See also Episode 1: On A Mission | https://wootten.com.au/ep1onamissionvideo/

See also Episode 3: Our Story So Far | https://wootten.com.au/ep3ourstorysofarvideo/

See also Episode 4: Good Things Take Time | https://wootten.com.au/ep4goodthingstaketimevideo/

COMING SOON Episode 5: Community Is Key

COMING SOON Episode 6: It's All About The Craft

THE BIGGER PICTURE:

As Donald Horne famously said: Australia is a lucky country. We are abundantly wealthy in resources and we are, by most measures, an affluent society. Yet we rely almost entirely on all of the goods we consume being imported, we have outsourced the production of just about everything, and in doing so we have lost the connection to how the things we consume have come into being. We have outsourced the environmental impacts of their production and even more horrifyingly, we have outsourced the impact of their eventual disposal. We need to take responsibility for this, we need to reconnect with the reality of consumption and waste. As it turns out, outsourcing everything to just across the water won’t insulate us from the inevitable catastrophic impacts of mass consumerism.

This cycle of consumption, over supply and cheap and “disposable” stuff wasn’t always the case, and we have seen over the past 40 odd years it being supercharged. There are two factors which, in our opinion, have contributed to this acceleration in consumerism and perceived “wealth”. In the early 1980’s the Hawk government cut import tariffs, almost immediately killing local manufacturing. Whilst at the same time Australia won a yacht race, the America’s cup, Hawk famously saying “any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum”. The 80’s were a different time, we were a nation ripe for growth, perhaps the slide into mass consumerism was inevitable, perhaps without the cuts and this famous win our eyes would have turned to the capital of consumer culture anyway. Nonetheless, Australians have since chosen to “supersize” pretty much everything, the glittery allure of American capitalism has proven dazzling.

In the last 15-20 years the shine has begun to wear off. Our excess hasn’t enriched our lives as we thought it would. Brands haven’t delivered in the absence of substance, the free market hasn’t delivered better outcomes for us as humans. Surely we have achieved abundance, we have absolutely exceeded ourselves, yet we are now waking up from our supercharged consumption with somewhat of an empty feeling, a hangover.

We have lost the connection to the things we consume and thus we have lost the connection to the community that it takes to produce them. We have lost connection to the meaning which the objects have, their impact on our lives and the environment we inhabit. We have lost the connection to the objects themselves and tend to treat them as disposable , once they are no longer required we tend to “throw them away”, but where is “away”?

It is our view that if we produce things of meaning that enhance our connection to one another or things that sustain our societies, there are benefits beyond the utility and the life of the product itself. So we ought to focus on the wellbeing of our society and the environment we inhabit before we consider our financial bottom line.

Since the early 2000’s there has been a myriad of manufacturing businesses close. Pretty much all of the small, medium and large production facilities have either closed or moved production offshore. The last remaining is RM Williams, us (Wootten), a handful of other micro businesses manufacturing on a small scale and individual craftspeople.

To put our production in context we produce somewhere in the range of 400-500 pairs of shoes annually. RM Williams produces somewhere in the range of 500-750 thousand pairs annually.

We use locally sourced materials and components meaning a great number of people outside our own team benefit from our production. The farmer raising the cattle, the tannery using world class environmental practices located less than 100km from our workshop. The rubber plant who used to have 30 staff and produce soles for the bustling local trade and are now a team of 4 producing some of the most durable soles in the world on a tiny scale. One of Australia’s last remaining webbing manufacturers operating specialized jacquard looms. There are dozens if not hundreds of hands that go into producing the raw materials we use, even before we spend weeks hand crafting your boots.

Even the end customer, coming into our workshop, meeting the small team of people working tirelessly to keep this enterprise humming. The provenance of the things we consume and how they live their lives is incredibly meaningful to our community.

For the direct Youtube link click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDBD3S0SiMY