Walk in my shoes
Local businessman makes Taos Moccasins in Gallup

Salvador Lopez assembles Taos Moccasins in the basement of City Electric Shoe Shop on Tuesday. Owners Louie and Tony Bonaguidi bought the business in 2006 and are gearing up for the busy season with upcoming weddings and graduations. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Three years ago, Taos Moccasins called up City Electric Shoe Store, one of its biggest customers, and told the owners that it was going out of business.

The company still had a few hundred pairs of moccasins available and the owners wondered if Louis Bonaguidi, City Electric’s owner, would be interested in buying them at a good price.

Since the shoe store sold hundreds of moccasins a year, Bonaguidi immediately expressed an interest and traveled to Taos to get the moccasins.

But something strange happened on that trip. He ended up not only getting the moccasins but buying the company.

Three years later, Bonaguidi has set up a small moccasin-making plant in the basement of his shoe store, where he makes many of the moccasins that his stores sell to Native Americans and tourists.

He also supplies a few of the clients that Taos previously sold to, but for the most part, it has become an internal operation that functions as his main supplier of moccasins.

He questions whether he will ever get as big as Taos was.

Taos stopped operations when its former owners realized the property the company sat upon was worth a lot more than what they were earning making moccasins.

The thing that most people don’t realize is that making a moccasin is not only labor-intensive, but getting everything that is needed to make all the styles and sizes of moccasins that the Taos company was known for is staggering.

Along the walls of the basement workshop are cabinets upon cabinets containing little nooks. Inside each of these nooks is the metal die that is used for each style and each size moccasin.

Each style takes three dies — which look like small metal frames that are used to fit the patterns around — and each size needs three more.

To produce the 60 to 80 styles that Taos was putting out before it shut down operation requires 5,000 to 6,000 dies.

Bonaguidi’s basement, which is loaded with the dies, holds only a small portion of the total number that he acquired when he purchased the company. The rest are in storage, and Bonaguidi said he and his staff just put out seven styles at the present time.

Another problem he would face, he said, if he decided to sell the moccasins nationally is the fact that the biggest moccasin manufacturer in the country, Minnetonka Moccasins, use labor outside the country so it can make its products cheaper.

Minnetonka also makes a good product, Bonaguidi said. So good that his company also sells some of their products in his store.

But the thing that Bonaguidi has going for him is that he knows his customers.

City Electric, which got its name because it was the first to use electrical machines to repair shoes, has been around for more than 70 years, supplying Native Americans with everything from boots and belts to moccasins that are used for traditional ceremonies or for kids who want to dress traditionally when they go to school graduation ceremonies.

Many of the ceremonial dancers at the Ceremonial will be wearing moccasins that they brought while they were in Gallup for the Ceremonial, and the company does a good business with tourists who come in to buy the moccasins for presents, souvenirs or even to wear.

Priced from $15 for infant moccasins to as much as $100 for a fancy pair of adult moccasins, it is something that will never go out of style in Gallup.

Bonaguidi only has a couple of people working part-time making the moccasins as demand calls for it, but he’s still happy that he purchased the company.

Bonaguidi still wanted to know if it really was a good buy so one day he asked his bookkeeper who told him that it was probably the best purchase he has ever made because it enabled him “to become his own supplier.”

For a business that deals with so many products, being your own supplier isn’t a bad thing these days.