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These vegetarian shoes and boots are made
with an expensive stitching process that lengthens their life,
bends easily, and can be repaired. Unlike cheaper glued-together
boots, it allows for complex sole designs - in this case the
Tredair sole made of up-market, crack-resistant plastic,
a porous insole board and an injected layer of quality bungee.
Most soles that claim to contain air will either contain a bit
of carpet under-felt, which is good at moulding round your foot-shape,
or a springy chamber with less moulding ability. The Tredair
sole does both, as well as resisting cracks and bending easily.
One customer writes "they feel very comfortable it will
be a shame to go out in them - I think I'll use them inside and
go out in my slippers!"
You may not have heard of Tredair because of a historical
accident. Until the early 80's, there was a brand of shoe that
any good factory could make, as long as they paid for permission
from Dr Martens family solicitors and met the quality standard
- using a cushion sole, a sewn tag and bright yellow string sewing
to emphasise the way that the shoes were made. A shared brand
turned-out to be a very efficient way of structuring an industry
- DMs were as ubiquitous as Cheddar Cheese, air force flight
jackets or Champagne, and hardly needed any advertising. The
competing factories provided a far better quality of seam-sewing
than any brand-name boots could match for the price. Sewing things
together in small batches with different designs and sizes is
tricky. Factories have an idea of the number of operations they
can do - often 100 - and the number involved in each batch which
is often less in the factory but more in administration. When
money isn't spent on brand advertising but is spent on getting
through the dozens of operations instead, a wide range of shoes
can be made and they get to reflect the times.
Another reason for DMs success was a new Health & Safety
act after the second war, introduced when boot companies were
re-structuring for the civilian market, allowed again to compete
with each other and to make their own designs. The act allows
employers to be fined or loose a case in court if they don't
check-up on safety standards such as the new toe-cap boots that
had just been introduced, and they appreciated the yellow sewing
& pull tag that made it easier to check that their staff
were equipped. To make the law easier to follow, a tax concession
was introduced. Several mail-order companies began selling at
wholesale prices to employers and anyone else who could pay for
a minimum order - very much like office stationary catalogues
- and very different to other wholesalers at the time which would
only sell to one shop in each high street and tried to control
the prices. Some manual labourers were able to get DMs cheap
or free from their employers, while other people could buy them
from market stalls or the army-surplus shops that had sprung-up
in most towns.
In the early 80s, the government's economic policy was arguably
to close most UK manufacturing industry, or that was the effect.
Successor governments have not softened their exchange rate and
inflation policy since then, which is now set by the Bank of
England's monetary policy committee - not by people who make
things.
The largest factory making DMs survived by buying the brand
and controlling all production itself. This also allowed quicker
delivery times (which had never been a strength) and with a little
more marketing DMs went mainstream, selling to mainstream shops
rather than army surplus merchants. Where a few factories had
experimented with bizarre variations like batches of mirror-finish
boots or painted-on spider patterns, the new brand owners hired
designers to tweak and change the finer points of the design
and increase the range, moving away from the standard army-cut
top and 1970s-shape sole. Over the past few years they saw dropping
sales Younger people had forgotten why DMs had ever been a counter-cultural
icon: they were no longer so ridiculously cheap or free, they
had lost their association with muscle & toe caps, nobody
thought about or worked in British industry any more, and the
boots lacked the relaxed look that the e-generation liked. Footwear
had become a style industry, with most trainer firms getting
their stuff made in Chinese sweatshops, selling expensively in
Europe and the US, and spending a big mark-up on advertising
to promote falsely relaxed, liberal associations to their brands.
One or two of the ex-factories and factories are still making
cushion-sole derby boots with a Goodyear-welted seam, passing
business between each other. They are not making many, because
nobody has heard of them, and people assume that they are making
a cheap imitation of the original product In the case of Tredair,
we think they are making a better imitation. It has a better
sole and a frankly better-looking seam And why should there be
only one brand for cushion soles?
why-these=are-expensiveWhy these
are expensive
Materials
Uppers are very well cut on these boots to avoid waste, but they
still use at least as much as a pair of shoes - 1½ square
feet or 0.25 square meters @ £44.40 a square meter plus
delivery. The outer sole is another thick chunky compenent costing
£3+VAT a pair with set-up for small orders. Add the small
parts like 40p for pull-tags and the three other layers of sole
and you get up towards £25 on parts assuming that all the
parts bought are used. The boxes for example cost over £1.
Hours of time at the factory and in the van
There are something like 100 operations in making a pair of these
boots, which take a lot of fiddling-about with materials and
machines to get right. One of the trickier jobs is using a hot
knife to seal the welt to the sole after the welt has been sewn-on,
then using heat again to sculpt the outsole and welt to a single
smooth surface.
Taxes & wages
Every pair of boot includes the cost of PAYE, National Insurance,
business rates, fuel duty and the costs of following UK environmental
and employment laws. There are pundits who say you can't tell
if factories are good or bad just by finding out what country
they are in. These pundits are employed in a couple of cases
by Chinese shoe importers who have set up a trade association
to pontificate about ethical fashion. They are obviously wrong.
a UK factory pays taxes towards services like the NHS, pensions,
democracy, dole, courts, and so-on. There is no known way a Chinese
factory could do this.
Some more open countries are on a the Fairtrade list and count
as third world, often because of bad government which is not
addressed by buying a fair trade clothing. Tariffs against despots
would help too. Those companies which carry the trade mark offer
a better deal to staff in worse-run countries by providing some
benefits in a kind of Butlins camp for loyalists. This is a quote
from Tradecraft Wholesale linked from T Shirt and Sons, ethical
T shirt printers:
"The company in India manufacturing the T-shirts, polo
shirts and sweatshirts have social responsibilities to all employees
and is committed to overall employee welfare and providing a
healthy working environment. It meets ethical standards required
for the manufacture of Fairtrade garments. The factory site includes
a housing colony for over 1800 workers with parks, a dispensary
and four bed hospital, plus a school offering subsidised education."
If you would like to go further and promote hospitals with
more than "4 beds", universal rather than "subsidised"
education and services to people who have been evicted or left
the "housing colony for 1800 workers" then look
no further than the UK.
Exchange rates
These have been rigged to reduce inflation in the UK from about
1979-2009 and are still rigged in the opposite direction in China.
PR, executive salaries, executive salary commitee salaries,
PA to the CEO at HQ, national advertising, distribution warehouses,
stock held in every high street and not just online, corporate
events, government lobbying, a tower block in the most expensive
city of London that looks like the corporate logo from above..
Next to no money is spent on the essentials in these categories
and none on the non-essentials. That's partly why people believe
the pundits who promote "ethical" manufacturing
in China; UK manufacturers aren't throwing money at PR and leave
customers to draw their own conclusions from the facts available,
and support local manufacturing.
People all over the world support local manufacturing. They
benefit the world economy by taking an interest in the products
of wherever they happen to be living, rather than the advertised
brands or the brands with ethics wash and green wash credentials.
VCross in Kings
Cross that may have small amounts of stock in some sizes
- please email or ring before making a trip in hope.
Made in
- Amnesty - Human Rights Watch - EthicalTrade.org#U - AZO - VOC - Jobs
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