Profile

Hiroshi Arai was born in 1972 in Hitachi City of Ibaraki Prefecture, home of the famous electronics company. 
Dreaming of becoming an engineer from an early age, he started studying power generation using superconductors.
 However, he grew more attracted to leather and how it becomes more beautiful with age. Leaving high-tech machinery behind, he joined a shoe factory specializing in Goodyear welting in 1994, gaining experience related to technique, design and materials over a span of 14 years.
He then established his own Hiroshi Arai's Laboratory of Kutu in 2008, and opened a made-to-measure footwear shop after that in 2012. In 2015, he expanded his store into a workshop, where his goal was to enhance the art of handcrafted shoes in order to create those with more detailed designs and moldings, that are also more comfortable. He held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2018. 
He is making “Kutu” (meaning leather footwear in Japanese), striving to provide one-of-a-kind, Japanese-made footwear, specially created for everyone.