City Banker 1: "Sub-Prime you say?"

City Banker 2: "Credit Crunch says I!"

One thing is certain, the rictus grimaces on the faces of the CFO's and CEO's of major financial institutions as they slashed profit forecasts and signed away millions in write offs revealed plainly that they were in no way marvelling at the semantic development of mankind and were most certainly not seeing a funny side.

Nor it seems were the retailers. The inevitable aftershocks of such a shake up in the world markets began to filter through before Christmas. The high street response was to rely on aggressive discounting and increasingly early starts to holiday season sales.

However, as the 2008 rolled on, the reports continued that consumer confidence was freefalling. On March 11 a survey by the British Retail Consortium did nothing to alleviate the glumness explaining an increase on the three month rate of growth from 1.5% to 1.6% was entirely the result of the heavy price cuts in the New Year sales and so was a distorted (and negligible) increase. So where is the good news?

Well; quite the contrasting story emanated from recent encounters that we had whilst visiting two important footwear trade shows at Pure London (February) and the Kensington Shoe Event (March). Dare we speak of cautious optimism?

The view on the ground with people in the industry is, of course, tinted with a good old dose of natural caution but even so, at the KSE even early on a nippy, rainy Sunday morning the order books were open and a business like demeanour permeated throughout.

At Pure London meanwhile, at the Olympia venue, such was this understated confidence that a whole second catwalk had been added for the duration, along with the introduction of an entire selection dedicated and committed exclusively to ladies footwear.

Buyers and vendors alike at both events spoke of new accounts, the firming up of existing relationships and new leads offering real possibilities. All of which adds up to behaviour which is pretty unexpected compared to what you might be looking for in a sector that is currently so subdued.

Of course, the reality is that market conditions are certainly not conducive to a cheery outlook. Concerns about economic slow down and the dreaded ‘R' word are more real than comfortable. It is quite possible that this difficult period facing our industry might be with us for some time to come.

However, maybe we can all take something from that sense of optimism witnessed at the stands over the last month in quiet defiance of the media hullabaloo. C'mon - it's spring time!

And maybe, with just a little luck, we might then be able to start forgetting that the concept of a sub prime what-do-you-call-it (what was that again?) ever existed in the first place....

Regards

Mike Sharkey
Editor

DL: 07966 136037

E: footwear@datateam.co.uk

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