How does a purveyor of comfortable shoes to middle-aged Britons bec¬ome one of the fastest-growing retailers in India? By listening to the shop staff, says Stuart Paver, managing director of Paver Shoes.

August 13, 2013 4:27 pm

The shoe seller who stepped up

By Andrew Bounds

A good fit:  says being a middle child gave him the skills to lead the company

How does a purveyor of comfortable shoes to middle-aged Britons bec­ome one of the fastest-growing retailers in India? By listening to the shop staff, says Stuart Paver, managing director of Paver Shoes. The business, which began with his mother selling footwear door-to-door and in village halls and spread across the north of England to reach annual sales of more than £60m, has continued to keep it simple while listening to what customers want. The UK stores are crammed with long racks of shoes and boxes displaying all the stock in order to keep staff costs down. But in India, which accounts for a quarter of group sales, spacious Paver shops are plastered with Union Jacks and ooze glamour and bling (see box). Mr Paver, whose appearance puts him in the smart, comfortable-clothes-wearing-Brit category, credits his Indian staff with helping to get the product right.“In the UK we sometimes try to be subtle,” he says. “[But] people actually don’t want you to be subtle in emerging markets. They want the brand to stand out and be visible. And the staff said to us [that customers said]: ‘I want people to know I bought a pair of Pavers England. I want a flag on the outside, I want a logo so that people can see.’ ”

“Right from the start we decided we would have to sell in India what India wanted,” he adds. “There are certain UK retailers who seem to put a package into their stores that just makes no sense for the weather or anything else. They sell jumpers when it is 40C. They sell shirts for £150 where people would only spend £5. There are a lot of retailers very unhappy in India at the moment.” Even Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, recently lost the executive leading its Indian operation, after falling behind with its store opening programme.

Mr Paver says many retail experts believe the market in India is set to replicate developments in China but that it is 12-15 years behind it. “And retail space is very, very expensive in comparison to China. Everything is. Their whole logistics nightmare is beyond belief.” He says any delivery, however small, requires at least 13 pieces of documentation all hand-signed, stamped and dated. “If any are not legible, a whole truck can be delayed at a state border for days until a new set arrives.” He spends up to 10 days in India every six weeks.

Pavers, based in York, had retail experience of India. In 2008, it partnered with London-based Indian entrepreneur Ravi Mehrotra’s Foresight Group to run franchised shops. Then, last year, it was the first foreign retailer to take advantage of a new law allowing non-Indian companies to open wholly owned shops. “You get there in the end as long as you’re doing everything correctly,” he says. Plus, he smiles, some Indian ministers wear Paver shoes.

Pavers England, the India operation, now has 450 staff, 32 stores and 120 concessions, and hopes to add two wholly owned stores a month. It ex­pects to be profitable next year, after a £120,000 loss in 2012. It has invested $25m with a further $25-$50m planned.

“We use exactly the same systems in India as the UK and we can log in and monitor everything 24 hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere,” says Mr Paver. “We also have daily calls and various meetings which I attend via Skype.”

Lightning bolt idea for a sole foothold in India

Utsav Seth, chief executive of Pavers England, tells how the venture began during a thunderstorm, writes Avantika Chilkoti. He and Stuart Paver were flying back from a trip to explore opportunities in China: “The plane was taking off through thunder and lightning and I was nervous. To divert my attention, Stuart said: ‘How about retailing in India?’ We borrowed some crayons and came up with the idea then and there.”

The word “England” was affixed to the Pavers brand and the joint venture with Foresight Group was formed.

Mr Seth is speaking in a Pavers England store in Mumbai, where a map of the British Isles is on the wall and even the price tags have Union Jacks on them.

Like the shop assistants, he is wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with a Union Jack. He explains that foreign status is a big selling point in India, where consumption is driven by an aspirational middle class.

“We are a European brand with an Indian heart and that heart is our R&D,” he says. Before opening in Mumbai in 2008, the company spent two years on product development. It has invested $6m in a research centre where about 150 employees study materials and designs to develop samples for the global business.

