A Daughter’s TikTok of Her Father’s Old Kitten Heels Saved His Shoreditch Shoe Shop

For 32 years, Rachid Lazraq sold Italian leather shoes from a small storefront on Hackney Road, on a Shoreditch stretch where the independent shops had turned, one by one, into cafés and chains. His was the last shoe shop standing. Last winter there were days when no one came in at all. He put a closing-down sign in the window and started preparing for the end.

His daughter Zineb had just lost her job. With empty days to fill, she came down to the shop and filmed a simple day-in-the-life video of the shelves, the boxes, and her dad at work. Then she noticed the heels. Sitting in the back was a stock of colourful kitten heels, mules, and slingbacks he had carried since the early 2000s, the Y2K styles that people her age had started hunting for. She pointed her phone at them and posted.

The video took off overnight. The North East Londoner reported that the shop’s Carrie Bradshaw-style heels pulled in millions of views and sent shoe lovers straight to the door. Within days, customers were queuing along the pavement, some waiting more than an hour in the July heat to try on a pair. People in line passed the time reading and talking with the strangers next to them.

On July 9, Rachid stepped outside, told the crowd, “We’re not closing down anymore,” and pulled the sign from the window while they cheered.

The shop had spent decades serving a loyal set of regulars, many of whom had drifted away as the area changed and overseas trips grew harder. Zineb’s video handed it to a new generation, one that wanted exactly the stock already sitting on his shelves. “They don’t want me to close,” Rachid said. “They want me to carry on.”

It is a family shop again. Zineb and her sister Maryam now work alongside their father, fielding messages from other countries and planning a way to sell online. Rachid, who says he had never figured out TikTok before all this, spends his days on his feet, fetching sizes and matching bags to shoes.

He had spent years hoping the right customers would find him. In the end it took his daughter, a phone, and a back room full of old heels to bring them to the door.