For our ‘Words With…’ series, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear from David Foster, CEO of the footwear brand GRUBS®. Daughters Abi and Beth joining the company make them the 9th generation of Fosters in the footwear business
What is the common thread that runs through the generations of the family?
Innovation in footwear has always been the major driving force in our families’ footwear from Samuel’s idea to reverse a nail to create a spike that would bite into a cricket pitch to our use of lightweight forms and resin enforced safety toes. We have always sought new methods and materials to bring an advantage to the wearer.
When Samuel came up with the idea of putting nails through the sole, he also had to make a steel plate, that backed the nail heads to stop them coming through the boot, into the wearer’s foot, creating the first spike plate. His grandson Joe took that idea and grafted it onto what was literally a ballet shoe.
His spikes were a hybrid of turn shoe construction as used in ballet shoes at the rear and welted foreparts with his grandfather’s metal plate trapped between layers. In more recent years, my Uncle Jeff pioneered the use of lightweight synthetics to form the uppers and the soles which made shoes lighter and more comfortable.
He created the world ten racer for Ron Hill who won the Boston marathon and Commonwealth titles in shoes made with a single millimetre of leather for the upper. That became the inspiration for the aerobics and fitness shoes that made Reebok the number one brand in the 80’s.
Reebok’s main selling point was the comfort aspect of the shoes, something that we poured into Grubs in the same way. All that knowledge that has accumulated in the family went into the design of our boots.
What prompted the founding of Grubs?
I was making tennis shoes for FRED PERRY in 1999 and I came across a weird looking rubber boot in the sample room, I asked the factory owner about it and he told me that I already knew the inventor.
Jim had worked at REEBOK with me in Korea and we caught up over a beer in Hong Kong. He had three very basic boots that had sold in New England. The idea was brilliant but I knew nothing about the rubber boot market and neither did he. We split the world in two, so he did North America and I the rest of the world.
I brought some samples home to show my wife and she loved them, so we set about finding distributors first in the UK then Europe, Australia, etc. That was Muck boot.
Where did the name Grubs spring from?
We had Muck boot which we sold to farm and agri but we had much more opportunity and also threat. I recounted to Jim my conversation with one of the then owners of Reebok, who also owned Olympus Sports, a high street chain in the 80’s. He sold copies of Reeboks under that name.
I asked him why and he said that the rules in fashion and footwear allow for three points of change to make a new design, so his policy was to have brand one and brand two. There was no room then for brand three! So we came up with a few ideas, one was muddies, for kids, and then Muck, Mucky, Grubby, Grubs!
Originally, it was to be ‘UNCLE GRUBS ALL PURPOSE FOOTWEAR’ so I shortened it to GRUBS. Jim got scared though in 2002 and sold the US business, My Wife Jan and I carried on with the new partners until 2012, at the same time also building up GRUBS and selling it to the sporting and outdoor markets.
What are the challenges for designing and manufacturing footwear in the 21st C?
There have been very few until the 2020s. The move to global manufacturing and sourcing, which I have been part of since the 1980s, made it relatively easy for new businesses to source products competitively and it’s how we got started ourselves.
Since Covid, the shipping crisis, currency crisis and dramatic slowdown of the western economies, it has become increasingly difficult. I still design on paper, this is then scanned and specified in illustrator, then sent out to our factory. We have a small but highly competent staff. It’s our factory, so there is no fight for space. We develop four ranges per year plus SMU’s for our distributors.
With sustainability dominating the outdoor industries’ agenda, how do you address the issues?
GRUBS® has a policy to show leadership, innovation and tradition at each step of the creative manufacturing transportation and sales process. Care is taken throughout this process and continues through the product’s lifetime.
We use lightweight shoeboxes made of recycled materials that are themselves recyclable. We keep print on the boxes to minimum and our inks are now water-based and non-toxic. We redesigned our boxes to use 20% less card and be 15% smaller, giving the additional benefit of packing more product into a container.
This reduces the container per pair cost as well as reducing the carbon per pair. 100% of waste rubber in production is recycled into the next batch resulting in an average 20% recycled content. All nylon and polyester face fabric is stripped from waste neoprene and returned for recycling, so 20% of our face fabric content is directly recycled.