The founder of Paraboot, Rémy Richard, was born in 1878 in the shadow of the Alps in the town of Izeaux. Shoe and boot-making was the main industry in his hometown and by the late 1800s, Rémy was a skilled cutter for one such brand. Despite the rural nature of his hometown and its proximity to some of the greatest skiing and hiking in the world, most of the shoes Rémy worked on were for city slickers in some remote (to him) region of France. Richard realized that the real money was to be had in big cities, where contractors simply handed off their designs to these rural factories and reaped the rewards. So, he tried the same thing. He headed to Paris with some models of his designs and within a few years, he was contracting out of the very same factory he had just left. By 1908, he was catering to some prestigious clients in Paris and began to form his very own brand.
