Introduction

CONTINUITY IS NO GUARANTEE of success in business. Sometimes it can be a hindrance, a disincentive for making the changes required to modernise, propel a company forward or even transform it completely. Statistics bear this out, with research by the Institute for Family Business showing that only around 13 per cent of family firms survive to the third generation. It is therefore remarkable that the company now known as Clarks has survived well into its seventh.

But it has not always been a comfortable ride. This is a firm that came perilously close to bankruptcy within a couple of decades of its formation in 1825 and then found itself in an even more precarious position a few years later. On both occasions, the family firm was bailed out by cousins, friends and others with whom it shared a powerful Quaker bond. It then went on to become one of the biggest shoe companies – and one of the most famous – in the world.

Along the way, the Somerset village of Street, where Clarks has been based for nearly 200 years, grew into a town almost entirely on the back of the footwear-producing firm. From just a few pairs of home-made slippers in 1831, Clarks now sells more than 50 million pairs of shoes a year, has a turnover of almost £1.4 billion and employs some 15,000 people.

That the company started at all is thanks to a seventeen-year-old apprentice, who, aware that he was to receive little in the way of remuneration for working in his brother’s sheepskin enterprise, hit upon an idea that would lead to the creation of an iconic British brand. The apprentice was James Clark, son of Joseph Clark I, a Quaker with a ‘gift in the vocal ministry’ who travelled widely espousing the teachings of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, and who would have been pleased if his son had done likewise.

James was born in Street in 1811, the youngest of three brothers. His oldest sibling, Joseph, was a yeoman farmer specialising in the corn trade; his second brother, Cyrus, was in the wool business. After an exhaustive Quaker education – during which he was deeply unhappy – James was meant to be apprenticed to a chemist in Bath, but successfully pleaded with his father to let him stay in Street and help Cyrus.

Cyrus had a talent for trade. By the age of twenty he had set up a wool and tanning business with a Quaker cousin, but soon broke away on his own to make rugs from the sheepskins rather than pulling off the wool for sale to textile merchants. James, in turn, was keen to find some practical use for the off-cuts of Cyrus’s rugs and began working after hours with a large pair of scissors and some needle and thread. He produced slippers which were so warm in winter that people didn’t want to take them off and so comfortable in summer that people wanted to keep them on. He also made sheepskin socks, which at the time were used by the shoe trade as inner linings to protect the underside of the foot from the insole.

James and Cyrus went on to form a partnership, variously producing rugs, mops, chamois leather, galoshes, gloves, leggings, angora hats, scarves, coats – and shoes. Cyrus was ten years older than James and though they were close and appeared to work well together it did not prevent an acrimonious battle between their respective families over Cyrus’s will following his death in 1866, the outcome of which would play a part in determining whether the business died or thrived.

It was left to James’s son, William S. Clark, to start turning things around. A towering figure who lived to the age of 86, William knew instinctively what people wanted to wear on their feet. But he also knew where his father and uncle had gone so disastrously wrong: by taking too much money out of the company rather than reinvesting it for future expansion.

William was one of the earliest shoemakers in Britain to introduce machinery into the production process, and he went on to establish C. & J. Clark both as a pioneer of new technology and as a champion of footwear innovation. He remained at the heart of C. & J. Clark and at the centre of life in Street for more than 50 years, and was followed by his brother Francis (better known as Frank), and then by his son Roger, his grandson Bancroft, another grandson, Tony, and finally by his great-grandson Daniel, all of whom served as chairmen of C. & J. Clark. Two more of William’s children, Alice Clark and John Bright Clark, and many of his descendants and the wider family have played important roles in the company.

Shoemaking was in their blood, but they were also imbued with a strong sense of what is now called corporate social responsibility. In Street, a school was founded so that young men and women could combine working in the factory with continuing their education. A theatre was opened, a library was built, along with an open-air swimming pool and town hall. Playing fields were established for the benefit of all and low-cost housing was provided by the company for its employees. C. & J. Clark was Street.

Today, the company places a concerted emphasis on its ‘enduring values’ and has a strict code of business ethics which talks openly about ‘caring for people’ both within the company and outside of it. Through the Clark Foundation, established in 1959, it supports a number of charitable initiatives in the UK and abroad, including Soul of Africa, a not-for-profit organisation working in Africa to fight unemployment and change the lives of orphans and children affected by AIDS.

Clarks is a modern business with a long heritage. More than 80 per cent privately owned by family members, the company goes about its business with little fanfare, largely shunning publicity and mindful – even subconsciously – of its social and religious roots.

