Our Story

It started with a shoehorn snapping in half.

Thin plastic, the kind that comes free with a pair of boots. It lasted about four months before it cracked at the neck, and the half left in the hand had an edge sharp enough to catch a thumb.

The replacement was the same shoehorn in a different colour.

That is most of the category. Shoehorns get treated as disposable — fifteen centimetres of brittle plastic that lives at the bottom of a drawer, gets lost, gets replaced, gets lost again. Nobody designs them, because nobody thinks they are worth designing.

We disagreed, on two counts.

Length

A short shoehorn only works if you bend down to meet it. A 55 cm one meets you where you already are — standing, in one motion, done in about a second.

Material

Solid beech does not flex, does not creak, and does not snap. It is the wood Nordic furniture makers have relied on for a century for exactly that reason: it takes daily load and stays where you put it.

And then, storage

A 55 cm object with nowhere to live just becomes clutter. So LÄVI has a magnet set into the handle and a small mount that goes up by the door with no drilling. It returns to the wall as easily as it comes off — which is the only reason a thing like this actually gets put back.

Who we are

We are a small team in Estonia. We are early, we read every email, and we would rather grow slowly on claims we can prove than quickly on ones we cannot.

LÄVI is a shoehorn. It will not change your life. It will get your shoes on without a fight, and it will still be doing that in ten years.

If it does not earn its place by your door, you have 90 days to get your money back — and you do not need to post anything back to us.

— The LÄVI team