Why Seiji McCarthy Left the NBA to Make Bespoke Shoes in Tokyo

Seiji discovered that achieving a lifelong goal—working at the Olympics—felt hollow because he didn’t love the work itself, which led him to abandon corporate life and become a craftsman.

Summary of Seiji McCarthy — Made to Be Worn. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:04:04 — His current wait list for bespoke shoes is about three years, and his small team of four people (including himself) produces roughly 70 to 80 pairs annually.
• 00:07:00 — He never planned to become a shoemaker in Japan. He was half-Japanese but grew up in America, moved to Berlin thinking he’d make shoes there, and only came to Tokyo when his mentor offered to incubate his business for six months in 2015.
• 00:07:59 — Living in Europe and studying British shoemaking, he didn’t respect American style until moving to Japan and meeting people like his friend Ethan, who showed him the appreciation for Americana that made him want to create American-influenced shoes.
• 00:08:48 — He worked for the NBA in various roles, including evaluating in-game fan experiences at arenas and eventually getting sent to the Beijing Olympics—fulfilling a childhood dream he had always wanted.
• 00:12:41 — Getting to the Olympics turned out to be deeply disappointing because the actual work involved spreadsheets and coordination with committees, not something he enjoyed, despite it being his stated career goal.
• 00:13:36 — He realized he wanted to make things with his hands instead of managing large organizational projects, which led him away from the NBA and toward shoemaking.
• 00:20:03 — Many people have unrealistic expectations about bespoke shoes, thinking perfection means everything should be flawless, when actually fitting well and looking good requires balancing technical precision with aesthetic judgment.
• 00:36:54 — He spends approximately 150 hours making each first pair of bespoke shoes, including measuring, creating the last, pattern-making, trial fittings, and final construction—and he wants customers to actually wear them rather than keeping them pristine.
• 00:45:55 — He studied philosophy and religious studies in college, responding deeply to Taoism and philosophers like Zhuanzi who used craftsmen as exemplars of living a good life, which he didn’t connect to his own path until becoming a shoemaker later.

In depth

The NBA detour and the hollowness of a dream fulfilled

Seiji’s path to shoemaking runs through a surprisingly specific slice of American sports culture. He attended the same high school as Kobe Bryant 00:08:51, had a front-row seat to Philadelphia 76ers practices because of his father’s job at St. Joe’s 00:09:02, and was, by his own admission, never much of a basketball player himself at five-foot-six 00:09:12. None of that stopped him from fixating on the NBA as a career goal once he noticed how much of his free time went to watching highlights 00:09:34, and a college buddy who’d played alongside Bryant got him in the door 00:09:46.

The job itself started unglamorously: producing what he half-jokingly calls Office Space-style reports for the league’s team consulting arm 00:10:17, work he describes as exactly as tedious as the movie makes it look 00:10:29. He eventually escaped into a group that evaluated in-arena fan experience — music, mascots, the texture of a live game 00:11:0700:11:12 — and that lateral move, not the international-relations track he’d actually studied for, is what got him sent to the Beijing Olympics 00:11:4900:11:55, the literal realization of a goal he’d held since college 00:12:17.

And that’s where the story complicates itself. Seiji is blunt that reaching the goal was deflating 00:12:41: no amount of anticipation made the actual work — spreadsheets, liaising with organizing committees — feel like anything other than office work 00:13:23, and he says plainly that a goal can’t deliver fulfillment if you don’t love the work underneath it 00:13:00. Grateful as he is to the NBA for the experience 00:13:28, the Olympics functioned less as a triumph than as diagnostic information: he wanted to make things with his hands 00:13:36.

That realization reframes the career change not as an escape from corporate life in general but as a correction of scale. He describes craftsmanship as a smaller life that paradoxically opens into a bigger world 00:13:5800:14:05 — you’re no longer in the mix, flying to meetings, but you notice more because you’re not swept along by that frothy pace 00:14:22. The Olympics gave him proximity to spectacle; the workshop gave him attention.

Needing Japan to see what was American about himself

Seiji’s stylistic identity didn’t arrive in a straight line either. He is half-Japanese but grew up in the United States, and he never planned to end up making shoes in Tokyo 00:07:00. His original ambition was to be a shoemaker in Europe, having trained in London’s British tradition, but Berlin turned out to be a poor market for bespoke footwear 00:07:16, and when his life there stalled, his mentor Hiroyuki Nagamachi offered him six months of incubation in Japan 00:07:36, which is how he landed in Tokyo in June 2015 00:07:57.

The more interesting twist is what happened to his taste once he arrived. He names a familiar psychological pattern — that people rarely respect what their own country produces, always assuming the better version exists somewhere else 00:08:03 — and admits he fell squarely into it: despite being steeped in Ralph Lauren-style Americana as a kid 00:08:22, he spent his early shoemaking years chasing British refinement instead, treating American style as something unremarkable because it was simply what he grew up around 00:08:14.

It took relocating to Japan and watching people like his friend Ethan engage with Americana — reverently, almost academically — for him to reconsider what he’d dismissed 00:08:33. He states the irony directly: it took coming to Japan to make him appreciate American style 00:08:36, meaning the signature hybrid he’s now known for — American silhouettes with British polish — wasn’t a strategy he arrived with. It assembled itself backwards, through other people’s eyes, in a country where he hadn’t expected to end up at all 00:08:41.

