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Suomessa käänne tapahtui 90-luvun alkupuolella kun talous rysähti monen tekijän yhteisvaikutuksesta reippaasti alas. Ennen sitä oli kohtuullisen varmaa että koulutuksella ja ahkeruudella pystyi takaamaan itselleen ja perheelleen mukavan ja turvallisen elämän. 90-luvun lama muutti tämän.
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Millaisessa maailmassa ovat kasvaneet tämän päivän teini-ikäiset jotka ovat syntyneet muutama vuosi ennen vuosituhannen vaihdetta? Pelon, epävarmuuden ja toivottomuuden maailmaan.
niin miksi ihmeessä työntantaja ei saisi maksaa enemmän yhtä hyvästä työvoimasta? Minusta hän on täysi idiootti, jos palkkaa yhtä pätevästä mies- ja naishakijan joukosta miehen kovemmalla hinnalla. Itse palkkaisin sen kumpi suostuu tekemään saman työn halvimmalla.
Tällä setillä aloitettiin tänään opiskelut.
FT: The shoe that is sure to fit
By Peter Marsh
Published: March 7 2007 18:29 | Last updated: March 7 2007 18:29
If you hate the idea of buying poorly fitting shoes but don’t like shopping, you are just the kind of customer Jarno Fonsen is interested in.
Mr Fonsen runs Pomarfin, a Finland-based shoe producer that is setting up a new line of business offering customised footwear over the internet.
Mr Fonsen’s vision is intriguing. In his plan, shoe shops around the world purchase or rent specialised scanners to measure customers’ feet with great accuracy. The details are passed to Pomarfin’s headquarters in Pomarkku, Finland, then sent to the company’s main shoe factory in Estonia where the footwear is made to specification.
Once a person’s details are on file, any further orders are made according to their personal measurements.
Although the internet service – which operates alongside Pomarfin’s mainstream business of making conventional shoes – is still in its early days, the 46-year-old Mr Fonsen is convinced it offers a sound business model for many similar types of Europe-based manufacturers, which see their products becoming less competitive because of high production costs.
“Offering customised solutions in this way is the way forward, certainly for a shoe manufacturer based in a high-cost region,” says Mr Fonsen, who took over as managing director of the family-owned company 13 years ago.
He began examining the concept of customised shoes in the late 1990s, and launched his ideas, using the trade name Left Foot Company, in 2001.
Technology development and setting up the service have so far cost Pomarfin about €10m ($13.1m). While some of this has come from cash generated by the company’s conventional shoe activities, Pomarfin has also received an undisclosed financial injection from Helmet Business Mentors, a Helsinki-based venture capital fund, in return for a 35 per cent stake in Pomarfin. The rest is held by Mr Fonsen’s family.
The funding is now in place, but Mr Fonsen admits the customisation idea suffered a false start as a result of his trying to do too much too soon. For instance, he has had to scale back the number of stores equipped with foot scanners from about 12 after launch to just seven, of which five are in Finland, one in Osaka, Japan, and another in Kaiserslautern, in Germany.
“Early on, we did not get the details of the system right. Some customers bought our shoes but often they weren’t happy,” he says.
Mr Fonsen reckons he has now sorted out the technical difficulties. “I think we are on course to have a total of 20-30 shops linked to our service within three years,” he says. “The places where I think we have a decent potential market outside Finland include Germany, Britain, Sweden and Denmark.”
Last year, about 10 per cent of Pomarfin’s total revenues of €6.5m came from customised shoes. By 2010, Mr Fonsen believes, the customised products could account for as much as half.
If this were to happen, Pomarfin would become a much more international business in sales terms. Today its total revenues (including the internet operation) come almost entirely from Finland and other Nordic nations, with Finland accounting for 70 per cent.
What do customers think of the service? Chris Lueb-keman, a director of global foresight at Ove Arup, the UK-based consulting engineers, is impressed.
Mr Luebkeman, who travels the world looking at technological innovation, says the experience of having his feet measured in a shop in Helsinki, then receiving a “wonderful” pair of shoes a few weeks later, was so convincing that he has ordered a second pair.
Recalling that before mass-produced shoes came along, many forms of footwear were made to measure by the local cobbler, Mr Luebkeman says: “This is a great example of ‘back-to-the-future’.” The shoes cost between €180 and €250 retail.
Teething problems are not unusual for businesses that try out new ideas. Mr Fonsen tackled his with the help of three groups of collaborators around Europe.
First, he enlisted the help of three Finnish software companies – whose identities he declines to disclose – which worked on the crucial links between the shop-based scanning hardware, the telecoms-based internet system and the factory in Estonia where the shoes are made.
“We needed some specialist help in the electronics side of the system, to make sure all the links in the chain worked properly, and we had to go outside for this,” he says. Since the start of the service, Mr Fonsen has replaced the original laser-based scanners used in shoe shops with a new set of equipment based around digital camera technology and made by Corpus.e, a Stuttgart-based high-technology company.
Finally, Mr Fonsen says he was forced to confront a more fundamental problem with the shoes that Pomarfin was originally trying to sell using the internet service. “Customers outside Finland on the whole did not like the shoes. They had a Finnish style, not a European style,” he says.
With the assistance of Mazzucato, an Italian shoe design business based near Florence, Pomarfin has re-thought the designs sold through Left Foot Company. “I am much happier with the style of shoes that we are selling now and I think customers are too,” he says.
Each shoe is made to order by workers in Estonia, where 120 of Pomarfin’s 140 employees are based, with the rest in Finland. Yet while each shoe is unique, its components may be standardised.
“It would be too expensive to make each shoe as a one-off completely from new,” Mr Fonsen says. “So we have found a way to put together the shoe reasonably cost-effectively from a number of basic building blocks in an example of ‘mass customisation’. The customer benefits from getting something that is made just for him.”
Use of the plant in Estonia, where wage costs for shoe production are a third of those in Finland, is a vital part of Pomarfin’s strategy. But even Estonia, where wage costs are gradually rising, is expensive compared with China, where much of the world’s footwear is made. There, the cost of employing someone in a shoe plant are about a fifth of that in Estonia.
If Pomarfin can offset its higher cost base by offering something different from the competition, Mr Fonsen thinks it will have a future in Europe. Much depends, therefore, on the success of his plan to offer customers a shoe fitting that lasts for ever.
A model appeal to retailers
Jarno Fonsen, head of Finnish shoe company Pomarfin, has had to find a way of keeping retailers happy when they sign up to be distributors under his innovative system to sell customised shoes.
They will be expected to hire a special scanner made by Corpus.e, the German manufacturer, for €600 a month, or buy one outright for €20,000. Retailers use this to measure consumers’ feet when they come in for a one-off “fitting”. From that point on, the same person need only log on to the website and select a style of shoe; the products will then be posted to him.
How does the retailer make any money from such a service? Mr Fonsen has a simple answer. No matter how many shoes a customer buys using the internet, the retailer who took his first order will gain the same marginal profit every time he places an order over the internet for another pair of shoes made to identical measurements.
“Under this process the retailer ‘owns’ each consumer who buys using the internet, even if the consumers no longer have to go into any shops to get their shoes,” says Mr Fonsen.
Feminists might have a problem with Pomarfin’s customised shoe service: it does not yet cater for women. But the omission is deliberate. Mr Fonsen believes the system’s minimal retail contact is more likely to appeal to men than women.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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