Pavers England targets the premium market. Prices start at Rs1,499 (£16) and it sells 350,000 pairs of shoes a year. Bata, the mass market retailer, offers flip-flops for as little as Rs299 and sells 45m pairs of footwear a year in India.

But Pavers England has ambitious plans. Revenues to the end of March 2013 were Rs750m and it aims to reach 10 times that within five years.

In his corner of­fice filled with designs and awards on an industrial park outside York, the softly spoken Mr Paver seems an unlikely invader of a country whose retail sector was only recently opened up to foreign direct investment. But he has thoroughly transformed a family business in which his formidable mother is still involved as a director at 85 (“Don’t write that she’s retired – she’ll be on the phone”). Cathie Paver had started a small business in 1971 with a £200 bank loan. The bank would not give her money to start a business but it was happy to lend the same sum to buy a sofa. She took the money, and the bank manager never asked to see the sofa. Mr Paver’s father, a postman, did the accounts.

Mr Paver worked at the company as a summer job after school and loved selling so much that he did not take up his place at university. His two brothers, Ian and Graham, were also involved in the business but he bec­ame managing director because he had the “right skill set”, he says. Also, “I was the middle child who always has to negotiate a tightrope as a child growing up”.

The business always kept pace with innovations in retail. It opened permanent stores when out-of-town shopping centres sprang up in the 1980s. Later, it moved on­line. It is about to launch an in-store collection service for purchases made on the internet.

Mr Paver decided three years ago to stop selling most non-Paver brands online because of competition. “We turned off £2.5m of turnover, but in the end it was the right decision to control our own destiny,” he says. “When it’s your own brand, you’ve got control over margin, you’ve got control over distribution. You’ve got control over everything.”

After the death of his father, Mr Paver had a tough job to persuade his mother and brothers, co-owners of the business, to invest in expansion in India. He convinced them that they could still reap profits at home while exploring the country’s huge potential. “We weren’t gambling the family jewels,” he says. “We were basically gambling a few years’ dividends, perhaps.” The UK business, which has 950 employees, made a £5.3m pre-tax profit on £63.4m turnover for 2011.

The clincher for the move overseas was the prolonged UK downturn. “You think . . .  wouldn’t it be lovely to work in an expanding economy, a growing new opportunity? And it is.”

He sought advice from Chinese shoe company Belle International, whose Staccato brand Pavers represents in the UK. Its advice was to focus just on India. “If we can be number five in India, [that is] 2,000-3,000 stores. It’s just huge numbers. And you get the mentality then of the Chinese, which is, this is growing so much, why try to change everything to open in a small country with a few million people?”

India’s market leader, Bata, is en­trenched but Pavers aims to be among the top five in the country by 2020. It is already in the top 10, selling 1m pairs of footwear a year, compared with 3m in the UK. Mr Paver notes that customers in India are more likely to spend more on footwear than people in the UK.

Although confident, Mr Paver acknowledges that he faces fierce competition. “It’s not going to be a straight road. It’s going to be a very, very bumpy road,” he says.

It’s a good job he has a pair of sensible shoes.

