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A luxe Madison Avenue shoe shop tried to walk all over a well-heeled customer — asking nearly $7,000 for a custom order it repeatedly made incorrectly, the patron charges in a lawsuit.
Justin Mills wanted a pair of handmade, $4,400 Italian shoes in the fall of 2019, before the pandemic struck, from Santoni North America, but never got what he asked for, he charged in a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.
“You pay this much because it’s something you’re going to use every day, and to [have] last for a really long time. That’s the idea,” said Mills, 30, who attends law school in Tennessee and frequently visits the Big Apple.
He plunked down a $2,200 deposit on a pair of Oxfords, with a single seam in the back, according to court papers. But what he ended up with was a style of shoe “priced at thousands of dollars less, a double monk strap with toe cap” he claims.
“I was a little surprised actually, since it was the entirely wrong type of shoe from what I ordered,” he said.
The store agreed to remake the order “due to obvious error,” and he asked for the new pair to be made wider in the toe, to avoid foot pain, Mills said in his litigation.
He wasn’t able to pick up the replacement pair for several months due to the pandemic, and when he finally got to New York to get his shoes, Mills says he was disappointed again.
“The fit was too tight,” he said,
A Santoni manager pledged to correct the problem, but Mills says months of radio silence followed and that when he checked in with the manager in December, he got a kick in the gut.
Santoni allegedly wanted the $2,200 balance on the order paid off, plus an additional charge of $2,500 to make the fixes, claims Mills, who refused to shell out what would have been a total charge of nearly $7,000 to get his shoes done the right way.
“I wasn’t gonna do that — spend another $2,500 on top of what was supposed to be the total,” he said.
He’s putting his foot down instead, acting as his own lawyer to sue Santoni North America for $20,000 in damages.
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