Strategy and technology takes handcraft forward

JUDGE a man first by his shoes – so goes an old Beijing saying. It shows how highly the people of Beijing valued their shoes in the old days.

Cai Wenke, chief shoemaker of Neiliansheng, a time-honoured Chinese brand best known for its “thousand-layered” shoes made of cotton, thinks many people in Beijing still value their shoes. He seeks to fulfil their need for good shoes, having devoted more than a decade already to mastering the fine craft of shoemaking.

“I started as a salesman in Neiliansheng when I was in my early 20s, and I grew fond of the craft. Like, how do you even make the sole? I realised it takes at least 2,000 stitches, sometimes 4,200, to make one,” said Cai.

“I asked the manager to let me learn the craft, and I have been doing it ever since.”

He said making a pair of Neiliansheng handmade cloth shoes involves more than 100 processes, from drawing, draping to stitching.

“It requires one man to work eight hours for six days to make a pair,” he said proudly, emphasising that the process has not changed for over 100 years. “We need to preserve the tradition and heritage.”

The “thousand-layered” – an exaggeration of the actual 30-40 layers – handmade cotton shoes were a luxury only the rich and the powerful could afford in the past. A pair of shoes that requires at least 48 hours of human labour was obviously beyond the grasp of the common man.

But machine-based manufacturing led to a productivity boost, making many sought-after footwear brands affordable. This factor, coupled with Neiliansheng’s fixation with black-and-white cotton shoes whose basic design hardly evolved for years, meant the brand was not among the fashion icons the younger generation of consumers craved.

Cai, however, thinks Neiliansheng has a bright future, given that many traditional brands have reinvented themselves to be perceived as hipster favourites in recent years.

For instance, by co-designing with Japan’s Mitsui & Co and Sweden’s Happy Socks, Neiliangsheng has made its products more global, to be appealing for the young while preserving its core values and craftsmanship.

So, in August, the 165-year-old Neiliansheng opened a pop-up shop in Sanlitun, Beijing’s key commercial zone, to present its new avatar.

“It’s mostly the young people who buy our shoes now,” said Cai while measuring the feet size of a 20-year-old female customer. The woman said she is set to go abroad for a while, so has been shopping for clothes and footwear. To wear a pair of Neiliansheng shoes that are unlikely to be found elsewhere seemed a brilliant idea to her.

As Cai demonstrated his shoemaking craft at the new store, passersby, suitably impressed, placed nearly 25 orders on two afternoons.

“Now we are also heading toward being more fashionable, in design and form,” he said. “We have co-designed products with intellectual property such as comics.”

Cheng Xu, deputy general manager of the company, said he hoped such pop-up shops would dispel the stereotypes that people hold of traditional handcrafted brands.

To encourage time-honoured brands such as Neiliansheng to reinvent themselves and withstand competition from modern, technologically superior manufacturers, a number of ministries, including the Ministry of Commerce, released a guideline last year to promote the crafts, products and technologies unique to China. These are the carriers of the craftsman spirit of China and are of huge significance to the economy, local brands and cultural values, the guideline stated. — China Daily/Asia News Network