The new digital portal, Portuguese Shoes, is finally online. This is the most complete digital portfolio of the footwear industry in Portugal, with a database of approximately 400 companies. Until the end of the year, up to 10.000 Portuguese products are expected to be on the platform.
"It’s the biggest showcase of Portuguese footwear ever made”, assures Luís Onofre. According to APICCAPS’ President, "we’re living in an exceptional time of our lives, with serious limitations to flights and also in attending promotional events abroad. For that reason, in the past few months, APICCAPS has worked on providing international clients with all the information they need about the offers of the Portuguese footwear, accessories and leather goods companies”.
As a professional portal, besides the description of the companies, it’s possible to access the companies’ showrooms with thousands of products, specialized and technical information and other relevant information from the brands and companies. In the next months, the access to virtual showroom and 3D photos will be available in a large scale.
The portal also provides information about all the Portuguese footwear companies with online stores, therefore creating a more effective and systemic connection between the brands and the final customers.
The launch of the Portuguese Shoes portal is within the sector’s strategy, namely the FOOTure 4.0 Plan, which has the goal of establishing Portugal "as the international reference of the footwear industry worldwide, by its creativity and sophistication, by increasing the Portuguese exports based on a national productive activity, such as being sustainable and highly competitive, with its roots in knowledge and innovation”.
Until the end of 2021, the sector will invest three million euros in the digital universe, within the project "Offer Valorization for the Footwear Cluster”, supported by the program Compete 2020. Since the beginning of this year, over 80 companies have already invested in the digital universe, through the association to international prestigious platforms, the creation of online stores or marketing digital campaigns.
A closer look on the Portuguese online presence
Approximately three quarters of the Portuguese companies that integrate the footwear and leather goods cluster have an online presence. On a study from the Research Centre in Management and Applied Economics (CEGEA) for APICCAPS, entitled "Portuguese Footwear Cluster on the Internet”, 328 companies and 362 brands were surveyed. The Portuguese footwear and leather goods cluster is on the right track, but, according to APICCAPS, "there’s a lot of work to do”.
In the footwear segment, 75% of the companies have an online presence, including a website. Numbers that go up to 78% in the case of companies from the footwear, leather goods and saddlery cluster.
Two additional notes that deserve a highlight are that "the percentage of companies with websites is slightly larger according to the size” and, this one a bit worrying, 4% of the websites "consists of a ‘under construction’ landing page”.
In terms of language, English is most common, being used in 90% of the websites, and Portuguese is only used on 75%, a result that may make sense on a sector that exports 95% of its production. Almost 71% provide a catalog of their products. Approximately 27% allows "the consumer to buy products from the companies online”. And only 9% of the companies allows products’ customization.
The presence on social media is also starting to be of importance for the companies in the cluster. Almost 60% of the companies have Facebook pages, 37% are on Instagram and 21% are on LinkedIn. Moreover, there seems to be no connection regarding the presence on social media and the size of the companies. The companies that are more active are the ones from the saddlery sector.
Only 27% of the companies have an online store. From those, 66% accept orders from all over the world, 14% only sell within the European market and 9% export for some destinations outside the EU but not worldwide. Approximately 2% of the companies sell in Spain and Portugal, and only 9% are exclusively on the national market.
In conclusion, according to the Research Centre in Management and Applied Economics, the presence on online platforms is low. Only 6.7% of the surveyed companies are on Amazon, 5.8% on Overcube and 5.2% on Dott. A highlight also for the presence on Zalando. The presence on Zappos, focused merely on the footwear market, is the one with a lower presence of the Portuguese companies, with less than 2%. The digital presence is more common in companies with over 250 employees.
APICCAPS aims to take actions, based on this closer look on the "Portuguese Footwear Cluster on the Internet”, such as creating new dynamic interventions, so the cluster can increasingly and efficiently impact the professionals of the sector.
As a reminder, the Portuguese footwear industry exports 80 million pairs of shoes to 163 countries worldwide, with an approximate value of 2.000 million euros.