Sustainability and new approaches to value in the footwear industry
The event is scheduled for 22 May 2026 and will take the form of a workshop exploring the opportunities offered by circularity within the supply chain.
Keep reading...A stable public-private partnership, a permanent technical committee and a tailor-made modernisation pilot programme for SMEs, aimed at accelerating digitalisation and sustainability and ensuring generational renewal: these are the key points of the joint proposal presented on 12 May by the national associations of footwear and footwear component manufacturers to the Minister for Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu Boher. The aim? To strengthen the competitiveness, modernisation and industrial continuity of the Spanish footwear sector and its ancillary industry.
During the meeting, both organisations emphasised the need to move towards a stable public-private partnership that would enable a response to the structural challenges facing this industrial value chain: increasing price pressure, the transformation of commercial channels, the gradual loss of the manufacturing base, difficulties in generational renewal, a lack of entrepreneurial scale, and new regulatory requirements regarding sustainability, traceability and product standards.
FICE and AEC have proposed to the Ministry that the footwear sector and its components be recognised as a priority area within Spanish industrial policy, given its significance in terms of employment, exports, innovation, territorial cohesion, production capacity and the international prestige of the ‘Made in Spain’ brand.
As the central focus of the proposal, both organisations put forward the possibility of promoting a pilot programme for sectoral industrial modernisation, supported by demonstration companies, technology centres and sectoral infrastructure.
The need to address one of the sector’s main challenges – business continuity – was also raised, along with measures aimed at strengthening the sector’s international competitiveness, supporting market diversification, improving market surveillance and promoting balanced competitive conditions for Spanish and European industry.
Both organisations have called for the establishment of a technical working group with the Ministry, with the aim of defining, in the short term, possible avenues for collaboration, support measures and modernisation projects applicable to the sector.
