When to launch your shoes into the market

All your work getting your shoes designed and built is at risk if your market timing is wrong. You need to make sure your winter boots arrive in time for the winter selling season. Make sure to carefully calculate your margins to ensure you can deliver your shoes profitably.

Planning your shoe manufacturing business

The shoe market has buying and selling cycles or seasons. To ensure your shoes are available in stores for these delivery windows you will need to work the schedule backward many months.

Footwear Delivery seasons:

Fall

Can also be called “back to school.” This is a large delivery window for many different types of shoes. The fall delivery is critical for football cleats, cross country running shoes, basketball shoes and any other shoe needed by students going back to school or college.
Fall product must be available to your stores starting in late June so they will be fully stocked for the shopping rush. Your shoe dealers will be switching off the summer product set-up in mid to late July. Fall orders must be placed to the shoe factory February 1st, in order to exit the factory May 1st and be available for retailers to order in late June.

Holiday

The Christmas shopping season can account for 25% to 45% of yearly sales of a shoe store. It is important to have fresh product for your footwear dealers.
Holiday orders must be placed to the shoe factory June 1st. You can expect to pay extra for ocean shipping during the holiday run-up as merchandise floods in from around the world.

Spring

Spring is also a major delivery window for summer sports shoes and items needed for winter vacation travel.  The shoes arrive in the stores in January as the merchandise is reset after the Christmas selling season.

Summer or April

This delivery is usually the smallest. Retailers will use this April product offering to top up their inventory for the summer selling season. Summer is a chance for shoe companies to offer new colors of top selling models.

In Chapter 4 of How to Start Your Own Shoe Company, we will review all the steps of the footwear development process and explain the required timelines in further detail.