Where your sneakers are made: inside Ethiopia's leather industry

Almost every sneaker sold in North America is made in one of four places: China, Vietnam, Indonesia or India. Ours are made in Addis Ababa. People ask why, and the honest answer starts with cows.

The leather comes before the shoe

Ethiopia is the largest cattle-breeding nation in Africa and holds roughly the sixth-largest cattle population in the world, at close to 61 million head, according to a 2022 working paper from the United States International Trade Commission. It raises sheep and goats for skins as well. That is the raw material of a footwear industry sitting in the country already, which is unusual: most leather-goods manufacturing happens thousands of kilometres from the animals.

For decades the hides mostly left. They were exported raw or semi-processed and finished somewhere else, and the value was added somewhere else too. Keeping the tanning and the assembly in the same country as the herd is the entire argument for making shoes in Ethiopia rather than importing Ethiopian leather to a factory elsewhere.

Why the world showed up in Addis Ababa, then left

Around 2011 the Ethiopian government started building industrial parks and offering tax holidays, cheap land leases and very cheap power. Foreign shoe manufacturers arrived quickly. The USITC paper lists the wave: Huajian International Shoe City opened in 2011, New Wing in 2012, Taiwan's George Shoe Corporation in 2012, Japan's Hiroki in 2014, Turkey's My Shoes in 2015. The British tanning group Pittards was already there.

The numbers moved fast. Ethiopian footwear exports to the United States went from about $669,000 in 2011 to $34.8 million in 2018. Then they went the other way: $24.7 million in 2019, $12.8 million in 2020. Trade access changed, a war started in the north of the country, and a lot of the foreign investment that had arrived for the incentives left when the incentives stopped being worth the risk.

The factories that were always Ethiopian

What did not leave were the domestic manufacturers. The same USITC paper names several by name, including Tikur Abbay, Enzi, SoleRebels, Soul of Africa and Anbessa.

Anbessa Shoe S.C. is the factory that makes our shoes. The Tsagué and the Lafrica are cut, stitched and assembled there, on European lasts, by people who have been making shoes in Addis Ababa for a long time. We are a small customer. Our last order was 228 pairs, which is a rounding error to a factory that size, and we are treated well anyway.

How a pair actually gets to you

It is less glamorous than the phrase "direct from Africa" suggests:

• The pairs are made and boxed in Addis Ababa.
• They fly Addis Ababa to Toronto. Ethiopian Airlines has no direct freight route to Montreal, so Toronto is the entry point.
• They clear Canadian customs and are trucked to Montreal.
• They sit in our stockroom in Montreal until someone orders a pair, and then they ship from there.

That last step matters more than it sounds. Because the stock is already in North America, an order is a domestic or near-domestic parcel rather than a shipment from East Africa, which is the difference between a week and two months.

What "made in Africa" does and does not mean here

We are careful about this. We do not hold a fair-trade certification and we are not going to imply we do. What we can say is specific and checkable: the shoes are made in Ethiopia by an Ethiopian company, in the country that raises the herd, and the manufacturing value stays there. That is the claim. It is a smaller claim than most brands make and it has the advantage of being true.

See what is in stock, or read about what full-grain leather actually is.

Source: United States International Trade Commission, Has the Other Shoe Dropped? Ethiopia's Rise and Fall as a Footwear Sourcing Destination, March 2022.