How A UK Shoe Company Came to India

by Samar Srivastava | Aug 3, 2011

UK-based Pavers Shoes believes it has cracked the code to succeed in India

You must be mad,” thundered 82-year-old Catherine Paver when her son Stuart broached the idea of selling shoes in India in 2007. “Why can’t you concentrate on what we know works?,” she asked.
Catherine was referring to the £100 million shoe retail business she had built since 1971. With a £200 bank loan, she had begun by throwing shoe parties and then moved to selling them in huge warehouses before setting up 160 retail stores in the UK and Ireland. Forty years on, the business, Pavers Shoes, was growing at 25 percent, far in excess of market growth, and she couldn’t see any reason for them to take a risk half way across the world.
On the other hand Stuart, it seemed, wanted to throw it all away. After all, theirs was a small business that gave the family about £10 million in profit every year. All of that money is ploughed back into the business.
A Maze Called India 
It’s not that her fears were not well founded. In 2002, Stuart’s brother Ian, who handles buying for the company, impressed with the enthusiasm of Indian suppliers, started sourcing materials for Pavers Shoes from India. The suppliers would say ‘yes’ to every order for insoles, toe caps and mid-soles, but would rarely deliver on time and in the desired quantity. After three frustrating years, the company stopped doing business with them, with Ian vowed never to come back.
But Stuart, acutely aware that the company had missed out on the China opportunity, didn’t want to give India a miss. So, on a whim, he winged his way here and decided to see things for himself. While strolling down Linking Road in Mumbai, he saw how disorganised shoe retailing was. Retailers would often do stock checks once a season and had no clear record of what was selling.
Stuart realised that in this market Pavers does not have to be perfect to succeed. “All we had to be was better than the others,” he says. “The market was at a place that would give us enough time to understand and learn from our mistakes.”
Four years on, the company has 12 exclusive franchisee stores and 65 points of sale in India. Pavers plans to add another 20 franchisee stores this year. Revenue from sales has been doubling every year, and now stands at Rs. 38.5 crore. If things go according to plan, Pavers India says it should close the decade with a billion dollars (Rs. 4,500 crore) in sales. That figure — Rs. 4,500 crore — is what analysts say India’s entire footwear market is approximately worth right now. Of that, the organised shoe market is 20 percent.
One company, Bata India, accounts for a third of all shoes sold in India. Last year, its sales stood at Rs. 1,277 crore. It also had the country’s largest network of 1,250 retail stores spread across 400 cities. India’s second largest listed footwear company Mirza International, the makers of Red Tape shoes, had revenues of Rs. 472 crore last year.
Growing Step by Step
Pavers has grown in excess of 100 percent every year in India, with the market for premium shoes growing at 40 percent. By contrast, Bata, which sells mainly mass market shoes, saw sales rise 15 percent. Pavers’ growth rates indicate that it is beginning to attract the Indian consumer.
In 2007, Stuart knew India could allow the company to grow a lot quicker. But he needed to test his hypothesis. That’s when he turned to Belle International, which had been set up in 1991 in Guangzhou, China. In 20 years, Belle has built a network of 12,000 stores and makes 50 million pairs of shoes every year. Pavers represents Belle’s Staccato brand in the UK. Stuart Paver knew if anyone could help him understand scale and high growth rates, it would be the head of Belle.
He brought Belle Senior Vice President Hu Bing to India for a market visit and to help set up operations and strategy. After a week, his message was unequivocal: “The Indian market is where the Chinese market was 15 years ago. Start operations in India and then ride the consumption wave.”
Thereafter things moved swiftly. Stuart reckons Clarks Shoes, Pavers’ main UK competitor, was 20 times as large as Pavers 10 years ago. Now they’d managed to narrow the gap to 10 times. If Pavers was to surpass the company in Catherine Paver’s lifetime, they had to get to India. Moreover, he reasoned that even if the India bet went wrong, an initial investment of £5 million wouldn’t kill the company. (Pavers, which has entered India in partnership with the USD500 million Foresight Group, has committed a total investment of £60 million, according to Utsav Seth, managing director, Pavers India.) So far, the company has invested USD 27 million.

