The trend towards outsourced production among the UK’s leading footwear brands showed no sign of slowing as 2003 got under way, as two of the industry’s best known names started the year with a fresh round of job cuts.
The first to wield the axe was Clarks International which announced the closure of both its Castelo de Paiva factory in Portugal and the Clarks Springers factory in Kendal , United Kingdom. Opened in 1988, the Castelo factory employs just under 600 people, the majority of whom are expected to finish before end of January 2003. At its peak in 1999, the factory produced over two million pairs of shoes and employed 900.
Nearly 170 jobs will go with the closure of Clark’s historic Kendal factory, which gave the K Shoe brand its name in 1865. Now the UK’s third largest women’s brand, the K Shoe brand will be unaffected by the closure, Clarks says. All production from the two sites is being switched to sub-contractors in China.
No sooner had the Clarks announcement been made than the UK’s largest manufacturer of safety footwear Totectors said that it too intended to move some of its production offshore. As a result, 75 jobs will go at its factory at Rushden, Northamptonshire, reducing the total to 225.
The announcements followed the end of UK manufacturing by R. Griggs, the makers of Doc Marten boots, in November 2002 and the announcement of 30 redundancies by the White & Co. shoe factory in Earls Barton, Northamptonshire in early January.
The job losses were reflected in figures released by the UK Office of National Statistics in January. These showed that between September 2001 and September 2002 the sector shed 1,400 jobs, reducing the total to just under 10,000.
