Where do you obtain the raw materials for the shoes, and where are they from?

Almost all sports shoes running, football, skateboarding or basket ball  are made of  4 basic materials.  The four main raw materials are leather, rubber, fabric and synthetic leather.

Leather:

Cattle are raised in the USA, Brazil and Australia. The animals are used for food in their home country.

The hides are then sent to China, Korea and Taiwan .  In Asia the hides are processed at leather tannery into finished leather.  The leather is dyed or plastic coated depending on the requirements of the shoe companies.

Rubber:

Shoe bottom Rubber is made of many compounds including  natural rubber, Synthetic rubber, fillers dyes and some chemical stabilizers.   Natural rubber  Latex from Thailand or Indonesia.  Synthetic rubber is polymer (plastic) material compounds come from chemical companies in China, Korea, and Japan.  To make rubber the compounds in powder form are mixed forming a material like chewing gum.  This gum rubber is then cooked in molds to make the shoe bottoms.

Fabric:

Fabric for sports shoes is made in China, Korea and Taiwan.  Fabric is really fine plastic threads knitted or woven together.  The plastics, nylon, polyester , rayon and polypropylene determine the performance and cost of the fabric.  cotton canvas is also a popular shoe material.

Where and how do the shoe materials become Shoes?

Shoe companies like Nike, DVS, Globe and Etnies  have a partnerships with several shoe factories, in the case of Nike dozens.  The shoe factory is responsible for collecting the shoe parts, cutting stitching and assembling.

The shoe factory orders the leather from the leather tannery, the fabric from a textile mill the mill sends the fabric to a dyeing house for color matching.

The rubber parts will come from another factory that mixes the rubber compound and "presses" the rubber parts to the shapes for the shoes.

Once all the materials are inside the factory,  the workers cut each shoe part and gather the parts  for each shoe into a bag.  This bag of parts is them passed to the stitching room where the workers use a sewing machine (just like the one you mom has). to assemble the parts.  Once all the leather and fabric parts are stitched you have a shoe upper with no bottom.

The final assembly is done on a 150 meter long assembly line.  On the line the stitched shoe is glued to the rubber bottom.  At the end of the assembly line workers attached the shoe laces and box up the shoes

How is the end product  transported?

At the factories the shoes are packed into shoes boxes them gathered into 12 count case boxes.  The cases are loaded into a ocean shipping cargo containers.  The metal container is  40 feet long 8 feet high and 8 feet wide- it is a semi trailer.

This size container can  hold about 5,500 pairs of shoes.  The cargo container is trucked to the harbor then loaded into container ships.  A container ship can carrying over 1000 containers can sail from China to the USA in 10 days and to Europe in 20 days.  Once the ship arrives the containers move by truck or rail to distribution warehouses.  At the warehouse the containers are emptied and the are shoes repacked for trucking to the skate shops and shoe stores.  The cost to ship a pair of shoes from china to the USA by ocean?  About .50 cents a pair.

How low does it take to make a shoe?

From  when a designer starts drawing to a new shoe, it can be about 18 months until it’s in the store.