The Game Plan 

Pavers identified some key strategies for India. First off, Stuart kept his brand price positioning slightly above Indian brands like Lee Cooper and Woodland but lower than the available international brands like Gioxx and Ecco. According to Jagdeep Kapoor of Samsika Consultants, a brand consultancy, the decision to buy shoes is largely based on aspiration and the company has done a good job by positioning itself between Indian and foreign shoe companies.
Another key insight: Sell what the market already buys and don’t try and change a habit as that takes a long time. In India, lace-up brogue-style formal shoes are the most popular and the company found that this is a particular favourite among bankers. It’s no surprise that Pavers’ top selling shoes in India are black formal shoes priced between Rs. 4,000-6,000. Akash Sehgal, who heads Landmark Group’s Shoe Mart, says Pavers’ shoes are selling as well as brands like Lee Cooper, which have been around for a decade.
Third, the fragmented and the underdeveloped nature of the shoe supply-chain in India posed a huge potential problem. Belle, with its two decades of experience in the rapidly growing Chinese market, advised Pavers against entering the Indian market with a large stock. According to Shirley Shan, head of international business at Belle, a company must always start small and then replenish quickly.
But knowing what sells is only half the battle won. Replenishing stores is another key challenge. This was one area where Pavers thought it better to over-invest. It spent $6 million in setting up a research and development facility in Ambur, a town known for its leather factories in Tamil Nadu. Two-thirds of India’s leather exports came from Ambur. Here, the company has its own computer-aided design system in place. At the facility, Pavers has also set aside one production line to work as a quick repeat line allowing it to make fast selling shoes in 28 days. For traditional shoe companies, this response time is usually three months.
Getting shoes to stores in time presented another challenge for Pavers. “Our challenge was to manage growth with the investment in the back-end infrastructure,” says Seth. Shoes are a complex retail business due to the number of stock keeping units a store has to keep. Each shoe comes in 10 different sizes and different colours. Ideally, a store must keep at least two pairs of each. This results in 3,000-4,000 shoe boxes in the average shoe store. Managing inventory is what often sinks shoe companies.
According to Stuart, when consumers don’t find their size, they rarely come back; it is usually a lost sale. The company invested in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that, by their own account, took 14-15 months to get working. It leased space in a warehouse in Bhiwandi, on the outskirts of Mumbai, where most of its stocks are kept. And to make sure goods reach stores on time, it also leased space in the city at Andheri. Now, the moment a sale is made, the ERP system gets updated and shoes are picked from the warehouse at night to be replenished in the store the next morning.
Next, Pavers realised that functioning from multi-brand stores was not a strategy that would work in the long-term as they were not able to get their brand sufficiently noticed in the clutter. But Stuart has now managed to get into leading malls in the country as well as high street locations like Khan Market in New Delhi. The company plans to more than double its number of stores to 40 this year. It has also set up airport stores in Mumbai and Bangalore to cater to business travellers who are hard-pressed for time.
One issue that Pavers still faces is with advertising. At Rs. 38 crore, the company is still too small and thinly spread to have a significant advertising budget. As a thumb rule in India, unless a national brand spends Rs. 10 crore in advertising, it is rarely noticed by consumers. In its first year, the company spent Rs. 1.5 crore in advertising and got nothing in return. The per shoe cost worked out to more than Rs. 22,000. “I would have been better giving cash with the shoes,” jokes Seth. Pavers has tied up with Jet Airways and Cathay Pacific to offer discounts to buyers.
For now, Stuart knows he’s had a successful start to the India business. As for Catherine Paver, she can see the India opportunity, but still says, “Why not concentrate on the UK?”

Using its network of local suppliers, this English footwear brand has secured a foothold in India..

Utsav Seth, CEO, Pavers England Footprints, and Stuart Paver, Chairman of the company

What’s got Utsav Seth kicked of late is a brand new store that footwear brand Pavers England has set up in the domestic airport in Chennai. The young CEO of Pavers England Footprints Ltd says this store, which has been set up in the security hold after the checks, is attracting many curious footfalls and patronage as well, as the store has been selling around 15-20 pairs a day of men’s and women’s footwear.

“We think ours is a unique offer; if you buy a shoe and don’t want to lug it with you on board, we courier it home free of cost. The strategy of Pavers is to be innovative – so instead of just a hoarding in the airport we wanted to create a presence for the brand. Now, we want to have at least 10 airport stores in the next year,” explains Seth.

While the Pavers brand, made in Western and contemporary styling, has been around in the country for a little more than a year, and retails from 60 outlets (with an intent to up it to 100 outlets this year), India itself is not new to the brand owners. As Stuart Paver, Chairman of Pavers England Footprints Ltd, says, Pavers, a retail brand in the UK, sources 35 per cent of its footwear from India, or around one million pairs a year from 12 different suppliers, five of whom are preferred vendors. “We source the rest from Europe and China, though India is a competitive sourcing base,” says Paver, in a recent interaction with Brand Line.

