Publisher of leading trade magazines for the Footwear, Leather-goods, Leather & PPE industries

S&V Publishers: Looking back, planning ahead

Published: 10th Dec 2020
Author: Tony Dickson - S&V Editor
S&V has been a window onto the soul of the leather, footwear and leather goods industries for decades, and like them, has reinvented itself many times
 
This is an anniversary year for S&V. An 85th anniversary. I very much doubt many other industries in South Africa have a trade publication which has published continuously for so long. Certainly not our colleagues in the CTFL sector, textiles and clothing.
But let me start by admitting that my calculations have been faulty - twice.
Firstly, S&V, founded as Shoes & Views in 1935, actually turned 85 last year.
Secondly, somewhere along the line, we lost 3 years in our volume numbers, so the cover reads Vol. 83 No. 11, but should read Vol. 86 No. 11.
I know this is going to cause some consternation at the various legal deposit libraries where all publishers are obliged to send copies, but I think next year we'll put the matter right by jumping to Volume 87. There are worse things than facing the wrath of librarians.
This is also an anniversary year for me as editor. A 40th anniversary. My first month at what was then still Shoes & Views was April, 1981, although I had been a freelance contributor and later a correspondent to the magazine for several years before that.
 
S&V has had 3 eras: 
- From 1935 to around 1970 as a subsidiary of the Port Elizabeth Managers' and Foremen's Association.
- From around 1970 to 1984 as part of Thomson Publications SA (Pty) Ltd.
- From 1985 to the present as a sole proprietorship.
 
The magazine was founded by the PE Managers' and Foremen's Association at the suggestion of James Neil Boss, owner of women's fashion factory Mobbs, and the editors were 2 of his staff, A.E. Anderson and A.C. Kirby. 10 years later, Anderson was also the founder president of the Footwear Manufacturers' Federation - what today is SAFLIA.
It was an A5 quarterly, and although it was a company, Shoes & Views (Pty) Ltd, its profits were handed over to the association.
With shoemakers writing it, it was very much a technical publication, as can be seen from the list of contents of the early copies. But Boss's rationale for founding it was as a mouthpiece for the footwear manufacturing industry, and specifically to put forward the industry's viewpoints on 2 contentious issues - wages and imports.
Yes, imports. Boss was described by Professor Stanley Shuttleworth as both 'the founder of the South African footwear industry' and the 'leader of the struggle for protection'. I'm digressing, but the 30% duty on imported footwear, which still stands, was introduced in 1923. The countries it was aimed at, however, would all have been in Europe.
I have no idea who the magazine circulated to, but there were articles which I think were aimed at retailers. The advertisers appear to have been predominantly suppliers to manufacturers.
Port Elizabeth was the centre of the shoe manufacturing industry when the magazine started, and was still an important centre, along with Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and (mainly for safety footwear) Johannesburg, when it was sold.
Only a handful of companies which would have featured in those early editions still survive in some form or other - Mossop, Jordan and Watson in the Western Cape, Bagshaw and Medicus in the Eastern Cape,  Sutherlands, Bata, Beier, Eddels and Dick Whittington in KZN, and United Fram and Wayne Rubber in Gauteng.

1935: The second edition, and probably the oldest surviving issue of Shoes & Views.

