Curious about Shoes

It’s a woman’s world

Women love shoes. It’s a fact that we all can agree on. The statistics backs it up too. According to the April 2008 CBI market survey on the footwear industry 53% of the market volume in Sweden and 55 % of the market value was made up of women’s shoes. It makes the business worth SEK 2567 million and that’s a lot of shoes. Just imagine all the varieties we have in that pile, from the cheapest of cheap to the most exclusive and everything in between. The entire micro cosmos of the market economy, supply and demand creating a vast jungle of styles, expressions, needs, desires and uniqueness.

We like that everyone can see the value of a rich tapestry of brands to express yourself through. There is just one glitch. It won’t work for long. Outsourcing is moving more and more of the production to cheap labour countries e.g. China, who has become the biggest producer of shoes in the world, supplying 41% of Sweden’s demand for shoes. We can all feel the wind of change concerning Co2 emissions. But the debate about raw materials, such as oil for example is growing, toxins in manufacturing is another hot subject. We all know for a fact that the shoe supply chain of today is not stable. What happens when transport prices get so high that production isn’t possible in China for us anymore? Can we reinvent a manufacturing industry here in Europe? How would it look? How can we be eco beyond our natural means? Again, we need to develop materials that don’t downcycle during the process and lose value. We can have a flourishing shoe industry with all the variety we so desire, but we must first build new business models to guarantee that we have somewhere nice to go to!