The headquarters of Clarks remains exactly where it has always been, in Street at the northern end of the High Street opposite the Bear Inn, a public house the company owned until a few years ago and which only was permitted to serve alcohol as late as the 1970s. The chief executive – one of only a few women in Britain in charge of such a large organisation – operates from a group of New York-style loft offices with striking views of Glastonbury Tor. The Tor was at one time the brand image of Clarks, and it is still used for Clarks sports shoes today. On the outskirts of town, the futuristic-looking distribution centre has room for 5 million pairs of shoes and dispatches footwear to all corners of the globe.

Clarks has a clearly defined structure. It is run by professional, outside managers, with a family shareholder council serving as an intermediary, a sounding board and as a democratically elected consultative body. This was put in place following years of in-fighting that resulted in the company coming within a few votes of being sold for £184 million in 1993 to a City of London financial consortium with no experience of the footwear industry.

At the time, almost every newspaper and media organisation urged the family to sell up. The Daily Telegraph predicted that the fate of Clarks would be the same as other Quaker companies – ‘the Lloyds and the Barclays, the Cadburys, Frys, Rowntrees’ – all of which had either gone public or been bought out. ‘If the bid is rejected, Clarks future looks grim,’ ran the paper’s editorial on the morning of the vote.

The bid was rejected, but the future was far from grim. Left to its own devices, Clarks regrouped and discovered a new resolve. It brought in experienced business people who had their own ideas about the future and who were allowed to see those ideas through. But crucially, the company remained family-owned.

Over the next decade or so, Clarks began the painful process of closing down all the factories it had run in the West Country, in Ireland, in the United States and elsewhere across the world. The survival of the brand now depends on production overseas, primarily in Vietnam and China. However, each line of shoe is still designed by Clarks, distributed by Clarks, marketed by Clarks and sold either in the 1,156 Clarks shops, franchise stores, factory outlets and concessions and through the Clarks website, or in independent shops and department stores serviced by Clarks as a wholesaler.

Nearly half its sales come from outside the United Kingdom. North America is one of the strongest markets, selling only 10 million fewer pairs than in Britain, and every year there is further expansion into the Far East and India.

For many people in Britain, their first pair of shoes has been and still is bought from Clarks. This reflects the company’s dominance of the children’s market, where parents are encouraged to take their sons or daughters to a shop so that their feet can be properly measured and their shoes properly fitted. Selling ‘First Shoes’ – the branded range for infants under two – and back-to-school shoes for schoolchildren remains at the heart of Clarks’ success and it is now possible to buy a version of the company’s famous foot gauge so that parents can measure a child’s foot before ordering online or visiting a store.

Footwear has never been an easy trade. The science of making shoes is complicated. In the days when all shoes used leather, there was the challenge of working with a non-uniform raw material. Because all skins have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, machine production was almost impossible until the middle of the nineteenth century. The human foot also poses challenges. Its shape is intricate and highly individual, requiring shoemakers constantly to experiment with new techniques. And then there is the fleeting shelf-life of shoes as they fall victim to the vagaries of changing fashions.

Clarks has never been afraid of experimenting. It was one of the first to adapt the sewing machine for shoe production; an early convert to offering a variety of width fittings; the first to design a shoe in 3D on a virtual last; and the first to use new materials such as polyurethane soling to replace leather. And although to begin with, Clarks took a dim view of advertising – along with other Quaker firms who thought it degrading – the company was soon producing imaginative ‘showcards’ using stars of stage and screen to endorse its products. Collett Dickenson Pearce, St Luke’s and Yellow Door have all held the Clarks advertising account, the last headed up by Mary Portas.

The Desert Boot is one of Clarks’ best-known lines. It has changed little since its heyday in the 1950s. It is a casual shoe created by James Clark’s great-grandson, Nathan Clark, based on his experiences serving in Burma as an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1941. Made of soft suede with a crepe sole, the Desert Boot resolutely refuses to be labelled and seems forever in fashion as a result. Everyone from Liam Gallagher to Bob Dylan to Tony Blair to the Jamaican rapper Vybz Kartel has been spotted wearing the Desert Boot.

There was no history of shoemaking in Street at the start of the nineteenth century. But today, fortunately, there is a huge amount of historical material about Street’s shoemaking. Quakers believed in keeping accurate records of their day-to-day business activities. Ledgers, letters, copy-books, financial papers and several personal memoirs make up only a small part of Clarks’ extensive archives. There is also a shoe museum and a collection of 20,000 assorted shoes going back to the Roman Empire.

These records paint an extraordinary picture of a British business that has changed beyond recognition since its simple, rural beginnings – and yet the survival of Clarks and its evolution as an international global brand is largely due to its unchanging values and the family’s fierce determination to remain independent.