Leather the key to Argentinian strategy
26/03/2009
Argentina’s footwear industry wants to use the quality of the country’s leather as the core element of a strategy to promote sales of its shoes at home and abroad.
Alberto Sellaro, the president of the country’s footwear industry association, CIC, has told local media: “What we want to do is promote ‘Made in Argentina’ as a brand. We want to use this as a means of boosting exports, and as a way to encourage people in the domestic market to buy local shoes made from leather instead of imported shoes made from materials other than leather.”
Mr Sellaro said the strong relationships the industry has been able to build up with Argentinian retail chains thanks to the government’s school shoe initiative—under which it convinced tanners, footwear manufacturers and retailers to lower their margins so that locally manufactured leather shoes would be available for around $15 for the start of the new school year in March—could also help promote Argentinian leather shoes among the wider public.
The combined output of Argentina’s footwear producers reached 95 million pairs last year, but footwear imports, principally from Brazil and China, reached 30 million pairs in volume and $353 million in value.
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