The other day I sold a pair of Crocs. Nothing odd about that - they are deservedly very popular - but as I put the money in the till I fell to musing about the things our customers put on their feet, and the way they change over the years.
Crocs after all are an up to date, high-tec, space age version of the Swedish type clog which we made a lot of money out of in the seventies (or was it the eighties?) which in its turn was a development of the things Lancashire mill hands used to clatter to work in during Victorian times, or so I am told, not having been around then, or there for that matter.
The Swedish clog (actually most of them were made in Italy) thing took over from the exercise sandal which must have been pleasing for Scholl shareholders until they got copied.
All these styles say “comfort” or more precisely “healthy lifestyle”. The person who wears them is likely to be concerned about climate change, buys Fair Trade products and eats Organic. These days the shoes you wear make a statement about you. I suppose they always did, come to think about it, but somehow now it is more pronounced.
But every now and then something designed for a specific purpose becomes a fashion icon, which has happened in the case of Crocs.
Fashion being what it is there will always be a swing from sensible to extreme and back again. I am talking about the mass market here. What every girl must have now. On the comfort side we have clogs, exercise sandals, good for the feet but tend to fall off when running for a bus and DMs, which are essentially work boots
On the extreme side things like winkle pickers (very big in Russia when we were there a couple of years ago), spade toes and stilettos. I include stilettos which, however they are part of every woman's wardrobe, are not sensible in engineering terms.
All of which is the way of the world, and one would expect make the manufacturers of whatever has suddenly unexpectedly come into fashion and is selling in millions to have great big grins on their faces as they go to the bank. Well not entirely. Their problem is how to make the things quickly enough to cope with demand, which can be as near as dammit to impossible. If you have a factory which makes, say 10,000 pairs a week it cannot suddenly make 100,000. You can't get your staff to work 24 hours a day because they have to eat and sleep, let alone the cost of all that overtime. You can recruit new people to work shifts round the clock, if you can find enough skilled people, which you can't. Even if what you are making needs fairly basic skills, as in the case of a moulded article like Crocs, running your machines 24/7 is a sure way to make sure they break down, so that you are then making nil pairs until the repair people get to you.
What happens in the real world is you get the shoes made somewhere like China, spending a lot of time and money on quality control, since there is no point doing this if theproduct when delivered is in the slightest not identical to yours.
Unfortunately by the time you have set this up the fashionistas have decided that something else is this week's must have, and you are left with a lot of stock which you will have to knock out for a marginal profit if you are lucky, or at a loss if you are not. The other possibility is that your idea will be ripped off. This is happily less prevalent than it used to be, now that we have intellectual property protection, at least in certain parts of the world, but it still happens.
Once, on holiday in foreign parts we were offered branded jackets at three price levels: genuine but fallen off back of lorry; made in same factory but with invisible imperfections to make them seconds; inferior copies with one letter of brand name changed. Don't let us pretend that counterfeiting doesn't go on.
If you have had a good idea, like Crocs, which sells, then you are entitled to charge whatever you think the market will bear. Someone will howl that it came out of the factory for a dollar and you are selling it for twenty pounds. It happens all the time and the sellers always fall for it and respond by going on about their costs, like shipping, distribution, rent, wages, etc. They never mention the real element in the price which is risk. Every time an importer signs an order for another container load his heart misses a beat. What if by the time the shoes get to the shops the ones he has just put his money on are fit only for gathering dust on a shelf? If the gross profit doesn't cover that risk he is a asking for trouble.
When you think of the trouble and risks attached to any fashion product it is remarkable that so many people bother. Not only do you have to have an idea, the appeal of which you can only test by asking a few close friends because you don't want the world to know, but you have to find the materials to make it, design it so it fits and doesn't fall apart, get it made and then present it to the people in the market place at a price which will both persuade them to buy it and make you the small fortune you have been lusting after.
The possibility that after all that you will end up with just enough to keep abreast of the mortgage or at least allow you to feed your kids or even make a loss is always there but one you try not to think about.
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