"Museums are intrinsically a tough sell compared with other forms of entertainment," says Emanuele Lepri, director of Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum. A museum devoted entirely to footwear is an even trickier challenge.

Nevertheless, with a relatively minuscule annual operating budget of $1.7 million, the classy occupant of the southwest corner of Bloor and St. George streets is currently celebrating a full decade of presenting what might crassly, but aptly, be described as history on the hoof.

The shoe museum is the world's only such institution that - unlike its smaller and less ambitious counterparts in Italy, England and Germany - is not sponsored by, or is a genteel shill for, any element of the shoe industry.

Yes, the museum's founder is Sonja Bata, whose husband Thomas was the longtime head of the global Bata shoe empire. And yes, a goodly portion of its budget is provided by the private Bata Shoe Museum (BSM) Foundation.

Ken Kerr, Business Edge
Museum curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, with a woman's French boot circa the 1890s, and director Emanuele Lepri, holding an authentic steel armour boot from the early 16th century, display some of the museum's historic footwear.

But from the outset, says Lepri, "Mrs. Bata was adamant that (her) museum's mandate would be purely cultural without any kind of commercial connection."

That high-minded choice - especially when it would have been easy to accept quid pro quo funding from deep-pocketed shoe chains - makes the BSM's survival a tough go, but a thought-provoking model for other entrepreneurs.

The genesis of what eventually became a thriving museum occurred about half a century ago when Swiss-born Sonja Bata became a self-described detective. During her frequent trips around the world, she compiled exotic and ethnically representative, contemporary and historic footwear ranging, as she likes to say, "from the ordinary to the extraordinary."

According to museum curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, her efforts demonstrate "that shoes can be a steppingstone into much larger concepts and much larger cultural interests and concerns."

By the late 1970s, her collection had become so vast and - in the opinion of many historians - so culturally significant that she decided to bestow it on her adopted country and bequeath it to future generations in the form of a permanent museum.

Bata's goal took 12 years of devoted effort by many people to accomplish, from the 1983 establishment of her foundation, to years later the quirky shoebox-shaped design by top architect Raymond Moriyama, to the opening of the museum in 1995, says Jill Oakes, environment and geography professor at the University of Manitoba.

Renowned circumpolar experts, Oakes and husband Rick Riewe, a U of M zoology professor, were among the first of an array of scholars commissioned by Bata to hunt for, retrieve and professionally document historically important shoes. The couple has continued doing so ever since, trudging through Siberia, Alaska, Greenland and northern Europe to bring back such treasures as the evocative array of moccasins and other footwear displayed in the current exhibition Appeasing the Spirits: Alaskan Coastal Cultures.

"Without the Bata Shoe Museum," says Oakes, "there would simply be no opportunity to collect information that the First Nations, Inuit and Metis want to have collected and no vehicle in which to disseminate it internationally."

Meanwhile, says Semmelhack, more experts were scouring other parts of the globe for shoes and related artifacts that would complement what Bata had already collected. The goal was to "create a centre of knowledge about the role of footwear in the social and cultural life of humanity ... and a glimpse of history by looking at what people wore on their feet."

Today the collection encompasses more than 13,000 shoes and other objects. It spans 4,500 years of history and virtually every culture in the world. Describing it succinctly is impossible, but a fair stab at doing so would likely include: Pre-Columbian sacrificial boots, fur samurai shoes, footwear and artifacts from ancient Egypt and Greece.

Also housed in state-of-the-art, glass-lined galleries are jewel-encrusted Elizabethan high heels, a pair of Napoleon's socks, Queen Victoria's satin dancing flats, Canadian flappers' high heels from the Roaring '20s and American astronaut boots.

Not to mention the beaded and porcupine-quilled footwear in the current Paths Across the Plains exhibition, or the exquisitely crafted shoes now on display in the Beads, Buckles and Bows: 400 Years of Embellished Footwear exhibition, which just won a first-prize award from the American Association of Museums.

Lest all this sound a tad too academic, Lepri - who was appointed director about 18 months ago after a stint at Italy's famed textile museum in Florence - quickly points out the "fun element" at the BSM. He describes this as somewhat like sugar-coating a nutritious vitamin pill and praises Bata's "brilliance" in making sure the museum doesn't fall prey to "a general tendency to perceive museums as dusty, dead and snobbish."

The solution, which he says is very much in line with prevailing trends among the world's top museums, is not to dumb down weightier holdings, but to leaven them with come-hither exhibitions that entice a broader range of visitors.

In the BSM's case, we're mainly talking celebrity footwear, which is where avid shoe collector Harvey Miltchin enters the story. About three years ago, the Toronto podiatrist asked Bata if she might be interested in exhibiting some of the athletes' and entertainers' shoes he'd been buying at auctions in the seven years since he'd snagged a pair of basketball star Michael Jordan's sneakers.

Spying a sweetener when they saw one, Bata and her team snapped up Miltchin's offer and mounted a short-term exhibition. It had to be extended repeatedly when locals and tourists clamoured to see not only Jordan's size 20s, but also Marilyn Monroe's red high heels, the black boots Elvis Presley wore in three movies, Princess Diana's pumps, Wayne Gretzky's rookie skates, Terry Fox's runners and numerous other such finds.

Although Lepri and Semmelhack let slip that this sort of fare is not their personal cup of tea, both concede it's what put the BSM - which attracts about 85,000 visitors a year - on the mainstream tourist map. And the attraction of Miltchin's celebrity shoes, some of which are slated to be added to the museum's permanent collection, turned out to be a crucial boon after 2004 when, as Semmelhack puts it, the BSM "was walloped by SARS" and visits plummeted by 25 per cent.

Various business strategies have since corrected that loss to within 10 per cent of peak attendance, Lepri says.

These include - in addition to raising admission fees to $8 from $6 - revenue streams such as sales of relevant books, posters, notepaper, jewelry and mementoes at the museum's gift shop, Thursday night lectures and, in lieu of an expensive marketing campaign, a partnership with Flare magazine to promote this year's 10th anniversary activities.

As for the BSM's future, Bata is currently in France scouting items for the upcoming Icons of Elegance exhibition of 20th-century innovations such as stiletto heels.

Lepri is involved in a redesign of the permanent gallery, while hoping that the museum's far-flung experts will come up with more men's shoes to add to the collection. He says they are in shorter supply than women's footwear because, less sentimental about things such as wedding shoes, men tend not to preserve what goes on their feet.

Speaking of men, Semmelhack says with a gratified chortle that her favourite visitors to the museum are "husbands sort of rolling their eyes and obviously thinking, 'What has my wife dragged me to now?' "And then I see them at end (of their tours) lagging behind because they're just so knocked out by what they've seen that they weren't expecting."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)