These same suppliers from whom Pavers has been sourcing for the overseas market now supply to the domestic market to designs given by the brand. Pavers has also established a $3-million five lakh pairs a year manufacturing facility at Ambur to make and export full shoes as well as an R&D facility for footwear design. Says Seth, “This R&D facility allows us to have rapid responses to retailer needs.” He says the Pavers experience in overseas market and its focus on retailing in India allows it to make 52 deliveries a year to the top stores it retails from as opposed to two-three times a year it usually is. Around 80 per cent of footwear, both men’s and women’s, sold under the Pavers brand is now sourced from within the country. Says Paver, “In most markets, 70 per cent of the footwear sold are for women and the rest are men’s but in India the ratio is the reverse, but that’s changing in India as well.”

Pavers has come in with a strong portfolio of women’s footwear, ranging from comfort to stylish sandals and with a sub-Rs 1,000 price point to start with, it has made rapid inroads as a brand, say retailers.

Pavers, a $ 100-million brand in the UK, has joined hands with the London-based Foresight group, a $500-million conglomerate into shipping, oil drilling and hospitality and footwear, to set up Pavers England Footprints in India with a capital of $5 million. This venture retails the Pavers brand of comfort footwear through franchisees (present FDI rules do not permit Pavers to launch its own single brand stores) and shops in shops.

The other equal joint venture that the group has entered into is with Lones Spa of Italy, which owns the Fly Flot brand, among the largest footwear brands in the world, retailing around seven million pairs a year, explains Seth. The PU injection shoe manufacturing plant, to go on stream later this year, will have a capacity of a million pairs a year in the first phase, 80 per cent of which will be brought back by Fly Flot. While the plan is to double capacity in three years, Pavers will also introduce the Fly Flot brand in the Indian market.

In men’s footwear, Pavers has established itself at a price point which is above brands such as Woodland, Lee Cooper and Red Tape but lower than brands such as Florsheim, Ecco and Geox.

Rajesh Issrani is director of a Chennai-based footwear retail store, Koblerr, which is among the best performing stores for the Pavers brand. Issrani says the store sold 198 pairs of Pavers footwear in July, though 70-75 per cent of it would be the women’s range.

He says the pricing for the women’s range seems just right – starting at below Rs 1,000 and going up to Rs 2,500, the Pavers comfort range has struck a chord with women shoppers. Says he: “Women’s footwear has a lot of unorganised players and not many national brands. Pavers has a lot of styles to offer and has gained acceptance but the men’s range could take longer.”

He has a reason to proffer. The men’s range starts at Rs 2,700 and goes all the way up to Rs 5,400. Most men, he says, have a mindblock about what they would like to pay for a pair of shoes, which is generally under the Rs 2,500-mark. “While Pavers shoes use good leather and are lightweight and durable, male consumers still have a mental barrier about what they would like to spend,” adds Issrani. Customers are still unaware of the quality and acceptance could take a little longer, he says.

Pavers also retails through 15 Reliance Footprint stores. Debdeep Sinha, Head (Marketing & Planning), for the chain says the Pavers brand stands for contemporary styling with a Western orientation and an emphasis on comfort. Sinha says that the Reliance chain offers a wide variety in footwear, including top-end imported brands such as Ecco and Geox. While a Pavers would match them in styling, it would be, on an average, 40 per cheaper and this is inducing trial, says Sinha. “When Pavers was launched, their price points were perceived to be high. Now, they have reworked their pricing and the price correction has helped push the brand. The brand is now aggressively priced against other brands such as a Clarks or Ecco. Also, Pavers is more Western-led styling and can’t be compared to other Indian brands; so while Pavers won’t do the same volumes, it will have value sales,” explains Sinha.

Also, he says, its exposure to Western markets has helped the brand master the logistics of the supply chain and is able to replenish stocks quickly. “They have extended their back-end expertise to this market. Also, in the time line between concept and product the turnaround time between product design to actual product on the shelves in faster,” adds Sinha.

With plans of distributing through 100 outlets this year, Pavers England expects to sell one lakh pairs of footwear and notch up sales of Rs 25 crore with the sole purpose of putting the brand on many more feet.