Courtesy of the National Library, I have scans of the covers of the second edition in 1935, the second quarter of 1950, and the first, second and third quarters of 1951. The 1935 edition is dated October, which suggests the first issue would have been in July.
The earliest edition of which I have a physical copy is dated October 1973, by which time it was owned by Thomson Publications SA, operating out of its Cape Town office, and it was an A4 monthly magazine.
It would seem Professor Shuttleworth, founder of the Leather Industries Research Institute, author of the only history of the leather, footwear and leather goods industry in southern Africa so far, and by all accounts a brilliant man, also got a date wrong (which makes me feel a bit better), in that he said Anderson had run the magazine for over 40 years. It seems likely that TPSA acquired the publication sometime between 1970 and 1973 - although Anderson may well have stayed on for some time.
That 1973 edition listed David van Reenen as ad manager and Peter Larcombe as editor, but the really interesting name is a bit lower down - Managing Editor: John Westoby.
I've no idea what Westoby's background was, but I assume it was publishing. Footwear, however, really seems to have got under his skin.
TPSA was a subsidiary of a Canadian company owned by 'Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet...who became one of the moguls of Fleet Street in London' to give him his Wikipedia description. In this country, however, it published trade publications - around 50 of them when I joined.
It was managed by several Irishmen, with whom Westoby, for some reason, fell out.
This story came to me second hand when I joined, and I never met or spoke to Westoby to hear his side. However, he left TPSA to start a competitor to Shoes & Views called SA Shoemaker & Leather Review.
That's fair enough, but apparently he editorialised about 'the Irish Mafia' running TPSA and one way and another really started a war.
TPSA's response was to hire a veteran journalist called Peter Charman, whose brief was to shut down SA Shoemaker whatever it took. Although Charman's background was hard news, he chose to give Shoes & Views a PR slant, which focussed on winning over every big advertiser through soft editorial, and lots of it, and it worked.
SA Shoemaker didn't close, but it was taken over, no doubt for very little, by George Warman, which amounted to the same thing. Warman was another ex-TPSA staff member who had elected to branch out on his own when TPSA moved its head office from Cape Town to Johannesburg. So far as I could see, he treated editorial as a necessary evil, and Shoemaker suffered. When he sold his group - in the late 1990s, as I recall - it was one of the titles that ceased publication.
By all accounts Westoby was passionate about the industry. It seems he was popular and feared, in equal measure, for a 'publish and be damned' approach. I heard he moved to the UK and started a magazine for shoe repairers, which, if true, really does indicate a passion for footwear.
For Shoes & Views, the TPSA years - after the war with Westoby - were characterised by a high staff turnover. The names of the editors that I know of were David Cumming, Tony Hudson, Malcolm Hill (not the same Malcolm who died earlier this year, but he did come from the leather industry), Peter Charman, Joe Robinson, George van Pletzen and Leigh Jackson - at least 7 in 14 years. Publishers and advertising managers came and went, too.
Although TPSA had an editorial/advertising office in Cape Town and an advertising office in Durban, the magazine was based in Johannesburg. This was before emails and cell phones, even before fax machines (we did have telex machines, and their staccato clatter gave a sense of breaking news, even for the  most mundane messages), and when 'long distance' calls between cities were expensive, so Shoes & Views' editors were isolated from most of the manufacturing industry. They were, however, in the heart of the retail and wholesale sectors, and the mix of the editorial changed.
The advertising base, served by those regional offices, I suppose, didn't - suppliers to manufacturers remained the bedrock.
If ever there's an example of the cyclical nature of the economy, it's this editorial by David Cumming in January 1976: "Well, 1975 has passed and there will be few in the industry who actively mourn its passing. Just about every type of economic difficulty has struck somewhere in the industry during a cheerless period in which it struggled to meet new challenges..."
I think I could just copy and paste that as a description of 2020.
Further down, he wrote: "High on the priority list of matters requiring urgent action [is] the need for better communication throughout the supplier/manufacturer/retailer chain..."
Will we ever improve?
In 1978, I joined TPSA to edit Natal Equipment News, a regional edition of its money spinner, New Equipment News, and as a correspondent for several other Johannesburg-based magazines, including Shoes & Views. I lasted a year before they fired me. I shouldn't have taken it so personally - my boss, the office manager, and the sales manager, both followed me out the door not so long afterwards. 
In 1979, TPSA sent Rocky Swartz to Durban to restart Natal Equipment News. To make the office more viable, he wanted a second publication, and he asked for, and got, Shoes & Views. He knew me from my first stint, and in 1981 he offered me the editorship. It also helped that I was earning R500 a month at The Natal Mercury, and he was offering R1000/month.
Aside from friendship, Rocky was easily the best boss I had ever had. He motivated, he was dynamic. When he moved on to higher things at TPSA, the office artist designed a card for 'Super Publisher', and he was all of that.
In 1984, TPSA's parent in the UK decided it was delinquent. A hatchet man was dispatched to SA, and 'the Irish Mafia' were out. Of the 50-odd titles, all those making a loss were closed. The second stage was to get rid of publications which were deemed too small or unpromising, mostly by selling them to their staff. And with that began Shoes & Views' third era. At some point after that, TPSA disappeared - when and why I don't know.
 

