Answers in Almansa
Footwear materials solutions innovator OrthoLite has completed an expansion project at its European production site in Almansa. It is tapping into the Spanish town’s long footwear past, but is also helping secure the industry’s future there.
With little fanfare, the result of covid-19, global insole supplier OrthoLite recently quadrupled its production capacity in the European Union (EU) by moving its operations there to a new facility in Almansa, in the Castilla-La Mancha region Spain.
OrthoLite was already making materials for the European market in Almansa, a footwear manufacturing town in the province of Albacete. But it has now completed a move from the 750 square-metre site it previously ran there to a new facility covering 3,000 square-metres, where it now employs 40 people. The company has said this will help it provide more, and more specialised, insole products to European partners.
“Our factory in Spain is a crucial European hub for our EU-based partners,” says chief sales officer, CB Tuite. “As production demand continues to grow in Europe, we can maintain exceptional levels of customer service, making advances in our technologies and our responsiveness.”
Comfort, performance, sustainability
The company says its innovations are always focused on helping footwear brands improve comfort, performance and sustainability. Beyond moulded and die-cut insoles, the factory in Almansa also offers heel-cups and wedges. Specialist products it makes also include OrthoLite O-Therm aerogel-infused open-cell foam insole technology that creates a thermal barrier underfoot, blocking cold and heat to deliver comfort in all weather conditions. According to OrthoLite, third-party testing has shown its O-Therm product to be more than 50% more effective than other thermal insoles at blocking cold.
In addition, the company makes its OrthoLite ESD Shield mechanically-bonded electrostatic discharge protection insole technology to deliver full heel-to-toe protection from electrostatic discharge. It presents this technology as being ideal for work and safety footwear. It uses patented proprietary technology called Fiber-Fusion, which uses conductive copper fibres mechanically bonded (without glue) to its X35 foam for a high level of comfort as well as performance.
An example of its work on sustainability perhaps comes from its HybridPlus-Recycled insoles, which contain 43% recycled PU foam and 7% recycled rubber, taking the total recycled content of the product to 50%. Also on offer are artisan leather insoles for high-end footwear brands, some of which are among its neighbours in the Spanish town.
Interesting neighbours
Sendra, one of the brands based there, is a very close neighbour; the two factories are on the same street. It is now 110 years since Andrés Serna returned to La Mancha after a trip to the US and decided to produce the cowboy boots he had seen and admired on his travels. Handmade, western-style boots are still the brand’s signature product, but its range also includes Oxford and Derby style shoes and low-cut Chelsea boots, loafers, double-monks and desert-style boots.
Another high-end Almansa-based brand, Michel Shoes, is not quite as old, having been founded in 1925. It is a specialist in Goodyear-welted and Blake-stitched shoes for men.
Footwear heritage
Having its European base in Almansa gives OrthoLite the ability to tap into all these decades of footwear know-how and more. The company considers it is now part of a heritage that has already lasted all of 400 years. The town is old; the imposing castle that overlooks it today was built in the fourteenth century and is not the first such structure to stand there. There were certainly artisan footwear producers in Almansa before the nineteenth century, even if it is from that time that the first important details of its footwear history date. As in other shoe-producing places, the arrival of industrialisation brought an increase in employment, in revenues, in exports and, in parallel, in documentation.
The economy in this part of Spain was predominantly agrarian, but some small footwear producers acquired their neighbours’ operations and gradually built up enough capital to industrialise their operations. This coincided with the arrival in the 1850s of the railway (a benefit of being on important routes linking Valencia and Alicante to Madrid). By the end of the century, Almansa was home to four modern footwear manufacturing companies.
These firms invested in technology that, for the time, was highly advanced; records show imported products from the United Shoe Machinery Company first arriving in Almansa in 1907. This machinery developer only launched in the US in 1899. Machines helped producers in Almansa increase production from a documented total of 87,000 pairs in 1904 to well over one million pairs per year by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.
Export markets began to open up to Almansa manufacturers in the decades that followed and, by 1928, there were 14 footwear factories operating in the town, collectively employing more than 1,500 people, around one-tenth of the total population at the time.
Tougher times followed in the 1950s, but even then Almansa made an important contribution to the development of the footwear industry when local people took their skills and experience to the footwear factories that were expanding production in Elda and Petrer, about 60 kilometres to the south.
Future-proof
An eighties revival saw the number of companies linked to Almansa’s footwear industry increase to 225 and, although many of these operators were small, their combined workforce rose to 3,400 people. Economic crises and the arrival on the global footwear market of cheaper shoes from China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh and Brazil have reduced this to a figure of around 60 companies with 2,200 employees.
This is still close to one-tenth of the town’s population, but local politicians have spoken in the recent past about their desire to future-proof footwear jobs and skills. An important expansion project such as the one OrthoLite has now completed is a noteworthy contribution to this wider Almansa ambition.
OrthoLite says its innovations are always focused on helping footwear brands improve comfort, performance and sustainability.
All Credits: OrthoLite
