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JULY/AUGUST 2012 | www.footwearbiz.com
Shoes on the move
F
ootwear feels like a completely different industry
today compared to the sector that
World Footwear
began to cover 25 years ago. Most countries
produced at least some of their own shoes and few
people had heard of the term outsourcing, even though it
was happening, of course. The foundations were already in
place for the industry we have today, in which sourcing and
shipping shoes to points of sale are the things that really
count in markets such as the US, Canada and much of
northern Europe (most of the wealthiest countries) rather
than making the footwear.
Feng Tay was founded in 1971, part of the huge industrial
development that took place in Taiwan, its home country,
during that decade. By 1977, Feng Tay was manufacturing for
Nike, a brand for which it now makes 50 million pairs of
shoes a year. Its history is mirrored by another huge
Taiwanese player, Pou Chen, which started making shoes
even earlier, in 1969. Adidas was the first major brand that
asked Pou Chen to produce on its behalf, with the two
companies signing their first agreement in 1978. Today, Pou
Chen claims to be the largest manufacturer of branded shoes
in the world with an output of 327.6 million pairs in 2011.
By the late 1980s, at the time of the launch of
World
Footwear
, both these groups had begun to spread their
manufacturing footprint outside Taiwan, opening factories in
China, Indonesia, Vietnam and India during the early years of
this magazine’s life so that, in 1993, when
World Footwear
was six years old, the influence of Taiwan as a manufacturing
location was already on the wane and China was by far the
biggest producer of shoes in the world, making a total of 3.3
billion pairs that year. The 50% share of global production
that Asia had in 1983 (largely thanks to groups in Taiwan and
South Korea) had now grown to 60% thanks to the output
from new factories in other parts of the continent.
Since the launch of
World Footwear
25 years ago, shoe manufacturing has
become a truly globalised industry and
logistics considerations necessarily play
an important role for all manufacturers,
brands and retailers. As is the case with
most logistics, packing, storing and
shipping shoes are activities that usually
take place well away from the glare of
publicity, but they can be critical to any
big footwear firm’s success.
Clever footwear firms will use extra flexibility in picking up shoes
from European ports to reduce inventory, lower costs and respond
more readily to fashion demands.
CREDIT: PORT OF HAMBURG
THE WORLD OF LOGISTICS AND FOOTWEAR
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