1985: Richleigh was one of our most regular advertisers. The name still exists as a brand within Dick Whittington Shoes.

1995: The problem of illegal imports goes back a long way.

 
 
At the time, I was newly-divorced, about to be homeless, I had 2 dogs, and my pension payout amounted to R15000.
My plan was to buy a second hand VW Kombi, load up the dogs, and drive to the Mozambique border. I intended to meander from there all the way through SA and SWA, trying to earn a living as a freelance journalist, submitting articles on whatever I found to write about or photograph. One long-term project: A coffee table photographic record of small town architecture. I still sometimes wonder how it would have turned out if I'd followed that dream.
Instead, Rocky's successor, Dave Hinchcliffe, persuaded me that Shoes & Views could make a lot of money for someone with no corporate overheads. Dave was a very decent man, and I'm sure under someone like him, it could have done. My pension money went as a deposit to TPSA to buy the magazine, and I started off deep in debt.
My first issue as owner didn't start very auspiciously (Earlier this year, I heard from my stepmother that my father had been appalled when I asked him to be a guarantor for my R15000 overdraft facility at Standard Bank. "My son's not a businessman," he exclaimed, no doubt mentally waving his money goodbye).
The first front cover was supposed to be an ad for Manuel Sarkin, one of the first importers, but he ran into some financial difficulties when we were preparing that issue, and the cover fell through.
My father was right, and I've made more mistakes than I would have thought it possible to make and still survive. I am a little proud that my father didn't lose his money, and that about 10 years later the bank released him from his obligation.
The manufacturing industry's suppliers were my advertising base as well. Even though the readership by that stage was 75% retail, few manufacturers advertised. It wasn't so surprising. Shoemaking in South Africa in the 1980s was a licence to print money, and a regular topic of conversation was which factory had the biggest, newest, most expensive cars parked outside. It never seemed to occur to some of those Jeremy Clarkson types that perhaps a lot of people at very different levels - customers, suppliers, staff - must have viewed those cars as coming from the sweat of their brows.
There were exceptions, and here I'll only mention businesses that no longer exist: Panama Shoes under Newton Wade, Millana Shoes under Mike Wakeling, Richleigh Shoes under Erich Debus and sales director Jonathan Greenblatt, and Jordan Shoes under Rob Jordan and later Brian Pollock  were among the most consistent advertisers. 
And then came imports.
I won't rehash that story here. Suffice it to say that the industry has changed out of all recognition. And S&V has had to change with it.
The decision in the 1990s to change the name from Shoes & Views to S&V was taken so that it didn't exclude leather - which by that time was predominantly automotive - and leather goods. My conversion was a little less successful than, say, ABSA's, when they canned a host of household names (The Perm, Trust Bank, United, Allied, etc., etc.) and replaced them with a completely new one. People still frequently refer to this business as Shoes & Views. Oh well. I should be glad it's such a strong brand, even if I didn't invent it.
 

1990: An Early version of the Directory, perhaps our most important publication.

 
More successful have been the various diversifications.
The first of these, while I was still with TPSA, was the S&V Directory, which grew out of my phone book and which produced its 36th edition in 2019. For many people, the Directory is our raison d'être - our reason for existence.
S&V African Leather and S&V Protect both turn 15 next year. That count is accurate! I'm just horrified that so many years have passed. 
 
Leather was separated for the reason mentioned before - that footwear was no longer the primary focus of the leather industry in SA. However, footwear remains an important part, and here's a prediction: It will become more important in the near future.
Protect was started because Gavin Cooke of Rebel Safety Gear said my annual feature on safety footwear wasn't reaching his target market, and he further assisted by providing me with the kernel of a mailing list. Just by-the-by, I intend to restart the annual feature on safety footwear in S&V Footwear & Leather Goods next year, but it will be in addition to S&V Protect.
 

