About

PROTA
FIORI

JENNIFER STUCKO

FOUNDER.
DESIGNER.
INVENTOR.

Jennifer Stucko founded Prota Fiori after more than a decade working within Italian fashion.

Her career began at Giorgio Armani and continued at Valentino and A.Testoni, where she worked closely with the business of Italian fashion and footwear.

In 2019, she set out to build a house of her own.

Her premise was clear: preserve the beauty, craft and standards of Italian shoemaking while reconsidering the materials used to make it.

Jennifer Stucko, founder of Prota Fiori

The beauty would remain. The rules could change.

Shoe lasts wrapped with pale nude straps in an Italian workshop

ITALY

Jennifer returned to Italy to build Prota Fiori.

In Le Marche, one of Italy's historic centers of shoemaking, she began working with family businesses, specialized suppliers and artisans whose knowledge had been developed over generations.

It was here that the first Prota Fiori shoes were developed and the foundations of the house took shape.

PROTA FIORI

Prota Fiori means to protect the flowers.

The name gave the house its first codes: the rose as its emblem and flowers as the names of each shoe.

Rooted in Jennifer's Italian heritage and inspired by the natural world, they remain a quiet expression of the idea on which Prota Fiori was founded: protecting what is beautiful while imagining how it can be made differently.

Prota Fiori shoe sole sketch with rose emblem
Artisan working on a shoe with Italian machinery

INVENTION

Building Prota Fiori soon took Jennifer beyond conventional footwear design.

Next-generation materials did not always behave like traditional leather. Existing manufacturing methods were not always enough.

Working between material developers and Italian shoemakers, Jennifer began developing new methods for constructing footwear with these materials.

Experimentation became invention.

That work resulted in two U.S. utility patents, with Jennifer named as inventor.

For Jennifer, invention became an extension of design: solving not only what a shoe could be made from, but how it could be made.

LOOKING FORWARD

Prota Fiori continues to look ahead: designing beautiful shoes in Italy, exploring innovative materials and new ways of making, while preserving the craft at the heart of the house.

The pursuit remains the same: beautiful shoes, thoughtfully made, and a continual search for what comes next.