Head down the end of Happy Valley Road, past the rubbish dump and up on the right before you get to the sea is a little street called Bata Place where a factory has been producing gumboots and other footwear for 63 years.
It’s the Bata factory, and now it produces only gumboots, but in its heyday, many of the pupils in New Zealand schools wore Bata school shoes, black lace-ups for girls and boys.
Then there were Bata Bullets, the ordinary person’s version of expensive sneakers, but definitely a cut above the old white sandshoes which had been compulsory for gym and sports training back in the 1960s.
There are not many people in the factory now, just four out of a total staff of21, a far cry from the 150 staff the company had in the 1960s. It’s now a much smaller business than it was behind the protectionist tariff wall which sheltered many New Zealand industries from competition.
The Bata story is one of expansion, decline, recovery, and now expansion again as a leaner and vastly different organisation. Bata began as a family shoe business in 1894 in Zlin, Czechoslovakia when Tomas, Anna & Antonin Bata set up the T & A Bata Shoe Company employing 10 cobblers. Today Bata employs over 30,000 people with 5,000 international retail stores and a presence in over 70 countries.
The company set up in New Zealand in 1948 and the first factory opened in Owhiro Bay in 1951 producing slippers. A second factory opened in Wainuiomata, and by the end of the 1970s Bata New Zealand had warehouses in Auckland, Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch, with factories and
workshops in Carterton, Masterton, Wanganui and Nelson.
During the 1980s all over the developed world industrial production of all kinds was sent to Asia, and with the phasing out of tariffs in New Zealand, producing leather locally had become unprofitable. By 1987 fifteen shoe manufacturers had gone out of business and all the others, including Bata, downsized in a desperate scramble to stay in business.
Tony Harmer is the head of Bata’s New Zealand operation and has worked for Bata for 36 years. He recalls the difficult choices the company faced.
“In the 1980s we did downsize, we tried to keep going as we were, but it didn’t work. The company steadily reduced its size and focus on non-labour-intensive areas to try and keep going.
“In those days we were doing sneakers, thongs (Jandals is actually a trademark owned by Skellerup), industrial leather, rubber products .. .. the range just couldn’t be sustained. We had to continually restrategise. The Bata family was committed to staying in New Zealand so we just had to find ways of doing that.”
In 1992 the Wainuiomata factory was closed and all production (by then it was only PVC gumboots) returned to Owhiro Bay.
In 2015 the result is a 21-person operation in the same 1940s building where the company began.
Now Bata has some bold plans to expand its business, and to increase production at the factory. Tony Harmer’s boss, Michael Wyatt, is in town from Melbourne, to help plan the sales drive.
Mr Wyatt acknowledges the vast power of Chinese manufacturing, but notes that costs in China have been rising steadily over recent years, eroding some of the competitive advantage that country used to enjoy.
Scale is a big plus because it brings economies, but it can also slow a business down.
“In Australia retailers like Bunnings like us because we can react quickly and adjust the size of their order and deliver in a matter of days. China needs four months to supply larger quantities than ordered. We can respond within days,” Mr Wyatt says.
The quicker turnaround is vital when the order is the result of some weather-related incident like a flood (of which there have been plenty recently in Australia.)
Bata plans to manufacture a wider range of gumboots at the Owhiro Bay factory, and to be competitive on price and quality with China.
The key element of the strategy is the new $4-million injection moulding machine unveiled by Prime Minister John Key in 2013.
“We had two old machines with 11 staff working 2417. They were replaced by a single machine which produces more and quicker.”
About 750,000 pairs of gumboots are imported into New Zealand each year; 1l0,000 pairs are made by Bata and 30,000 by another company, Tony says. Bata claims 80% of the industrial market, where their gumboots are worn by people working in places like meat processing plants and dairy factories.
In all countries Bata likes to portray itself as offering a sustainable product and as having a commitment to the country. “Locally made” and “committed to the local community” are common and successful themes in branding and marketing in Australia, and Bata will be shouting that message loud and strong in New Zealand too.
In New Zealand Batas main competitor is Skellerup, a well respected name which started as a family business in Christchurch in 1910, but is now a listed public company. It’s diversified over the years but is still strong in rubber goods. It imports all its gumboots from China while Bata makes all theirs locally.
Bata wants to develop an entry-level gumboot, for the “weekend warrior”; that’s industry jargon for gardeners and home handy types.
“If we can run the factory at full capacity, we can enter new markets, increase sales, price more competitively and build up trade.” Tony Harmer says confidently.
The plan is to put some prototypes into the market and see how the market responds. This will use existing moulds, but if the prototype sells well, then Bata will invest in new moulds and crank up production.
Currently the factory is running a normal eight-hour day, five-day week. It has plenty of capacity to increase this to 12 hours a day, six and half days a week.
Tony Harmer talks about Bata as a family company with family values. Every year they are audited for their contribution to the community. Bata has helped the local school and is open to doing more. They strive to source everything they can locally.
Every year staff can get a pay increase, and almost all do, says Tony. People stay a long time, he says, standing on the factory floor and reeling off the years of service of the staff around him, “ten years, nineteen years, thirteen years” for the three people working the moulding machine and bagging up the pairs of gumboots.
The auditors from the parent company check the social side, and ask the staff about life in the factory, whether they are enjoying their work and are happy.
Gumboots are now about a third of the company’s total sales but the only product Bata makes in New Zealand. There is also a factory outlet shop, which stocks fashion footwear from Batas retail brands like Marie Claire, Weinbrenner, and Bubblegummer, and they are agents for Reiker (comfort
shoes) Via Nova & Ferracini.
“We are a wholesaler and we’d love to change that. We’ve got a machine with ample capacity. Go out and get the business, that’s what we have been told to do,” Tony says, “and we will”.