The shoe sector presents an optimistic outlook because consumers spend more money on footwear, and sectoral experts predict that this will be the same for the years to come. But this is not synonymous with a feeling of relief for the traditional specialised traders. There are major changes in how shoes are being sold.

Last year consumers developed strong favours for shoes. According to polls carried out by the Cologne-based IFH Consultants, Germany’s shoe market scored a turnover volume of
€ 9.1 billion in 2010, an increase of 8.9 per cent. Statisticians from the German Federal As-sociation of Shoe Retailers (BDSE) referred to a sales volume of € 12.1billion for 2010. They pointed out, however, that total sales of the sector could only be the result of an estimate, because the market is subdivided among many ways of selling and distributors. Shoes are not only sold by specialised shops, but there also are the mail order companies and wholesalers to boot. Many factories offer their products in shops of their own, make use of the internet for online sales, or the sell directly to customers “ex works”. For that reason there is no exact data describing the market volume.

Nevertheless these figures raised a cheer within the sector, as growth in such dimensions has not been seen for a couple of years. IFH experts even referred to a “milestone in the history of shoe sales”. The reason behind this feeling of euphoria is that these figures were not offsetting any losses which might have been incurred during the desperate situations of the financial crisis. On the contrary: the financial crisis hardly affected the shoe market at all. Rather, and following the view of IFH Retail Consultants, this intensified shopping spree among shoe buyers is due to the greater value attached to shoes as part of everyday con-sumption.

Looking at the structure of facilities selling shoes, one readily comes to the conclusion that there are changes here as well. Mail order shops showed a considerable increase; Zalando GmbH in particular, pushed the market quite energetically. As Mr Peter W. Engmann, a BDSE market expert says: “Modern techniques for presenting goods, ordering, forwarding, payment and returns management really revolutionised this way of selling”. Even shop-based facilities cannot shut their eyes before this type of selling. When the BDSE ran a representa-tive poll in August 2011, 24.3 per cent of specialised shoe shops said they also offered shoes on the internet. Of these, 13.4 per cent run their own internet shop, 5 per cent use facilities of an internet-based operator such as EBay or Amazon, and 5.9 per cent sell shoes using both internet channels, i.e., at direct internet shops and internet-based operators. And, as the IFH Retail consultants noted when submitting their report for the shoe sector for 2011: “Inter-estingly enough, there has until now not been any serious cannibalisation of shop-based trading by online-based shoe shopping“. But this might very well change in future: “It is also the multiple uses of smart phones that cast their shadows forward”.

BDSE found out that chain stores enlarged their offer as to the number and sizes of shops, the assortment offered as well as to more rapid changes in collections on offer. Thus, the Essen-based Deichmann group alone - as communicated by the company itself - sold about 152 million pairs of shoes all over the world in 2010, an increase of 10 per cent over the year before. Business in Germany, reaching € 1.77 billion, accounted for about half of group sales. The second largest shoe trader in Europe is the Hamm-Reno-Group (HR), Osnabrueck, followed by Ludwig Goertz GmbH from Hamburg.

Mr Engmann continued by saying that fashion stores opened more and more shoe sections or they enlarged the offer of shoes as a part of the goods on sale. One reason was that “shops were getting increasingly larger”, but this also reveals a tendency of completing both collections and brand representations by important suppliers”. [A.d.Ü: Anführungsstriche im Original widersprüchlich] It is rumoured that Boss, the clothing brand, sells 1.6 million pairs of shoes a year.

In addition, both brands and labels of German and international suppliers raised greater in-terest and attention by setting up their own single-label stores and arranging for different area concepts in specialised trade facilities. As Mr Engmann pointed out: “It is especially in larger clothes shops that shoe suppliers view good prospects for vertical shopping areas, because this sector has a lot of large areas. And in between there also has occurred a significant increase in the number of partnerships in a multiplicity of ways, be these shops-in shops, soft shops, stores with partners, licences or consignments”. Also, department stores and shops as sales points lost in importance over the past few years. As Mr Engmann observed: “Certainly it is the specialised shoe trade which represents the most important and also the most comprehensive sales channel for shoes in Germany”. Mr Engmann is also convinced that its importance has been growing, referring to sales of € 7.9 billion in 2010, and an increase by 8 per cent over 2009. Expectations for this year had been surpassed by a long stick. According to a BDSE-run poll, only about 6 per cent of retail shoes traders had reported a fall in sales, whereas 82 per cent reported higher sales figures, and this despite the fact that quite a few among them had been rather conservative as to the quantities ordered on account of the economic situation in previous years. Engmann's estimate: “Assuming that other sales channels and types of operators have shown similarly positive growth rates, one may put the market volume for shoes and accessories at a total of € 12.1 billion, inclusive of value-added tax”. There therefore is sufficient reason for confidence in the specialised shoe trade. At least 22.6 per cent of companies expect growing sales for 2011, and about 67 per cent foresee stagnation at a high level. Relying on BDSE calculations, retail sales of shoes should have reached € 5.6 billion for the first half of this year.

As reported by “Schuhkurier” – a specialised magazine, ladies shoes were the most sales-intensive group goods, scoring almost 62 per cent of total sales. 42.2 per cent of sales were made up by boots with cold lining, followed by boots with warm linings (30.3 per cent), while slip-ons and loafers reached 8.8 per cent and court shoes and ballerina shoes recorded 8.6 per cent. Pairs with selling prices over € 100 made up about one third of sales. Men’s shoes only represented 12.6 per cent of sales, those for children 10 per cent. Looking at men’s shoes, the share of those priced at over € 100 accounts for about 44 per cent of sales.

In principle, the market for shoes will go on growing in 2012 as well. BBE, a market consul-tancy from Munich, and marketmedia24, a Cologne-based market data specialist, launched a new series of short studies, predicting a positive development for the shoe market into 2012. “While other sectors face the question of survival for their specialised trade, German special-ised shoe traders obviously are sailing with the wind”, as the market researchers put it.

All information comes from the statistics report for 2011, presented by BDSE. This report on shoes with an attachment for leather goods is available in a ring-bound version or on CD-ROM as a Word file. It costs € 99 EUR for members of EHV, the retail traders’ association; non-members pay € 149, plus VAT, packaging and dispatch. A combined version consisting of a printout plus CD ROM is priced at € 119 (for members of the retail traders’ association) and € 169 for non-members. Please direct any orders for the BDSE statistics report to ITE-Verlag, Fax (0049) (0)221/92150910, mailto itebestellungen@bte.de. You may also place your order via the BDSE website: www.bdse.org.

Text: Dörte Fleischhauer
Photo: styleuneed - Fotolia.com

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