Page 35 - Shoeman no ch 1

Goodyear Welted Plant 31
As you already know, I am not good at uncertainties so, I later hired a car, and was able to go to the hotel of my choice. It was an easy one-day and night visit. You could get an evening ight both there and back to Nantes from Heathrow then with little or no traf c problems. The business developed and he built a very practical warehouse on the edge of the village. I guess he knew the Mayor well. He had an of ce on a sec- ond storey looking over elds and I noted the agricultural progress each time I went.
Yvon’s company, Freelance, always had a stand at the Semaine de Cuir show in Paris and the Dusseldorf show. For many years we had a Padders stand in Paris and a Groocock’s stand in Dusseldorf. It was interesting to see his customers. They were exactly like him in their appearance and types. He would always make me very wel- come. His English was perfect and he didn’t mind the occasional translation. I must say, he did have more “springs in his arse” than Arnold Held accused me of pos- sessing when I was at the New York Show. The fashion he projected led away from welted product and we nished trading. I found the relationship unlike any other customer. It was stimulating and he was demanding, but it was the best one for fun. Once I turned up with the family and samples when we were setting off on a caravan holiday down the West coast of France. He made us very welcome.
Margi and I drove to La Gubretiere in 1999. The warehouse looked very active on the edge of the village but in contrast to all the other buildings they had converted their second factory to a factory shop and all the walls were covered in very artistic graf ti.
HIGH GRADE WELTED (THE OTHER FRENCH CONNECTION)
We were contacted by an immaculate Frenchman who was at the time buying for a small chain of shops in Paris. He had a partner in this project with the brand name and shop heading of ‘Bowen’ but he clearly ran the business as if it was his alone. He was looking for high-grade welted shoes and although the individual style orders were small the overall volume with the potential high price made it interesting. The uppers were from French calf or other high grade full grain materials, all leather soles and heels and English designs. It was a dif cult journey as he was fastidious about quality. He complained about almost every delivery but carried on buying from us. I suppose it was his form of quality control because many of his complaints were not valid. It is a challenge to make heavy welted shoes and boots for the C.O.S. mil- itary market next to ne welted shoes that were selling into a market that Church’s were the leaders. His mark-up was an embarrassment. He made frequent visits to the factory in Rothwell and I made frequent visits to Paris (later on the Eurostar in its early days when it was largely empty) not only to be lectured on quality control but mainly to discuss development samples. In fact, we had a good personal and business relationship but he was a challenge. His shops were a re ection of him with antique objects as decoration and a very expensive relaxed atmosphere. I am sure he did all the shop tting design and input himself. Not surprisingly he fell out with his partner and started up a smaller chain of about 8–10 shops on his own called Handley-Reid. We clearly had lower volume of the same product but we had all the tooling so it was pro table. We made shoes for him until just before we closed the plants but he probably changed his direction to the Italian lighter weight theme. Some of the Italian high grade shoes were works of art. In contrast to his fellow Frenchmen, Marcus