No. 1
Guy West - Jeffery-West
When Mark Jeffery and Guy West first started working together back in 1983, having met in the hotel Guy West's parents ran in Northamptonshire, they saw markets as their first opportunity to 'make a few quid' by selling rejects and samples from Mark Jeffery's family shoes factory, as well as leather ties and odds and sods of reworked and customised second-hand shoes they could pull together.
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Later in 1987, they decided to form Jeffery-West shoes, producing styles based on footwear companies they admired that were working in Northampton. They decided to work with classic Northamptonshire factories, but they wanted to create a look that was slicker, more elegant and sharper than anyone else was producing. They wanted to create a new branded style of traditional footwear that nodded to footwear heritage but brought it right up to date.
'Initially we didn't have much money so we had to do all the stages of the manufacturing process ourselves,' recalls West. 'A chap would come to our office in the evening to cut out the styles. We would then take them to a closing room in Northampton. We would then take them to a factory where they would be made. They would then be collected in their boxes and put into cartons. Every stage was overseen by us.'
The initial styles offered a new take on classic Victoriana men's styles as well as reworkings of patterns that were coming out of the traditional factories. At this point, with no real funding Jeffery-West's initial output were 'cemented' rather than offering their customers the superiority of Goodyear Welted shoes that they would soon become accustomed to.
To initiate the first orders, the industrious pair would take their first styles around to respected footwear retailers to show the buyers what they were about and could offer. The feedback was good.
'We got the orders before we even had any backing from the bank,' says West. 'We went to see a potential bank manager with our order book and a 12-piece sample range to try and get the £5,000 credit we needed. He sympathetically said that he would give us a try. It was quite a gamble because at the time there was absolutely nobody in the industry as young as us. It is amazing, we still know people who wear the original Chelsea boot we produced.'
Despite this youth, their determination, innovative take on tradition and the prevalent music styles of the time (New Wave, White Funk and Art School Rock), would soon begin to take give them a firm foothold in the market. The styling, that mixed up English gentlemen's club, Rock'n'Roll aristocracy Victorian knocking shops, the darker elements of religious sects and even contemporary art, was proving inspirational in a market flooded with repetitive styles, conspicuous branding and blatant fashionability.
See Mark Jeffery's page who takes the story on ....
www.jeffery-west.co.uk
