Édouard Blanchard opened a shoe workshop next to the Limoges train station in 1891, trading first as E. Blanchard & Cie and later as The Ultra Shoes. His son Eugène renamed the company Weston in 1922, borrowing the name from the town near Boston where his father had learned the Goodyear welting method at the turn of the century. Every J.M. Weston shoe is still made at that single Limoges factory, and the company remains the only shoemaker to run its own sole-leather tannery, Tannerie Bastin, in nearby Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.