Footwear Plus

WHAT DO YOU get when you mix coffee beans and mens footwear designs? How about entrepreneur extraordinaire Joshua Bingaman, owner of Progress Coffee, a popular Austin, TX, hangout for the caffeinated crowd, and founder and designer of Helm, a mens line of finely crafted leather shoes and boots. Bingaman splits his time between the two ventures, but admits serving up mouthwatering shoe designs is his primary love.

His mothers Imelda Marcos syndrome spurred his own fixation with shoes at an early age”boots in particular”but it wasnt until Bingaman and his brother opened the trendy Subterranean Shoe Room in San Franciscos Mission District in 2001 (since closed after the brothers relocated to Austin in 2003), that he first thought about designing his own collection. I wanted a line of shoes that incorporated all of the attributes of...