Clarks: how a Somerset shoemaker built a global brand

Clarks began with a practical use for material left over from making sheepskin rugs. In 1828, James Clark turned the offcuts into slippers; nearly two centuries later, the company founded by his brother Cyrus in Street, Somerset, is known internationally for shoes including the Desert Boot and Wallabee. Its history is not simply a story of enduring styles. It is also one of mechanised production, attention to fit, changing ownership and a Somerset town shaped by the fortunes of its largest employer.

From rug offcuts to a family business

Cyrus Clark’s business in Street began in 1825, after an earlier partnership in wool, hides and tanning had ended. He made rugs from sheepskins. His younger brother James joined as an apprentice in 1828 and began making slippers from offcuts too short for rugs. These Brown Petersburgs were assembled by outworkers, who collected materials, made footwear in home workshops and returned the finished slippers for payment. By the time James completed his apprenticeship in 1833, the slipper trade had helped establish his claim to an equal partnership. The firm became C. & J. Clark.

The brothers developed trade beyond Somerset: the company was selling in Ireland in the 1820s, Canada by the 1830s and Australia in the 1850s. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, it won a gold medal for an elongated galosh made from gutta-percha. Growth did not proceed smoothly. In 1863, volatile markets, weak financial discipline and poor planning brought the business close to bankruptcy. Support from the local Quaker community helped it survive, as William Stephens Clark, James’s eldest son, took the lead.

William’s period at the helm brought mechanisation to the shoemaking process in Britain for the first time, according to the supplied account, and gave the firm a new footing as a manufacturer. The family’s Quaker commitments also reached beyond the factory. In Street, the business supported a school, theatre, library, swimming pool and town hall, as well as playing fields and low-cost housing for employees. These were practical investments in the place where the company worked and its employees lived.

Making shoes to fit and finding a market

In 1903 the partnership became a private limited company, allowing a further generation of the Clark family to take formal roles. The business combined manufacturing knowledge with a growing interest in style: it opened a London office in 1908 and built a reputation for fashionable footwear. Its ranges included the premium Tor line and the more affordable Wessex. Clarks entered retail directly in 1937, acquiring the Abbotts chain, and developed the Peter Lord retail brand.

Fit became an important part of the company’s approach to children’s shoes. After analysing thousands of measurements taken from local schoolchildren, John Walter Bostock devised a fitting system. In 1945 Clarks introduced children’s ranges in four width fittings, alongside a foot gauge to help shop staff measure customers. This was a concrete response to ill-fitting shoes: a product change paired with a tool intended to make fitting more systematic.

After the Second World War, the business expanded its manufacturing network across south-west and south-east England and South Wales. Its share of the UK footwear market by volume rose from 1.1 per cent in 1945 to 9 per cent in 1970, according to the supplied article. The company also used manufacturing agreements abroad, including in Ireland, Australia, Canada and South Africa. In the 1970s it acquired Ravel, Pinet and Mondaine, and bought K Shoes, based in Kendal, to protect it from a hostile takeover. Factory closures began in 1978 and continued through the 1980s.

The Desert Boot, Wallabee and life beyond the factory

The Desert Boot emerged from Nathan Clark’s wartime travels and his family’s request that he look for footwear ideas abroad. He encountered suede boots worn by soldiers in North Africa and sent sketches and patterns home. The company’s Stock Committee initially rejected his sample. Clark later presented the design at the Chicago Shoe Fair in 1949, where coverage in Esquire helped attract American interest. Officially launched in 1950, the Desert Boot was first sold in Britain through shops in Regent Street. Its design drew on a boot seen in Cairo’s bazaars, rather than being introduced in 1828 as the earlier article states.

The Wallabee followed a different route. Produced by Clarks from 1967, it was based on the Grasshopper, a moccasin-style shoe launched by German company Sioux. Clarks made the Wallabee at the Padmore and Barnes factory in Kilkenny, Ireland, after acquiring the factory in 1963. The name was adopted for the North American market when the Grasshopper trademark was already in use. Together with the Desert Boot and Desert Trek, the Wallabee became associated with distinct styles and music scenes beyond the company’s original market. The supplied Wikipedia account describes the Desert Boot’s links to British Mods and the Wallabee’s adoption by New York hip-hop artists, including the Wu-Tang Clan.

Clarks’ British manufacturing history later gave way to a different business model. The last Clarks factory in the UK ceased production in 2005; the last K factory followed in 2006, and production moved offshore, largely to third-party factories in Asia. A proposed return to Desert Boot production in a robot-assisted unit in Street was announced in 2018, but the company said in January 2019 that the unit would close after failing to meet production targets. The sequence captures a lasting tension in the company’s story: a brand closely associated with a Somerset manufacturing town could no longer sustain all of its production there.

Street nevertheless remained the company’s headquarters and operational centre. A distribution facility built there in 2005 was designed to process up to one million pairs of shoes a week. Clarks also developed as a retailer and international brand, reorganising its business into four regions under chief executive Melissa Potter and expanding online and in markets including China and India. The supplied account records 320 stores in the UK and Ireland as of October 2023, alongside international franchises and third-party distribution.

A changing company and an enduring local record

In November 2020, a rescue plan involving LionRock Capital and a company voluntary arrangement marked the end of the Clark family’s overall control. Viva China Holdings agreed in 2021 to acquire a majority stake in the firm that would own the Clarks brand; LionRock later sold its remaining indirect stake to Viva China Holdings. In 2021, Clarks named Victor Herrero as chief executive. The supplied article also records staff industrial action at the Street warehouse later that year, following disputes over dismissals and rehiring. Jonathan Ram became chief executive in 2022.

The brand has continued to connect established designs with new customers. From 2022 to 2023, English footballer Raheem Sterling collaborated with Clarks Originals on a Wallabee range, and a later school-shoe collaboration used football-inspired details. These examples sit alongside Clarks’ longstanding place in children’s footwear. The company’s history of fitting systems, width options and school shoes is more specific than a broad claim to comfort: it shows how the firm made children’s feet and the practical business of fitting them part of its product identity.

That history is also preserved locally. The Alfred Gillett Trust cares for the archives and collections of C. & J. Clark and the Clark family. A public museum, Shoemakers Museum, opened at The Grange in Street in September 2025, following the closure of the earlier Shoe Museum in 2019 and the transfer of its collection. The archive and museum make the firm’s story visible as part of the history of shoemaking in Somerset, rather than only as a sequence of products sold around the world.

Why Clarks deserves a place in British Legacy

Clarks deserves a place in British Legacy because its history connects product design to the working life of a specific British town. The business began in Street in 1825, developed from sheepskin rugs into footwear, and helped make that Somerset community a centre of shoemaking. The family’s investments in education, recreation and housing, alongside the firm’s role as an employer, show how its influence reached beyond the shop floor. Later, the company’s factory closures and move to offshore production made the costs of industrial change visible in the same place where its story began.

Its design history is equally tangible. The Brown Petersburg slipper made use of material that would otherwise have been too short for a rug; the children’s fitting system responded to measurements of local schoolchildren; and the Desert Boot and Wallabee travelled from specific manufacturing and design histories into international fashion and popular culture. These are not interchangeable claims about British craftsmanship, but examples of how a Somerset company developed products, processes and identities that reached far beyond Somerset. The archive held by the Alfred Gillett Trust and the Shoemakers Museum in Street give that record a public home. Together, the company’s local roots, manufacturing story, influential footwear and preserved collections make it a substantial part of Britain’s commercial and social history.

Sources

Clarks (shoe retailer), revision 1372691379 · Clarks (shoe retailer)

Adapted in part from Clarks (shoe retailer) by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.