About Ordering:

BUYING MY SANDALS:

You can either buy my sandals in person, at the store, (so that I adjust them perfectly to your feet) or through a friend or relative, visiting Athens, (make sure they've got your right measurements). In the mean time I am trying to find a solution to the two basic problems that prevent me from selling my sandals over the internet, without compromising the quality of the sandals.

THE TWO REASONS THEY ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON LINE:

1.REASON:

My hand-crafted sandals as products of love and personal joy combined with quality are not mass-produced for speedy delivery to customers. I do not feel satisfied unless I see the footwear I create perfectly fitted to your feet, but since people's feet are so different, I often have to get your measurements and re-adjust the sandal straps for a perfect fit, right on the spot.

2. REASON:

Various technical problems, like: Expensive Shipping, Insurance-Unavailability for some countries, and above all, lack of time and inability to expand due to the 'T.Rex' of the local Bureaucracy, which daily wastes senselessly our time and frustrates any attempt, on the part of non-corporate, traditional businesses like mine, to increase their activities.

For a short period of time, my sandals were available on line, for the sake of old customers (worldwide) who kept calling me or sending me e-mails. However the whole thing soon got out of hand and I almost had a nervous breakdown, trying to keep track of all those things going on, at the store as well as the incoming orders. Keeping up with such an international demand, would mean that I'd have to open a factory and forget all about hand crafted quality and my art. Besides, as I mentioned before, conditions and laws (regarding my traditional trade) are not favorable for such an endeavor and I would not be fair to myself or anyone else, if I tried to kill my love of the arts, my personality and principles so as to turn into an impersonal corporate guy, caught up in intricate business dealings. If I managed to offer my sandals over the internet I would rather do it on a small scale. I'm too old for big business and besides: my true reward (believe it or not) is my happy faced customers, who buy my custom made sandals and tell me that my inimitable shop, with its upbeat and colorful atmosphere has been the highlight of their trip.

I am afraid that I am an incurably romantic person, who strongly believes that the essence of an individual's being is found in the honest, kind and unpretentious, daily joys of life and after all, that's what I preach through my art and poetry as well.

Pantelis Melissinos