Pavers shoe firm steps in to take over failed manufacturer Equity Shoes Ltd

1:22pm Monday 23rd February 2009 inBusiness newsBy Ron Godfrey

PAVERS Shoes Ltd, founded in York by Catherine Paver in 1971, has bought failed manufacturer Equity Shoes Ltd for an undisclosed sum, rescuing ten jobs.

Equity Shoes of Leicester, dating back to 1886, went into liquidation on January 20, with the loss of 98 jobs.

The company earned a reputation for producing some of the best wide-fitting quality shoes in the world, especially the Equity and Elmdale brands for “large ladies”.

Production at the factory was halted after managers failed to find a buyer for the business. It was hoped an investor would allow them to continue trading.

Now Stuart Paver, managing director of Pavers Shoes and Shoe Club Ltd, his 50-50 joint venture of which he is chairman, has stepped in to buy the Equity brands and machinery.

He has retained the ten Equity jobs to continue design, development and sales of the shoes, but as the Leicester factory building has been sold, he is seeking a new manufacturing base by June, the location of which has not been decided.

Pavers acquisition of Equity shoes comes at a time when the industry is taken a battering in the recession. Last Monday Stylo plc, parent of the Barratt and Priceless Shoes chains, was placed into administration.

Now 220 of its UK stores are to close with the loss of about 2,500 jobs.

Yet Pavers has had rapid expansion over the past ten years. With a 90,000 sq ft distribution centre at Northminster Business Park, Upper Poppleton, it now has 76 stores in the UK and Eire, plus eight unmanned concessions in Edinburgh Woollen Mills and is due to open two more stores in Lancashire and Nottingham next month. It employs 750 people.

Mr Paver said: “We have always been prudent with our cash and have avoided borrowing money or overstretching the business so that we could survive a downturn like the current one.” Pavers Shoes sees a bright future for the Equity brand and for autumn/winter 2009 will focus on the core best-selling styles.

He said: “We will be offering shoes across all the fittings and will amalgamate the best-selling styles from both Equity and Elmdale into the new Equity range.

“This will prevent duplication in the range and allow us to offer better stock backing to the range, and great value.”

The good news for stockists is that Pavers Shoes will not implement price increases for any forward orders placed for autumn/winter 2009, despite most suppliers quoting 15 to 25 per cent increases.

Pavers Shoes products are also available from high street shops and online.

PAVERS – PURCHASE OF PAVERSSHOES.TV

Commenting on Gordons, Stuart Paver, Managing Director, Pavers Ltd said: “Gordons people are accessible and approachable human beings, who are very easy to work with and who understand our business.  We’d certainly recommend them.”

Yorkshire law firm Gordons has advised York-based Pavers, one of the UK’s leading footwear retail specialists, on its purchase of PaversShoes.tv, the world’s first TV shopping channel dedicated solely to selling shoes.

Pavers, founded by Catherine Paver in 1971, has established a reputation for high quality, comfortable and value-for-money shoes with a sense of style. With a turnover in excess of £50m, it has 100 plus outlets in the UK, including high street shops, discount concessions and designer outlets.

The purchase of PaversShoes.tv from London-based Jungle TV saw the company expand its offer into the shopping channel market place and it is expected the acquisition will add £10m to Pavers’ annual sales.

Gordons corporate solicitor Duncan Firman advised Pavers on the transaction.

Commenting on the acquisition, Pavers managing director, Stuart Paver, said: “This was a complex deal involving millions of pounds on broadcasting and production rights and also required consent from both Ofcom and Sky. Throughout the process, the team at Gordons provided a professional and expert service that enabled us to successfully purchase the shopping channel in order to further expand the Pavers brand.”

As well as its 100 retail outlets and a hugely successful ecommerce store (www.pavers.co.uk), Pavers wanted to launch a TV shopping channel to help increase both sales and brand awareness nationally.

Commenting on the acquisition, Duncan said: “It was a pleasure working with Pavers on its latest acquisition. Pavers prides itself on being an innovative retailer and this deal will bolster the company’s plans for further expansion over the next 12 months.”

Please contact Duncan Firman to discuss Corporate and Commercial.