SHE KNOWS MEN’S SOLES
Shoe master breaks the leather ceiling
In a world dominated by men, Maria Germer has shoehorned her way to the top.
Germer, 57, has ruled the men’s shoe department at Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue for nearly 40 years.
Customers visit her from as far away as South Africa to be fitted for shoes, and some longtime clients trust her so completely that they will buy a pair of $700 shoes sight unseen.
“She’s consistent, and she really knows the busi- ness of men’s shoes,” said longtime customer Frank Gooden, a mortgage broker. “She can tell you when a batch of cordovan leather is just not up to standard.”
Armed with a shoehorn and a withering downward glance that tells her in seconds the foot size of a potential customer, Germer is so valued at Brooks Brothers that the company makes shoes for her.
And she only ever wears men’s shoes.
“If I wore women’s shoes, my customers would never take me seriously,” she told The Post.
Germer’s love affair with men’s shoes began when she was 17 and her father, who worked in maintenance for Brooks Brothers, helped her get a job.
For years, the senior salesmen — all men — simply tolerated her and wouldn’t allow her near their customers.
One day, when all of them took off for an afternoon coffee break, she stunned everyone by selling 39 pairs of the company’s most expensive shoes to a Spanishspeaking tourist. The sale was a store record.
Germer, whose mother was Honduran and father German, grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, with five siblings who have all worked for Brooks Brothers. She speaks fluent Spanish.
“They couldn’t believe it,” she said of her col- leagues. “Suddenly, they realized that I knew more about shoes than they did.”
Since then, Brooks Brothers estimates that she has sold more than 15,000 pairs of shoes.
“It’s a passion,” said the grandmother, who now lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, becoming tearyeyed as she showed a customer a wingtip. “I come here every day, and it’s just like the first day I started.”