International Women's Day

International Women’s Day is a day that carries a very personal meaning for us.

When Davoud works at the sewing machine, he uses his left foot on the pedal — the same side as the heart. As he often says, when you are making, your heart has to go into the work.

That belief — that craft is something carried in the heart — is integral to our business.

Davoud grew up in Iran and was a teenager during the Iranian Revolution. When universities closed in the early years after the revolution, he began working in his family’s shoemaking trade instead, learning the craft from his uncles — his mother’s brothers — who were all cordwainers. What began as necessity became a lifelong dedication to craft.

Shoemaking in Davoud’s family was never just a job. It was something passed down through generations — a skill learned by hand, side by side, within the family.

Years later, when Davoud became a father, he faced a difficult decision. He could remain in Iran — close to friends and family while running a successful shoe company — but within a system where freedoms of expression were limited and women’s rights had steadily been restricted.

As he watched his oldest child, Mina, grow up, he struggled to imagine a future where his daughter would be treated as an equal. She was only a toddler at the time, but the decision became clear. For her future, and for the opportunities he hoped she would have, Davoud made the difficult choice to leave Iran and build a new life in Canada.

It was not an easy choice. Leaving meant distance from family, culture, and the life he had built. But it was also an act of love — a belief that his daughter deserved a future where equality and opportunity were not uncertain.

Today we are grateful to live and work in Canada, where those values are fundamental rights.

In recent years, the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” have become a rallying cry in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, sparking a movement calling for dignity and basic freedoms for women.

On International Women’s Day, those words carry special meaning. They remind us that the freedoms we experience here are not guaranteed everywhere, and that the hope for equality continues to shape lives and decisions around the world.

Family has always been at the heart of HD Russell Boots. In many ways, this craft has always been about family — the people who teach us, the people we build a future for, and the people we carry with us even when they are no longer beside us.

And every day in the workshop, when Davoud presses the sewing machine pedal with his left foot — the side closest to the heart — he is reminded of the path that brought him here: the family who taught him, the daughter whose future shaped his choices, and the brother whose memory continues to live in the work.

Everything we make carries that spirit with it — the love of family, the resilience to start again in a new place, and the hope that the next generation will walk a freer path than the one before.