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The tougher the competition gets – the more doubtful the marketing gets. One of the things that brands tend to use more and more in this day and age is dropping numbers on how long it takes to make the shoes, how long time that have been spent to develop new models, and similar. Numbers that are extremely exaggerated compared to reality.
People often talk about how things were better before, and about the many challenges around today for the quality shoe industry (I’m definitely one of them). But if we zoom out a bit, it’s a fact that today is a golden age to be interested in quality shoes, in all price ranges, from €150 Goodyear welted to €4,000 full bespoke, the options and quality-price ratio available is better than in a long, long time.
The first big player in the classic shoe industry that might fall due to corona seems to be British Foster & Son. They closed their factory this summer, now they are according to unconfirmed info to close their Jermyn Street store where their bespoke workshop has been based as well. Here’s a summary of what we know and the most credible rumours.
NOTE: NEW AND CORRECTED INFO ON THE TOPIC HAS BEEN ADDED FROM FOSTER & SON, SEE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE.
There’s branches of people within “the classic shoe world” who are skeptical against factory-made Goodyear welted shoes in general and all types of shortcuts from making “the best shoes possible”, which ideally would be fully handmade bespoke of absolute best quality. Thing is, this industry, all of it, needs to have those who take these shortcuts – here’s why.
An increasing amount of new brands are introduced which all market themselves as offering shoes comparable to much higher-priced shoes, since they “cut out the middlemen”. This, is more or less just false advertising. These brands themselves are the middleman, and the difference in actual margins compared to the traditional quality shoe brands are small. Here’s why.
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It’s certainly a special spring that we all have been through. The impact that the coronavirus has had on the whole society is huge, and for an industry like the manufacturing of quality shoes, it’s meant a whole new reality. Here’s an overview of what has happened to this industry this far, and some thoughts on what might come next.
The world of quality shoes is in general doing well in many regards when it comes to being sustainable and environmentally friendly. There’s still several areas where things can be improved though, some thoughts around this in today’s article.
Cheaney has more than doubled their turnover and earnings the past decade, after Jonathan and William Church took over the company and moved it away from private label production to producing shoes under its own name, and also selling these themselves to a larger extent. Hear about this topic, the Prada buyout of Church’s, Brexit and more in episode 10 of the Shoegazing Podcast.
The Asian quality shoe industry, outside Japan, is much more evolved than what most Westerners tend to believe. And more is happening – fast. In this episode, we hear shoe expert Robin Chang, founder of the Taiwanese shoe store Oak Room, talk about Asian-made classic shoes.
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How do makers of classic shoes succeed internationally? What are the important success factors, and the pitfalls? How strong is the British shoe heritage around the world nowadays, and what do the growing competition from Spanish, Portugese and Asian-made welted shoes mean? These are some of the topics that Richard Utting, Export Manager at one of Englands largest makers of Goodyear welted shoes, Loake, talk about in episode 8 of the Shoegazing Podcast.
