Commissioning a Pair from Outside Pakistan

The studio is in Islamabad and every pair is painted there. If you are somewhere else, nothing about the work changes and three practical things do: how the price is quoted, how you pay, and how long the parcel takes. Here is each of them, said plainly, because these are the questions a website usually leaves out.

Overseas commissions are quoted in US dollars, and the figure already has the parcel inside it. That is deliberate. Express courier out of Pakistan costs more than most people picture when they imagine postage, and a quote that leaves it to be added later is a quote that changes after you have agreed to it. So the number you are given is the number, and it is settled before anything is painted.

Payment from abroad is arranged in conversation rather than through the checkout. The on-site checkout is built around domestic bank transfer, which is the right instrument inside Pakistan and the wrong one for somebody paying from another country. So an international commission is agreed on WhatsApp: the brief, the quote and the method, in writing, in the same thread where you will later receive photographs of the finished work and a tracking number. It is less automated than a card field and considerably harder to misunderstand.

If the pair is for a date and you are not ready to commission yet, a place at the bench can be held rather than bought. The reservation is a fixed fee, credited in full against the piece, quoted in dollars like everything else, with its terms confirmed to you in writing before you pay anything. It holds your slot in the queue rather than a particular shoe. It exists because the bench genuinely fills, and a queue anyone can join for nothing is not a queue.

Time is the part worth planning around. Ten to fourteen working days at the bench for most pairs, longer for genuinely complex ones, and then the courier on top. Tracked delivery runs worldwide and the tracking number arrives in the same thread as everything else. Customs is the variable nobody controls: most parcels clear without incident, some sit for a few days, and any duty your own country charges on an incoming parcel is yours to pay rather than ours. We would rather say that here than have you meet it at the door.

Sizing is the one thing that is genuinely harder at distance. A Signature is painted onto a brand-new Air Force 1 that the studio buys, so the size you give us is the size that gets bought, and nobody tries it on first. Send the size you take in that model specifically rather than your general size, and if you are between sizes or unsure, say so in the brief. We will talk it through before anything is purchased. It is a short conversation that prevents the one problem a brush cannot fix.

One service we keep domestic: painting a pair you already own. The reason is arithmetic rather than reluctance. Your shoes would have to cross a border twice, the inbound leg is yours to pay, and together those legs cost more than the painting does, on the service whose whole appeal is that it is the least expensive way in. Add the customs treatment of used footwear and the risk of losing a pair that belongs to somebody else and cannot be replaced, and it stops being a favour.

Everything else is identical. The same bench, the same hand, the same layered curing and sealing, the same photographs before the box is closed. Tell the studio what you have in mind and where you are, and you will get a real quote rather than an estimate.