From a thriving industry to a handful of artisans, the landscape of New Zealand-made footwear has shifted dramatically, leaving behind a legacy of craftsmanship.
Locally produced footwear is an endangered species.. New Zealand used to have shoe factories.. They were all over the country, until they weren’t.. Now, New Zealand-made shoes feels like a distant memory, like carless days, a top-bracket tax rate of 66% and The Video Dispatch.. We went from having 95% of our footwear made locally in the late 1980s to only 5% by 2008.. These days it’s certainly even less than that.. The New Zealand
Footwear Industry Association, an incorporated society that represented manufacturers and suppliers, shrank from 50 members to 15 by 2014.. It was dissolved in 2017.. A lot’s changed.. Casual, comfy shoes like sneakers and slides outnumber other varieties of footwear, and producing offshore is the industry norm, even for local labels.. According to Tearfund, the most popular shoe brands in New Zealand in 2024 were The Warehouse, Nike, Kmart, Adidas, Skechers, New Balance, Number One Shoes,
Temu, Crocs and Puma.. It’s easy to assume from the sea of casual, synthetic footwear that locally made shoes have gone the way of the moa, but you’d be wrong.. They’re more like the critically endangered tara iti (fairy tern): there are some around.. But not many.. In 2026 you can count the number of New Zealand-based shoe manufacturers on one hand (or foot).. Maybe two if you look under the right rocks.. Not all
are easy to find, but they’re out there.. McKinlays is the largest and most well known.. The Dunedin manufacturer makes 90 to 100 pairs of leather shoes and boots each day, estimates owner Graeme McKinlay, with 99% of them sold domestically – 85% of which are school shoes.. A family business in its fifth generation, McKinlays has been going since 1879.. “We’ve got industrial sewing machines, hydraulic cutting presses for cutting leather and soling,” says
McKinlay.. “And then quite a big range of specialist [equipment] for assembling the shoes, for cementing them, gluing them, pressing them, stretching them over the last.” (Lasts are the foot-shaped form shoes are made on.) Nearly all their leather comes from Tasman Tannery in Whanganui, the last of its kind in New Zealand.. Sourcing materials is the biggest challenge to producing locally.. “Once you get past the leather, everything else has to come from offshore.”
Some of their soles are made in Christchurch, but the rest are from Vietnam.. Thread, buckles, shoelaces and rivets are all made overseas.. Materials and components are getting harder and harder to source, says shoemaker Sue Engels.. “Getting nice, what I call tight skins, is unheard of here,” she explains.. “I get individual skins from Italy and that suits me, because I can’t afford to be buying heaps of leather in one go, it’s very
expensive stuff.” Engels creates custom-made shoes from a workshop on her Waiheke Island property.. “The bespoke way is all done by hand,” she explains.. “It means making a specific pair of shoes for a specific customer with specific feet.” Her clientele usually finds her through “the wonders of the internet” and often visits the Oneroa studio.. Many can’t find shoes that fit their feet, some want recreations of favourite shoes, while others have a creative
idea in mind.. One pair of shoes takes Engels around three days from beginning to end, and she can usually produce two pairs a week.. “Every pair takes a very different amount of time.” Engels taught herself leatherworking before studying shoemaking.. She did that at London’s Cordwainers College, which dates back to 1887 and is now part of the London School of Fashion.. While in the UK she spent time with the lastmakers at John
Lobb.. “The last is so important,” says Engels.. She adjusts her base lasts by attaching carved pieces of leather.. “Once I’ve fitted the last up, I then cut patterns with paper, cut those paper patterns into various bits of leather and prepare them with hand tools and knives.” Engels uses a machine to piece together the upper then hand-moulds that around the last before attaching the insole and outsole.. All her heels are built from
scratch.. She loves the problem solving involved in custom-made footwear.. “Looking at the sketch that I’ve drawn up and getting to the end result is fun for me,” she says.. “I would rather make one pair that takes forever, and put my heart and soul into it.” Most of her soles are cemented.. “Because, as I was taught, glue is good,” she says.. “Sometimes I’ll send it into town to my colleague to get it
stitched.. So I have a version of welting, but I do not do the old school hand-welting.” (The process involves stitching together the upper, a strip of leather called a welt, the insole and outsole).. Someone who does do it is Louise Ayling.. “I’m in absolute awe of her,” says Engels.. Ayling also studied at the Cordwainers College and worked in London before returning home to New Zealand, where she produces her made-to-measure shoes in
the English bespoke method from her Christchurch studio.. She and Engels are among the handful of local shoemakers left.. They both focus on made-to-order, producing one-off pairs of boots, brogues and high-heeled shoes for customers.. Eugene Gordon produces custom work as well.. He works seven days a week from his small, tightly packed workshop in Henderson, West Auckland, filling orders.. Like Engels he averages around two pairs a week.. While he used to make shoes
for dance and film, these days 100% of his work is orthopaedic footwear.. As a certified pedorthist, he creates custom footwear for people with high needs – like foot issues caused by injuries, medical conditions like arthritis or diabetes, and birth defects.. His shoes can be life changing; one pair Gordon’s making for a young burns victim, currently using a wheelchair, means he’ll likely be able to stand and walk again.. Gordon’s footwear is highly