2007: I've made many, many bad decisions in 40 years, and one of them was starting two new magazines in the same year, with no new editorial or advertising staff - or planm for that matter. However, both S&V African Leather and S&V Protect have survived my mistakes, and are healthy and enduring publications about to turn 15. Beier Safety Footwear, its successor, BBF Safety Group, and REbel Safety Gear have been Protect Advertisers since the beginning.

 
The biggest evolution in S&V has been to switch from print to digital, and it was taken out of desperation.
During the postal strike that started in 2014, the Post Office instructed me NOT to post to any addresses from postal codes 0001 to 3000 - SA's industrial and commercial heartland, and the bulk of my readership for all the magazines.
I'm still receiving the odd returned magazine posted in 2014.
I continued printing and posting the Directory and Calendar, but this year put paid to that also, and frankly, I'm glad. In the next month or so, we will unveil the free-to-view online Directory and Calendar, while still offering the comprehensive subscribed online Directory.
Digital was the biggest evolution, but the biggest game changer has been the S&V Weekly Newsletter - which was also the first venture into digital publishing. Like so many pivotal moments, it came about by chance.
One Friday afternoon, at about 16.30, Alan Fleetwood of Bolton Footwear phoned me to tell me about Bolton's takeover of Conshu's factories. There had been lots of speculation about that, so it wasn't hot, hot news. However, Bolton and the Beier Group had carefully concealed their parallel set of negotiations, whereby the Beier, Bolton and Conshu safety footwear divisions would be folded into one new company, BBF. And that really was hot news.
While I was writing the article, I realised that by the time it was printed, it would be ho-hum old news. So I asked my web designer, Jonathan Commons, whether it was feasible to email the story to the entire mailing list. And Jonathan, who believes that I'm still in the quill and papyrus age, said "Of course". That was the first newsletter, and I didn't really intend to do another one, but the reaction was such that even I knew I'd stumbled onto something.
Initially, I tried to bring it out fortnightly, but it was such a struggle to find enough copy for that that I had to come up with another idea. Bloody mindedness, stupidity, call it what you will, but my solution was: If I can't find enough copy for a fortnightly, try a weekly. It's not quite as stupid as it sounds - the thinking was that if it gains momentum, news will come to me. And so, to an extent, it has. As has the advertising.
Another major game changer was SAFLIA's out-of-the-blue offer of sponsorship in 2016. That has been a major help ever since, but during the lockdown this year, it was the difference between continuing and not continuing. Noel Whitehead and Jirka Vymetal, thank you.
One of my many weaknesses as a businessman has been people management. I've had lots of staff over the years, most - probably all - of them very capable, but I never created a team which could go out and conquer.
Now, more through luck than anything, I have a network of independent staffers: A webmaster - the abovementioned Jonathan - and 2 designers, Linda Davie and Heather MacKessack, who produce what's needed, when it's needed, and feed me with ideas. They're professional and very good at what they do.
It's time, really, for a changing of the guard. I'm confident there's a very viable entity to pass on.
Dad, I don't think you'd be disappointed.
 

1985: Millana Footwear in Port Elizabeth and Panama Shoes in Durban both competed for the synthetic upper, contemporary fashion women's footwear market, and regularly took front covers. In Millana;s case, MD Mike Wakeling oversaw his own photoshoots, and there was always more model than shoe in the end result. Newton Wade was happy for the shoes to dominate.

 
 

 

Tags: S&V Publishers, Tony Dickson, S&V Footwear & Leather Goods, Magazine, S&V African Leather Magazine, S&V Protect Magazine, James Neil Boss, A.E. Anderson, A.C. Kirby, Professor Stanley Shuttleworth, David van Reenen, Peter Larcombe, John Westoby, Peter Charman, George Warman, David Cumming, Tony Hudson, Malcolm Hill, Peter Charman, Joe Robinson, George van Pletzen, Leigh Jackson, Rocky Swartz, Dave Hinchcliffe, Manuel Sarkin, Newton Wade, Mike Wakeling, Erich Debus, Jonathan Greenblatt, Rob Jordan, Brian Pollock, Gavin Cooke, Alan Fleetwood, Jonathan Commons, Noel Whitehead, Jirka Vymetal, Linda Davie, Heather MacKessack

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