Orient - The Official Magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore - Issue 72 June 2019
Jumping in With Both Feet – Transforming the School & Sports Shoe Market in Singapore
When I was a growing-up in the UK, the annual trip to buy school shoes before the start of every school year was somewhat of a rite of passage. Fast forward thirty years to Singapore when I am taking my little girl Izzy to buy her first pair of shoes and the experience felt a world apart from my childhood memory. Whilst there were a handful of shops selling school shoes, they carried very little stock, with huge mark-ups on prices and a complete lack of measurement expertise, so finding school shoes felt like an impossible task.
I called my friend Nicola for advice and she explained most people took an extra suitcase back home to stock up on school shoes over the summer holidays. We soon realised lots of our friends were experiencing the same problem and as a result were either buying shoes online (which invariably didn’t fit and had to be returned), asking relatives to bring them out or purchasing on visits to their home countries. Most were not aware that children’s feet expand by up to a size in the tropical heat – ‘the Singapore Swell’ – so shoes purchased at home were too small within weeks of getting back to Singapore. Over a coffee in Dempsey, Nicola and I decided there was a big gap in the market and we were going to do something about it!
Feet First Our story began with a desire to do things differently. To bring a proper measuring and fitting service to Singapore along with a huge breadth and depth of high quality school shoes. We hand-picked shoes to suit our tropical climate from the top three European school shoe manufacturers, choosing styles which were lightweight yet durable. Our Ricosta shoes have a dry-fit insole (more akin to the inside of a trainer) and our Petasil manufacturer changed the lining of the shoes we chose to ensure the colour didn’t bleed onto children’s socks in the heat.
To cater to the 20,000 children at the International schools in Singapore mandated to wear black leather school shoes, we imported 8000 pairs of school shoes in our first year which meant we could keep prices in line with the same styles in the UK and Australia. We sell shoes to children aged 3 – 18 years old so our range starts at dinky size 24/7UK through to a whopping 48EU/13UK and in widths ranging from E, F and G. All our shoes are stored in our 1,500 sq ft air-conditioned warehouse to prevent the leather from perishing in the heat.
We recruited the ex-CEO of Clarks in Australia to train our team of ten at launch and appointed Helen Crawford and her colleague Rob from The Osteopathy and Podiatry Centre in Singapore to be our consulting podiatrists. They have helped advise us on the shoes and trainers we have selected, trained us in children’s foot health and run free mini podiatry consultations in the shop every month for our customers.
On your marks, get set… In year two we extended our range to offer ASICS kids trainers, football boots and netball shoes, recommended by our podiatrists as the most supportive sports shoes for children on the market. Our aim was to make life easier for busy mums by having their children’s feet measured for school and sports shoes at the same time and in the same place.
The ‘Shoe Ladies’, as we are now known as, branched out to offer a fantastic range of high quality school uniform in our third year – day wear, sports wear and accessories – so we can now offer schools and parents a full complement of high quality uniform from top to toe.