THE year 2011 was a bad one for Portugal: the country was forced to seek an international bail-out and its economy shrank by 1.8%. It was perhaps not the most fortuitous moment for the country’s footwear industry to launch an international marketing campaign under the slogan “Portuguese shoes: the sexiest industry in Europe”. But Paulo Gonçalves, head of Apiccaps, the Portuguese footwear-manufacturers’ association, says they had to do something. “We were making excellent shoes, but most of the world didn’t know.”
In the next three years unemployment soared, hundreds of thousands emigrated and protestors marched in the streets as Portugal underwent a gruelling economic adjustment programme. But the shoemakers prospered. The industry, which employs about 35,000 people in its northern heartland, has seen exports grow by 54% over the past five years. In a country with double-digit unemployment, shoemakers have created 8,000 jobs in the past two years alone.
With exports accounting for 95% of its production, the footwear industry is a trailblazer for what Portugal’s three-year bail-out was meant to achieve: a rebalancing of the economy away from...Continue reading
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