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NEW PARENTS, OLD VALUES
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2012 | www.footwearbiz.com
A message worth repeating
In 2012, the brand still finds itself pushing the message that
children’s feet require correct measurement so that their shoes
will fit properly, according to Eve Davies. “It’s a message that’s
always worth emphasising,” she says, “but it’s quite a British
thing. People who have come to live here from other countries
may not have grown up with the same understanding. We have
had generations that grew up having their feet carefully
measured and their shoes carefully fitted, but it seems to me
there is a new generation now that doesn’t know as much
about this, that their children’s shoes need to be fitted, with
growing room, and that even if the materials cause no pain or
marks the shoes can still damage young feet, in which the
bones are like blancmange.”
Star quality
Something that the company’s founders may never have
dreamed of but that Eve Davies has put in place to help Start-
rite present its philosophy to today’s parents (from all
backgrounds) is to enlist celebrity support for the brand.
Interestingly, though, she says that in this case, the celebrity was
already a passionate devotee of the brand before the
partnership began. The person in question is pianist, singer and
broadcaster Myleene Klass. Ms Klass became famous in the
early 2000s as a member of the music group called Hear’Say,
which had several years’ television, recording and touring
success. She later had a solo singing and piano career and now
presents music programmes on national radio.
The company has worked on a small range of shoes with her
for the autumn-winter 2012-2013 season, an arrangement that
both parties want to continue for the seasons ahead. The
special collection they are collaborating on for spring-summer
2013 will be bigger.
Red patent and leopard-print linings
Ms Davies describes the inaugural joint collection as “just a
little taster”; it consists principally of re-works the music star
suggested to a couple of classics in the main collection, including
red patent finishes and leopard-print linings in shoes as the
Carmen and Madam Butterfly models, which have had a good
reception. The spring-summer 2013 ideas, which are already
touring the UK to give advance viewings to retailers, combine to
give a boutique range within the collection, shoes with more of
a designer feel and, the company believes, more fashion appeal.
“Myleene is from Norfolk and her mother is a nurse and
knows about foot health, so Myleene has known about Start-
rite all her life,” Ms Davies explains. “Her own children were
wearing our shoes before we even talked about this project, so
it’s not the case that we have agreed to work with her just to
have a celebrity name. She will grab headlines for us, but what
people will hear from her is the same as they hear from us, that
our shoes are about good foot health as well as fashion. It is a
new venture for us; we have been quiet in the marketplace and
if you are too quiet people sometimes think you have
disappeared. So, yes, we are trying to move with the times, but
this is not a volume-chaser for us, but just a way of positioning
ourselves as more fashionable. And no matter what, we will
always come down on the side of building shoes properly.”
High standards everywhere
Start-rite’s sourcing these days is spread across various
footwear manufacturing locations in Asia (including India, China
and Indonesia), but it is still commissioning “a reasonable
amount” from outsource manufacturers in Europe, principally in
Spain and Portugal. Eve Davies describes them as good sources
for the brand’s more fashionable models and insists that they are
becoming more competitive, price-wise, all the time, owing to
the increases in labour costs in Asia and in transportation costs
from those locations to the UK. “We insist on high standards
everywhere,” she says, “so we never place mega-volume orders
for manufacturers just to churn out. We spend ages on our
lasting process and on maintaining the shapes we want, and all
this while, for the past 10 or even 20 years, the retailers who sell
our shoes, like everyone else, have been trying to reduce stock.”
With a background in apparel retail, Eve Davies knows a lot
about order volumes reducing and about the companies big and
small who have learned (often the hard way) how much cash
can be tied up in inventory. In the clothing industry, she insists,
even the best in the business is unlikely to achieve a greater
than 65% accuracy rate for forecasting precisely which items will
wow the shopping public when they hit the shelves. And with
footwear she says it’s even more complicated because retailers
have to stock more sizes and width options per style.
Everyone knows that staying true to your principles and, at the
same time, giving consumers what they want is a tough task.
Start-rite’s commitment to its heritage is a help here, rather than
a hindrance. The National Health Service in the UK is publishing
900,000 copies of a new Mother and Child guidebook for new
parents. In the section on the foot health of growing children, it
mentions the importance of choosing shoes that fit from the
outset and it singles Start-rite out as a recommended brand.
This, along with the active involvement of Myleene Klass, gives
it a great chance of making as big an impression on a new
generation of parents as it did 50 and more years ago.
A small collection put together for
autumn-winter 2012 includes a
small number of re-works of classic
Start-rite shoes, including the
Carmen and the Madam Butterfly.