India has approximately 1.4 million registered doctors. It has over 9.5 million teachers in secondary education alone. Add to this the tens of millions of corporate professionals, lawyers, bankers, government officers, and executives who report to offices and institutions five or six days a week, dressed formally, on their feet for hours at a stretch.

This is one of the largest cohorts of walking professionals in the world. And the footwear industry — both domestic and international — has almost entirely failed them.

The Indian Market: What Is Actually Available

If you walk into any multi-brand shoe store in any major Indian city today looking for formal leather shoes, you will find broadly three categories.

Mass-market domestic brands at ₹1,500–₹4,000. These use synthetic or low-grade leather, basic construction, and standard insoles. They look acceptable for the first few months and deteriorate rapidly. They are not built for daily professional wear.

Mid-range brands at ₹4,000–₹12,000. Better leather quality, but still built on Western lasts for Western foot shapes, with no meaningful comfort engineering beyond basic rubber outsoles. Many professionals in this range report the same foot pain they experienced at lower price points — just with a longer-lasting shoe.

Premium imports at ₹15,000–₹40,000+. Excellent craftsmanship, beautiful leather, and genuine durability. But designed for European wear patterns — cooler climates, harder stone floors, shorter average walking distances per day — and priced entirely out of reach for most Indian professionals who might benefit most from better footwear.

The Last Problem: Indian Feet Are Different

This is not often discussed publicly, but it is a well-documented reality in podiatric research: Indian feet, on average, have different proportions than the European and North American feet that most formal shoe lasts are designed around.

Indian feet tend to be wider in the forefoot relative to heel width, with higher arches on average and a different toe box requirement. Shoes built on standard D-width European lasts — which includes the vast majority of formal shoes sold in India — systematically compress the forefoot, restrict the natural spread of toes under load, and place incorrect pressure on the medial arch.

Over a two-hour wear, this misfit is uncomfortable. Over a twelve-hour wear, it is damaging. The long-term consequences — bunions, plantar fasciitis, metatarsalgia, chronic lower back pain — are significant and genuinely common among Indian professionals who have worn ill-fitting formal shoes for years.

The Climate Dimension

Most formal footwear is engineered for temperatures between 10°C and 20°C and low-to-moderate humidity. India is not that climate. In large parts of the country for much of the year, ambient temperatures are 30°C–40°C, with humidity that can exceed 80%.

In these conditions, the foot sweats significantly more than in temperate climates. Leather uppers that are not properly breathable trap moisture, accelerating bacterial growth, causing skin irritation, and softening the insole — which then loses its already minimal cushioning faster. Adhesives in cheaper constructions delaminate. The shoe deteriorates in ways that European climate testing never anticipates.

A formal shoe engineered for India needs to account for heat management, moisture wicking, and material durability under sustained thermal stress. These are not afterthoughts — they are primary design requirements that no imported brand currently addresses.

What Needs to Exist

India needs a premium formal shoe brand that starts from its professionals' actual daily reality: long hours, warm and humid conditions, varied surfaces, Indian foot geometry, and the non-negotiable requirement that the shoe looks authoritative.

Not a shoe designed in London for a London banker that happens to be distributed in India. Not a cheap domestic shoe with a premium price attached. Something genuinely built from first principles — for the doctor, the executive, the teacher, the officer who refuses to compromise on either comfort or appearance.

This is not a niche market. It is one of the largest untapped segments in Indian consumer goods. The professional class in India is growing, increasingly aware of quality, and entirely willing to pay for something that genuinely serves their needs.

They are simply waiting for someone to build it.

DOKOH is that attempt. Started not in a design studio but from a genuine frustration — and built with the specific, unambiguous aim of creating the formal shoe that Indian professionals should have had access to for decades.