What three years and 150 hours actually buy you

The wait for a pair of Seiji’s bespoke shoes currently runs about three years 00:04:04, produced by a team of four — himself plus three workshop staff — turning out somewhere around 70 to 80 pairs annually 00:17:01. That scarcity isn’t a marketing posture; it’s structural. He distinguishes between made-to-order, made-to-measure, and full bespoke 00:19:19, with only the last category involving a last, pattern, and construction built entirely around one person’s foot 00:19:23.

That scarcity also feeds an expectation problem he’s candid about. Because almost nobody in a consumer culture has something made exclusively for them, clients arrive assuming bespoke is synonymous with flawlessness 00:20:03, and his own team’s instinct, especially early on, was to chase that standard literally — obsessing over every stitch as though the job demanded fanatical perfectionism 00:20:25.

He walks through why a single pair eats roughly 150 hours 00:36:5400:37:04: measuring, carving a custom last, drafting a pattern, building a trial shoe, fitting it, then — if anything is off — re-cutting the last, re-drafting the pattern, and building another trial shoe before the final pair is even started 00:38:27. Difficult feet can push that to multiple rounds. The payoff, he argues, is that the effort invested in nailing fit on a first pair is what earns repeat clients 00:39:01.

What he’s since learned to resist is treating fit and appearance as separable problems. A shoe can be technically flawless against the foot and still look wrong if it doesn’t read as elegant, and vice versa; he offers a blunt internal metric — a shoe that nails fit perfectly but only looks 60 percent right still won’t satisfy the client 00:25:13. Reconciling those two axes, he says, is something pure technical training doesn’t teach — only years of watching how people actually wear shoes does 00:25:46.

Taoism, tailors, and the case for friction

Before any of this, Seiji studied philosophy and religious studies in college 00:45:55, and gravitated toward Taoism — specifically Zhuangzi, a figure who comes after Lao Tzu and who repeatedly reaches for craftsmen as his model for how to live well 00:46:1100:46:2000:46:41. At the time, he insists, this was purely an intellectual attraction; it never occurred to him that he’d eventually embody the archetype he was reading about 00:47:10. The philosophy stuck decades before the craft did.

Having actually become the craftsman, he now describes the daily experience in terms that echo that old reading: a smaller life, a bigger world 00:47:21. His example is almost mundane — a tree seen from a moving car registers as a color, but a tree seen by someone who has spent a day slowed down by handwork registers as a living thing reaching toward its own nourishment 00:47:5700:48:24. He credits the work itself, not any deliberate mindfulness practice, with producing that shift 00:48:39.

He brings in a friend’s postdoctoral research as corroborating evidence rather than personal anecdote: the study is investigating why people who make things by hand with their own hands — tailors in particular — often keep improving well into old age, bucking the usual pattern of decline 00:48:4600:48:5200:49:38. Seiji’s own interpretation leans on agency: making something puts you in active control of an outcome, whereas passively absorbing emails, feeds, and instant AI-generated answers removes the friction that otherwise proves you’re present 00:50:3000:50:37.

He extends this into a broader cultural claim, noting that traditional hierarchies elevated makers over merchants 00:50:49, and that contemporary life’s drive toward frictionlessness is quietly making people less happy, not more 00:51:28. Friction — the resistance of material, the slowness of getting something right — is, in his account, what generates the feeling of being alive in a given moment 00:51:3200:51:47. It’s a sweeping claim, offered without much pushback in the conversation, and it rests more on lived conviction than on the postdoc data he cites secondhand.

Why a scuffed shoe is the point, not the failure

The host volunteers his own counter-example early: he buys expensive things, then stashes them unused out of fear of damaging them 00:31:3700:31:44. Seiji doesn’t dismiss the impulse — he traces his own version of it to a childhood where necessities were covered but anything beyond that was scarce, which he says leaves him genuinely terrified of nice things even now 00:32:4000:33:03. This isn’t framed as a contradiction of his craft philosophy so much as a separate, unresolved tension he admits to living with.

Professionally, though, he pushes hard against that instinct. He wants his shoes treated as daily wear, not relics — explicitly telling clients these should become their everyday beaters 00:30:27 — and he and his team repair worn-through pairs rather than treating heavy use as damage 00:31:08. His reference point is Cary Grant, whom he imagines wearing the same pair of shoes to awards shows year after year, each appearance looking better than the last because the shoes had relaxed into use 00:33:57. He worries that Instagram has pushed bespoke footwear toward the opposite, trophy-case instinct, and says explicitly that he wants customers extracting real value from the shoes, not preserving them 00:36:3000:36:49.

Underneath that preference sits a claim about what handmade objects actually transmit. Seiji argues a maker’s particular tendencies — right- or left-handedness, personal taste, even stylistic quirks that look like flaws — get imparted into the object itself 00:41:2900:41:49, which is why he can’t simply replicate another maker’s toe shape on request; it isn’t his to produce 00:42:2900:42:52. He’d rather hear that a shoe looks human than that it looks machine-perfect — being told a stitch line looks so clean it could’ve been done by a robot isn’t the compliment people think it is 00:43:19. The host’s own detour into a Noguchi lamp gallery, where the visibly hand-bent bamboo piece pulled him in precisely because it wasn’t as polished as its neighbors 00:39:5900:40:2200:40:49, serves as an outside confirmation of the same instinct: imperfection, legibly human, reads as more alive than precision ever could.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.