Shapes, materials and colours in sports shoe uppers change frequently; many of the components in their construction are soft. These factors make using automation to produce them a particular challenge.

In the toing and froing over the tariff turbulence of the first half of 2025, it was easy to miss one of the main objectives that US president, Donald Trump, trumpeted.

At a first earth-shaking announcement on April 2, he unveiled tariff rates on imports into the US from a long list of footwear-exporting trading partners. These numbers have changed several times since, but the initial figures were 54% for China, 49% for Cambodia, 46% for Vietnam, 37% for Bangladesh and 32% for Indonesia.

Reborn in the USA

The president said April 2 was “Liberation Day”. His reasoning was that this date would go down in history as the day on which industry in general in the US would be reborn. He said: “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.

More production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers.” He went on to claim trading partners had been taking advantage of the US, “stolen our jobs [and] ransacked our factories”. 

Unlike many other sectors of the US economy, the footwear industry still has factories there. Manufacturers based on home soil produced around 25 million pairs of shoes and boots in 2024, according to industry body Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America. Against this, though, shipments of shoes from China to the US reached almost 1.25 billion pairs in the same period, a volume that was around 50 times greater than domestic shoe production.

Footwear manufacturing in the US can expand, but it is difficult to imagine it could expand by 50 times and make up quickly for the product shortfall that could, in theory, occur if high tariff rates make imports from China and other Asian countries too expensive.

Outsource outreach

According to a senior figure in the global footwear industry, William Wong, the first instinct of at least some brands was to look not for new factory sites in the US, but for new overseas producing countries to outsource from. He received a spate of calls about this following the April 2 announcement. Hong Kong-based Mr Wong, who is president of the Global Footwear Sustainability Summit and a consultant to the Hong Kong Footwear Association, says that callers wanted to know where they should turn to to avoid the heaviest blows that the new tariff regime will deliver to footwear and most other products.

He mentions the Philippines and African countries as places shoe brands were interested in. But he has told the Wall Street Journal that Asian outsource footwear manufacturers are reluctant to invest in new operations in those geographies. It would take years to build up a big enough production base to meet the needs of US brands from there, he explains. Setting up a large-scale manufacturing business is “not like switching on or off the lights”, Mr Wong says. This could be discouraging news for political leaders intent on supercharging their domestic industrial base.

Automation’s appeal

Commentators quickly pointed to advanced technology and automation as a possible pathway to increasing shoe production in the US. But here, too, footwear manufacturers may find it difficult to make quick inroads. The recent lived experience of the industry could put doubts in many minds. Tom Fletcher, a former executive at a technology provider that worked with Nike on bringing footwear manufacturing back to North America, says that, even with advanced technology, he is certain reshoring shoe production will be expensive, slow and difficult.

Mr Fletcher was a senior vice-president at Flex, a Texas-based supplier of automated production technology. He began working with Nike in 2015. This followed Flex’s success in helping Apple set up production of some of its products in the US. Nike’s ambition was to set up a shoe production facility in Mexico with high levels of automation and for this to allow the Mexican site to produce tens of millions of pairs of athletic footwear per year by 2023. There was also hope that the Mexico factory could be a model for setting up similar facilities across the border in the US. But, by early 2019, the two partners had wound up the project.

Upper reaches

One of the biggest problems they encountered centred on automation requiring production processes to be simple and easy to repeat millions of times. By contrast, the shape, materials and colours in sports shoe uppers change very frequently. The softness of many of the materials in a sports shoe represents another challenge.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal soon after Liberation Day, Tom Fletcher explained that it had taken the Flex team eight months to find a way of putting the Nike swoosh on shoe uppers using automation. And at the end of these eight months, Nike had already moved on to a new model for which Flex’s automated swoosh solution no longer worked.

Speaking now, Mr Fletcher says he still thinks highly automated, high-scale production of sports shoes on US soil is possible. But he says Flex’s experience of trying to set this up with Nike had been “humbling, for sure”. If new attempts to do this are to be successful now, Mr Fletcher insists the companies involved will need to have “deep pockets and patience because it’s not going to happen fast”.

In a similar vein, rival brand adidas hailed an idea it called Speedfactory as “a new era in footwear creation”. It began constructing its first Speedfactory in Ansbach, near Nuremberg, in 2015. Its plan was to use automation to make shoes close to the European market. It was 20 years since adidas had made any shoes in its country of origin, Germany. 

It soon announced that a second Speedfactory in Atlanta, Georgia, would do the same for its supply to markets in North America, adding that further Speedfactories would follow. But, by the end of the decade, adidas had called time on the Ansbach and Atlanta sites, moving the technology in which it had invested to partner factories in Asia.

Keen makes its own luck

In the face of this, it might be tempting to say that a decision Keen made several years ago to build a new factory in Kentucky with high levels of automation has proved fortunate. Luck had nothing to do with it, insists the Portland-based outdoor footwear brand’s chief operating officer, Hari Perumal. Around 2010, the company noticed that costs in China were rising, at a time when international shoe brands seemed to be increasingly dependent on Chinese factories for making their collections. Keen no longer sources any shoes from China. It has outsource manufacturing partners in Cambodia, Vietnam and India. Currently, these partners make two-thirds of the company’s footwear. The other one-third of its products come from its own factories in Thailand, the Dominican Republic and, yes, the US.

Mr Perumal says the choice of location for the new factory, Shepherdsville, near Louisville, Kentucky is deliberate. From here, it can reach 80% of US consumers in two days by road or rail. It has a logistics facility nearby and several suppliers in the region, too. “It definitely puts us in a good position,” he concludes. 

Keen’s Targhee IV hiking boot. The company began investing some years ago in a highly automated factory in Kentucky. It says that, in the face of widespread tariffs on imported shoes, the move puts it in a good position.
Credit: Keen

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