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SOURCING & SUPPLY CHAIN
WORLD FOOTWEAR | MARCH/APRIL 2012
U
K-based footwear brand Clarks announced the
appointment of Nick Cullen to the new role of group
supply chain director at the start of this year. Mr
Cullen has become a member of the brand’s
executive leadership team, reporting to Melissa Potter, the
company’s chief executive. In the newly created role, Mr Cullen
will focus on organising the supply chain for the entire Clarks
group, with the aim of delivering improved costs and customer
service. Clarks has stated that his appointment reinforces its
business strategy of “leveraging the scale of the combined UK,
North American and international businesses”.
Two brothers, Cyrus and James Clark started making footwear
in Street, in Somerset in the south-west of England, in the
1830s, starting with sheepskin slippers (Cyrus Clark had started
out in 1825 as a sheepskin tanner and rug-maker) but quickly
broadening its output. It became a major retailer of footwear,
through acquisition, in the 1930s. It began to make an
impression on international markets from the late 1940s
onwards with the successful development of the desert boot.
Nathan Clark, a great-grandson of one of the founders,
introduced the desert boot in 1949. He was serving in Burma
during the Second World War when he noticed soldiers wearing
rough suede boots with crepe soles. They had come from local
tradesmen in Cairo’s Old Bazaar. “I thought a version of these
boots would make a good all-round shoe,” he said in an
interview later in his life (he died aged 94, in June 2011), so
he created a version for Clarks.
Other acquisitions of footwear manufacturing and retail
operations, particularly in the US, followed during the 1970s,
but Clarks began the process of closing factories in its traditional
manufacturing base in the UK in the 1980s, a pattern that
continued until it closed its last substantial footwear factory in
Somerset in 2005. The company said at the time that it was
sorry this had happened, particularly as so many consumers
regarded Clarks primarily as a manufacturing business, but it
said the competitive advantage of the manufacture of footwear
had clearly moved by then to Asia. Certainly before the turn of
the twenty-first century, Clarks had ceased to be a
manufacturing-oriented business and had become, in its own
description, “a consumer-driven, design-oriented branded
products group” with outsource manufacturing partners in
various parts of the world. It is, therefore, very much a global
supply chain that Nick Cullen signed up to look after at the start
of 2012.
Footwear brand Clarks started the year
by appointing a new group supply chain
director, Nick Cullen (pictured). He
reveals that he expects the best
manufacturing and logistics partners to
challenge the company, to help it grow
and to grow themselves.
A strategy of moving the emphasis away
from manufacturing towards design has
been in place at Clarks since the 1990s,
bringing new supply chain challenges.
PHOTO CREDIT: MESSE DÜSSELDORF (GDS)/CTILLMANN
A challenge to
all partners
PHOTO CREDIT: CLARKS