specialised and he’s the only person in New Zealand doing this kind of work.. Each pair costs around $3,000 (pre GST) and, depending on the medical issue, many are funded by ACC and the healthcare system, though some customers pay out of pocket.. Fittings are comprehensive, with five usually required from the start to finish of the process.. “There’s a lot of things involved on the admin side,” he says.. “But when I’m over here
and I’m on the tools, I love it.” His workshop’s full of custom lasts, leather and the machines he’s held onto.. Gordon learned the trade as a young man, working at Selby Shoes in St Lukes, Auckland.. “I wish I started earlier.” The factory, which employed 50-60 staff, could produce 500 pairs a day.. “New Zealand’s shoe trade, it shrunk,” he says.. “It’s retrenched to a small core amount of people.” There’s not many.. Lastrite,
a family-run business that’s been going for half a century, makes specialised (and fully reparable) footwear for industries like forestry and farming, as well as a range of casual shoes.. Bata makes gumboots in Wellington and Soul Shoes in Raglan makes jandals and sandals.. So does Paul Clough, who’s based in Te Kowhai near Hamilton, where he and his wife Jennifer run The Sandalmaker out of their property.. During the summer, their busiest period, he
makes around 20 pairs of shoes a week.. Offering larger sizes and custom fits, they do a lot of school sandals (Clough made a size 20 pair recently) and have a steady stream of elderly customers.. “They can’t get shoes because their feet are swollen.. We get a lot of business from retirement homes and villages.” Though the couple are semi-retired now, they used to have a large factory in Auckland, supplying shoes to Smith
& Caughey’s and Scarpa.. “We closed that down about 20 years ago when imports came in… you just couldn’t compete,” explains Clough.. With millions of dollars invested in machinery, shutting the factory was a hard decision.. “We’d been doing it for 40 years and built up from a hay shed on [his wife’s] father’s farm to around 15-20 staff,” he says.. “Every factory closed, there’s only one left.” Closures gained pace from the 1980s due
to the rollback of tariffs and import restrictions.. Among them were the Suckling Brothers boot factory in Timaru, which closed in 1981, Christchurch factory Duckworth and Turner, which shut up shop in 1987; and Regent Footwear, “wound up voluntarily” the following year.. By 2000 the already reduced import tariffs on footwear were removed entirely.. Factories sold their expensive machinery for a pittance (or gave it away for free) and workers found jobs in other trades..
Paul Clough watched the industry shrink around him.. “As time went on, it all died out.. People passed away, people retired, and that was the end of the footwear industry, basically.” Some local manufacturers held on.. Douglas Sandals, whose roman sandals were worn by generations of New Zealand school children (and some brave adults), lasted from 1948 to 2011.. Minnie Cooper, the locally made designer footwear brand by Sandy Cooper, shut its Avondale factory in
2018 after more than three decades, unable to compete with cheap imports and online competitors.. Other familiar brands are still around, although no longer manufactured in New Zealand.. The production of Red Band gumboots was shifted off-shore in the mid 1980s.. The decision, parent company Skellerup told The Spinoff, was driven by changes in the economics of rubber footwear manufacturing.. Since 2004 their famous boots have been handmade at a Skellerup-owned and operated factory in
Jiangsu, China.. Still here, McKinlays footwear currently employs 14 people, ranging in age from 20 to 64, at its 1,000-square-metre Dunedin factory.. “Occasionally, we’ll be lucky and someone will turn up at the door looking for work at the right time,” says Graeme McKinlay.. But it’s difficult to find people with the right skills.. “You have to train them on the job because you can’t find trained staff anymore,” he says.. “Years ago there used
to be a full apprenticeship programme.” On the New Zealand Qualifications website, all 100 level 2, 3 and 4 unit standards under Footwear and Leather Trades are listed as expired and are no longer available.. The New Zealand Institute of Skills & Technology confirmed that there are no programmes in footwear manufacturing currently offered by NorthTec, Whitireia & WelTec, WITT or Tai Poutini Polytechnic.. None of the other institutions appear to offer it either.. Across
the ditch, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology does offer a full-time one-year course in custom-made footwear, which can also be completed as an apprenticeship.. And as recently as the early 2020s, New Zealand had a small, dedicated shoemaking school operating in Wellington, the only one in the country.. At least we did, until founder Lou Clifton relocated to Melbourne in 2023.. At the New Zealand industry’s peak it employed 11,000-12,000 people, Graeme McKinlay estimates..
There were factories in Auckland, Christchurch, Te Awamutu and Dunedin, where McKinlays is based, which had three at one point.. They’re the last ones left.. While the past few years have been steady for McKinlays, what’s next is up in the air.. “The business is actually on the market,” says Graeme McKinlay.. Selling the family business is no small deal, particularly in such a small industry, but there’s been interest already.. “Ideally someone will come
and learn the ropes and take it over.” Does he see New Zealand-made footwear continuing, once the fuel and freight issues settle down?. “I don’t think there’s any reason it can’t,” he says.. “I would hate to see it gone.” Pathways for learning the trade could help ensure a future for locally made footwear, according to Sue Engels, who runs tutorials of her own, when she’s got enough time.. “I think funding for students to
go and study in Japan – Japan’s probably the closest – would be a good move forward, because we have so much creativity here.” Paul Clough is less optimistic when asked if New Zealand could reach a point where no footwear’s made onshore any more.. “Without a doubt,” he says, twice.. “There’s going to be no industry left, because the skill is gone.”