorite shoes and were instantly a hit amongst friends too (eventually that single pair traveled with me from Turkey to NYC, from East Coast to West Coast, by car from Marseilles to Venice, all over Europe, and finally to Tokyo... they were on my feet during my first visit to the Conde Nast offices and shared many other countless memories with me). I immediately ordered a few other pairs in different colors.

The origin story of Sabah has continued to be at the core of our business. The majority of our shoes are made with Orhan and his family. Albeit, we’ve grown from just 5 craftspeople and a couple of stitchers in a small, crumbling house in Gaziantep to being nearly 70 craftspeople in a brand new, cleaner, healthier facility just a couple blocks away. In 2021, we expanded our operations to El Paso, Texas, home of our second Sabah workshop, another facility that celebrates craft and people in the making of high quality goods.