Outdoor Maternity Footwear · Wan Dazhi

The first step of professional training is not drawing. It is reading materials, pairing lasts, and following a pattern — understanding how many pairs of hands a shoe passes through from cut piece to finished form.

The first thing he learned in those two years: a shoe must fit the foot before it can be called beautiful.

In his five years at Wangsheng, he was promoted to a full-time professional designer.

The word "occupation" means treating a shoe as a career rather than a few strokes on a drawing. Cutting requires a calculation of material loss; mass production has to pass quality inspection; a style has to answer for how it is worn. When a design reaches the production line, it becomes a colleague's hands and a customer's road.

What those five years built was the ability to translate "beautiful" into "can be made, and can be worn."

In his nine years at Baoxihe, he rose to Design Director.

At that level, the way you look at shoes changes: no longer at a single style, but at an entire product line; no longer how much design to add, but whether you dare to remove. The market has never lacked styles; what it lacks is styles that can each withstand being worn.

Over nine years he saw plenty of materials, lasts and trends — and settled on one conviction: the value of a shoe is not in quantity, but in millimetres.

The first three titles were given by the factories; the fourth he chose himself.

He let go of a seven-figure annual salary, let go of an established path with a team to lead, and came to DawnCalm as a dedicated designer. "Dedicated" means something very plain: only shoes, only maternity shoes, only outdoor maternity shoes — that one thing.

DawnCalm says it will spend ten years making just two styles. Wan Dazhi says it took him eighteen years to learn to make just one shoe. He and the brand are one sentence matching another.

That "ten years" does not count from the company's founding. More than a decade ago, while his wife was pregnant, he drew the first maternity-shoe sketch on paper. The idea stayed with him from then on, and only at the end of 2025 did the two styles actually land. Planning first, landing later — ten years in between.

His ambition is neither large nor small: to put a pair of shoes worthy of the four words "going out normally" on the feet of a pregnant woman.

Every decision in this pair of shoes has eighteen years behind it —