Rotterdam → Bursa → Rotterdam: Our Production Route
Customers often ask us one simple question: "Where is AMUMIN actually made?" The answer is also simple, but it has two places in it. Our brand lives in Rotterdam. Our shoes are made by hand in Bursa, Turkey. The leather comes from Turkey too. Each pair travels a real distance before it reaches your door, and we think the route is worth knowing.
How AMUMIN started
AMUMIN began in 2023 as a small hobby at home. Our founder — a Dutch Muslim woman — started giving handmade leather tawaf shoes as gifts to friends after her own pilgrimage experience. The shoes were simple, real, and made with care. Friends wore them, loved them, and told other people. Messages started arriving from women she did not know, asking whether they could buy a pair.
What began as a gift grew organically. First it was word of mouth. Then it was DMs. Eventually it became a proper website — amu'min — so that everyone who wanted a pair could find one without having to know her personally. More than two years later, we are grateful for every customer who has worn our shoes and shared them with someone they love.
We did not start with a business plan or a pitch deck. We started with a pair of shoes that felt right, and we are still here because customers kept telling other customers about them.
Why Rotterdam (HQ)
Rotterdam is where the brand lives. It is our home, where the design work happens, where customer service sits, and where returns get opened and inspected. We chose Rotterdam for the obvious reasons — we live here, and the city has a practical, maritime, no-nonsense temperament that matches how we want to do business.
Everything you do not see as a customer happens in Rotterdam: answering emails, photographing new models, updating the collection, building the website, talking to the tannery, planning the next leather order. It is a small team and we answer our own emails.
Why Bursa (production)
Production happens in Bursa because that is where the craft is. Turkey has a deep and long-standing leather tradition, and Bursa is one of its centres. The apprenticeship chains are intact — skills are still being passed from one person to the next, quietly, in workshops that have been there for a long time.
We looked at other options, including closer to home. In each case, either the craft depth was missing or the minimum quantities made small-batch work impossible. Bursa lets us work at the small scale we actually operate at. That flexibility is part of why we exist. For the full making process, see our pillar article on how we make a pair.
The physical route: from hide to doormat
Let us trace one pair, in plain terms. The leather is vegetable-tanned in Turkey (see the tannery piece). Once finished, it moves to our atelier in Bursa. There it sits on a cutting table, gets cut, skived, stitched and lasted by hand. The finished pairs are boxed, labelled, and collected for transport.
From Bursa, the pairs travel to our warehouse in Rotterdam. Once there, each shipment is unpacked, cross-checked, and moved to our shelving. From there, individual orders are picked, re-boxed in our own packaging, and handed to a local carrier for final delivery.
We do not fly stock in unless we genuinely have to. We would rather wait and ship surface than burn the carbon budget to save a few days. Transport costs have risen over the past period, as has the cost of labour, and we have chosen to absorb that where we can rather than compromise on how we make the shoes.
What kind of logistics
We are a small operation. That means no enormous warehouse, no automated conveyor, no outsourced fulfilment. Each order is picked by a human who can see the full pair before it goes out. It also means that when something goes wrong — a damaged box, a lost shipment — the person who answers your email is the same person who walks to the warehouse to check.
What customers get back
The practical thing you get back from this route is a shoe that is not generic. Because we control the chain from hide to doormat, we know the provenance of every material, we know the people who made your pair, and we can repair or resole what we made.
You also get slower delivery than some larger retailers. We are not ashamed of this. Real handmade work at a small scale takes time, and we would rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.
Customer service from Rotterdam
If you email us, a human in Rotterdam reads it. Usually quickly. If you have a sizing question, take a look at our size guide first, and if you still have doubts, just ask. If you have a defect, we will work with the atelier to understand what happened and make it right.
Resole and repair
If a pair needs resoling or repair, we collect the shoes, send them back to Bursa with the next outgoing shipment, and return them to you once the atelier has finished the work. It is not instant, but it is real, and it keeps shoes out of the bin. This is the whole point: a shoe that lasts, and that we stand behind for its full life.
This is not a scalable way to run a business in the usual sense. But it is a good way, and it is why the route matters. If you want to read more about who we are, our about page has the fuller version.