When you find someone who truly clicks with you—especially over a niche interest—you’ve met a kindred spirit. When your businesses and expertise align, it’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. And when you also fall in love? Now that’s kismet. Just ask Mark and Keri Suffolk, the founders of leading pointe shoe and ballet lifestyle brand Suffolk.
Mark is a former engineer with more than 30 years of experience in manufacturing pointe shoes. Keri is a former dancer who worked in fashion design and purchasing for upscale retail before opening Spotlight Dancewear, a large dance store near Dallas, TX, in 2000. She was a Suffolk customer long before the two met in person in 2009.
“They complement each other in terms of their individual strengths. Keri elevates the brand, and the brand wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Mark,” says Jeff Kinney, owner of Kinney Dancewear in Louisville, KY, and Noblesville, IN. “They do business the right way.”
In honor of Suffolk’s 25th anniversary, Dance Retailer News spoke with Mark and Keri to learn more about how the business started and expanded—and the pioneering new pointe shoe they’ve designed to celebrate a quarter of a century in business.
The Early Days
Let’s start at the beginning: In the late 1970s, Mark Suffolk was a young mechanical engineer from Leicester, England, who had an apprenticeship with an engineering company that manufactured parts for Rolls Royce and, once qualified, worked with airplane engines. Unable to find a full-time engineering position due to the economy, he took what he thought would be a temporary job making soft ballet slippers for a London pointe shoe manufacturer. Six months later, Mark began learning how to make pointe shoes and fell in love with the craft. He ended up staying at the company for 18 years.
While at the manufacturer, Mark was fascinated by the 1890s-era sewing machines that were still in use despite replacement parts becoming obsolete. “New machinery had been created since then, but they weren’t suitable for ballet shoes and couldn’t be adapted,” he says. Utilizing his mechanical-engineering experience, he “stripped one of the machines, drew up new parts, had them made, and rebuilt the machine.”
By the time he turned 25, Mark was a department manager and trained other shoemakers. At 33, he was given the budget to develop a new way of making pointe shoes based on his engineering skills. That led to a shoe line that is still a top seller for his former employer. When it became a success in the U.S. and Canada, Mark was the brand’s pointe shoe production manager and technical development manager. He was ready to explore new innovations. “Unfortunately, the company decided they didn’t want to take things any further,” he says. “But I had loads of ideas and I wanted to take them to the next level.”
Mark started his own company in 2000, opening a pointe shoe factory in Leicester with his customized machines. Orders began piling up on the fax machine before he had even designed Solo, his debut shoe. Once it went into production, Mark fulfilled every order by himself.
Today, Suffolk employs 50 shoemakers. Depending on the shoe and size, there are nine different widths (including half-widths!) and three shanks for dancers to choose from. “The quality, craftsmanship, and design is incredible,” Kinney says. “You can order six of the same size at different times and you know that every single pair is going to fit exactly the same.”
Partnering Up
In 2009, Keri’s store in Lewisville, TX, was a top Suffolk customer. When Mark’s North American distributor resigned, Keri placed her orders directly with Mark. “We had a normal client–vendor relationship for years until he asked, ‘Would you like to distribute?,’ ” Keri says. “Three weeks later, I was on a plane to England.”
Likewise, Keri convinced Mark to come stateside. He ended up taking a three-week, whirlwind tour of U.S. ballet companies and schools to observe current trends. On that trip, Keri discovered a significant obstacle. “At our first trade show together, people assumed Mark’s company name was Solo, after his pointe shoe design,” she says. “Mark had created his logo on Microsoft Word, and didn’t even have a catalog to hand out—even though by then he had 20 shoemakers and was a legitimate company. One of the biggest hurdles was getting the branding out there.”
Inspiration struck the duo on the flight back to England: “Our first patented [pointe shoe] design was drawn on an American Airlines cocktail napkin,” Mark says. “That was the first thing we collaborated on.” Once they started working together, “we were pretty much inseparable. We’ve been together ever since,” Keri says.
They married in 2012, the same year Mark was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to British manufacturing. Then, the pair merged their two businesses. Keri rebranded her store to Suffolk Dance Boutique, which is now a showroom for the brand’s pointe shoes and apparel line—Keri always knew that she wanted Suffolk to become known “not just for pointe shoes but as a ballet lifestyle brand”—which launched in late 2014 with leotards. It has since expanded to include tights, skirts, legwarmers, and canvas ballet slippers (designed by Mark), as well as accessories like bobby pins and hair nets; ribbons, elastics, and toe pads; dance bags; and therapy bands. “We really put a lot of thought into the products because we want to get it right. We are always asking ourselves, ‘What can we do better or differently?,’ ” says Keri, who now leads Suffolk’s product development, sales, and U.S. distribution.
Looking to the Future
To celebrate its 25th anniversary this year, Suffolk unveiled its most revolutionary pointe shoe collection to date: the Camber line. While developing the patent-pending shoes, Mark reviewed cross-sections of broken-in pointe shoes from a variety of manufacturers and discovered the shanks all had a slight single curve, or camber. He documented the bottom of dancers’ pointed feet to determine angles and an average shape, and spent two years designing prototypes and gathering input from dance medicine experts. “I’ve been doing this for 43 years and I’m still learning new stuff,” Mark says. “The foot was telling us what the foot wants. It has been shouting out for years and no one has been listening to it. We knew we were on to something good, but I had to reinvent everything I knew about shoemaking.”
Suffolk’s three Camber styles have an ergonomic design featuring the company’s patent-pending “Dual Camber shape,” so dancers feel like they have a broken-in shoe to help them get over the platform while still receiving the support provided by a new shoe. “There has never been a shoe like this before,” Kinney says, adding that his business was one of a few to beta-test the collection in fall 2024. “Our customers are just blown away and cannot believe that it is a ready-to-wear shoe. They can take it to class and start dancing in it, and it is not going to wear out quickly.”
As Suffolk looks toward its next 25 years, Mark and Keri credit their success to a one-of-a-kind synergy—both at work and at home. “We are a united team that gets things done,” Mark says. “We do way more together than I could ever do alone.” It’s a yin-yang duality, Keri says: “By working together, we have found a perfect balance that allows us to focus on our strengths.”
Hannah Maria Hayes has an MA in dance education from New York University and has been writing for Dance Media publications since 2008.