Milk & Honey Review: Design Your Very Own Pair Of Perfect Shoes

Women 'umm' and 'ahh' over shoes for longer than we do prospective partners, staring at them online for hours on end, desperately zooming and pausing the 360C views to see if they’re just right.

Heaven forbid if we ever do find a perfect pair, we end up hemorrhaging money into a Timpson’s IV drip to keep them alive just a few months longer as the plastic heels and cheap fixtures fall apart - and all because we know we’ll never find another pair quite like them.

Said shoe dilemma is exactly what inspired Dorian Howard and her sister Ilissa Howard to start Milk & Honey shoes - a digital build-your-own shoe store.

Having spent their lives obsessing over shoes and never quite finding what they were looking for, a stroke of luck on a trip abroad led them to a cobbler who would make any shoe design they were asking for.

After buying hundreds of pairs to take home, they had a brainwave and the company was launched just a few months later.

Three years later, and Milk & Honey is the go-to website for shoe obsessives and picky brides worldwide, their heels have been seen on the likes of Ginnifer Goodwin, Selena Gomez, Busy Philipps, Emily Deschanel, Malin Ackerman, Whitney Cummings, and Kate Mara to name a few.

Allowing anyone to design the shoe of their dreams, Milk & Honey offers a totally customisable service with prices ranging from £100 to £200 and a six-eight week turnaround for your perfectly-preened heels to arrive on your doorstep.

Starting with 14 initial shoe styles to pick from, followed by thousands of combinations of fabrics, straps, cuts (they even make shoes narrower or wider if you struggle with a standard size), detailing and heel heights, choice is really not an issue - your only real problem is narrowing down your perfect combination.

Options include standard leather in ten shades, as well as glitter prints, wool blends, neons, patents, silk, sparkly leathers, suede, snakeskin, pony and metallic leather - with the main shoe, strap and heel all changeable options (pony print heels on neon yellow sandals, anyone?).

After agonizing over our design - and whether we wanted a special blue inner sole for our ‘something blue’ (such a cute extra) - our choices were whisked off to M&H's Hong Kong office, where Ilissa's team send the order to their cobblers in China to put together our shoes.

It takes around seven or eight weeks for the shoes to land on your doorstep (if you’re ordering from the UK), but you can expect conscientious little emails in-between to reassure you that your little creations are in safe hands.

Three weeks after making our order, we received the following adorable email, alongside snaps from the cobblers: “Our skilled craftsmen are still hard at work on your shoes! In our last update the upper of your shoes were being sewn together.

“Three weeks into production, the artisans are now in the process of molding the upper of your shoe into the perfect structure; you shoes are heated, then cooked, to ensure the perfect shape. Your dean shoes are closer to being a reality.”

A month later, and our heels were sent Express overnight delivery, wrapped in two boxes and complete with a dust bag and gel pads for the balls and heels of our feet (just in case they’re not comfy enough as is).

Our sparkling Dorothy-inspired wedding heels (complete with blue bows on the heels) look better in person than we ever could have imagined, the leather is top quality and the craftsmanship sturdier than we would have given a ‘made in China’ tag credit for.

The girls are on hand to help out throughout the ordering process and if you’re not 100% happy with your shoes when they arrive, they even offer a full refund or exchange service - their mission is to make sure you LOVE your shoes, if there’s something they can do to make them better, they’ll do it.

But we’re more than happy with our new pair, and now that we’ve found our perfect heels, there’s not a chance we’re letting them out of our sights for even a second.

Design your own pair of Milk & Honey heels

[ Luxury for less - Designer bags for under £500 ]
[ Rainy weather wardobe must-haves for those April showers ]
[ Spring Fashion: The key pieces for your SS14 wardrobe ]