Vein Wear founder Chris McCallum reveals how boutique footwear players can nail offshore manufacturing.
02 Feb 2010
Boutique footwear labels are gaining serious ground in the Australian market, as revealed in Ragtrader magazine's recent shoe report. Chris McCallum, founder of Queensland-based brand Vein Wear, reveals his production secrets.
Each year, 11 billion pairs of shoes are produced worldwide. Of that figure, Brisbane-based Vein Wear handmake just 10 to 100 pairs in each style in the spirit of true craftsmanship.
Mass production footwear factories around the world today typically use a ‘conveyor belt’ of workers who are each assigned to a very small section of the shoe-making process and thus do not understand how to make a pair of shoes from beginning to end.
Because each worker is unaware of what the workers before them did, there are no check-points, so if a mistake is made, the shoe will still continue down the line until its faulty completion.
At Vein Wear, however, each shoe is crafted by master cobblers according to old traditions. The label’s head patternmaker, Sen Shi Fu, is a master with over 40 years of experience, and chief cobbler, Mr Bitters, has over 35 years of experience.
Walk into a shoe store and ask for the name of their chief cobbler, patternmaker or designer and they typically won't have seen or heard of these people. Walk into Vein Wear, however, and we’ll tell you about them all!
At Vein’s production workshop in Taipei, each cobbler is responsible for the shoe he accepts at his check-point. He is also responsible if the next check-point rejects the work he has just completed. New cobblers begin their career at the first check-point.
Only after three years and four months at the same check-point will they have the opportunity to graduate to the next check-point. After graduating, the cobbler then receives shoes passed up from the check-point they worked at previously.
Only having masters handling the footwear means every step in the shoe-making process is actually a quality control test.
We also personally hand pick the highest grade leathers (which have passed rigorous tests for colour, strength and consistency) directly from tanneries across the globe. What’s more, each pair of shoes is made from the same piece of leather so they match perfectly.
The leather bonding process is then tested in hot and cold environments to ensure the shoes perform in both summer and winter extremes.
You may ask why anyone would hand-craft shoes in a world obsessed with churning out huge volumes with machine manufacturing.
Sure, “production-line” shoes thrive because they are cheap, but when you invest a little – or a lot – more for hand-made shoes you save money in the long run. Look after them and they’ll serve you well for a long, long time.
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