Somewhere between 90 and 100 pairs of boots and shoes come off the benches in Dunedin on an ordinary working day. Fourteen people make them, aged 20 to 64, in a firm established in 1879 by Robert McKinlay six years after he arrived from Scotland, and held by the same family through five generations since. About 99% of what they make is sold inside New Zealand. By 2026 you can count the country’s shoe manufacturers on one hand, and McKinlays is reckoned to be the largest of them still making everything it sells. (Te Ara 2026) (McKinlays Footwear 2026) (The Spinoff 2026)
Divide the pairs by the people and the business becomes legible. Fourteen staff, including whoever answers the phone, finishing something like six or seven pairs each before the day ends. That is not a factory with a bottleneck to find. That is close to the rate at which a person and a pair of hands can finish a boot.
And the country it sits in has no heritage boot. Not no bootmaker: McKinlays is right there, taking orders. What is missing is the object in the national imagination, the one anybody could name without thinking. Australia has two of those. New Zealand, which once made almost all its own footwear, has a workshop in Dunedin that most people would have to look up.
Purity or surrender
The obvious reading is grim and economic, and the wage arithmetic backs it. Footwear labour runs at roughly US$12 to US$16 an hour in Western countries against about US$3 to US$4 in China and US$1.50 to US$3 in Vietnam and Indonesia, and an Asian-made sneaker costs around US$15 to produce against US$35 to US$45 made in the United States. (Sourcify 2026) New Zealand wages sit at the top end of that spread. The trade went accordingly: about 95% of the country’s footwear was made locally in the late 1980s and about 5% by 2008, which is a larger argument than this one. (Te Ara 2026) (The Spinoff 2026)
So the two honest responses look like the two romantic ones. Either you keep everything proudly made here, at any cost, and go broke defending the principle, or you accept it is over, offshore the lot, and let the name become a label on somebody else’s work. Purity or surrender.
Both feel like the only options, and both are dead ends, which is usually a sign the question has been set up wrong.
Blundstone took the second option
In 2007 Blundstone announced it was moving boot production to Thailand and India, saying it could no longer compete against low-cost imports. About 300 jobs went in Tasmania and about 60 in New Zealand, as reported at the time. (Wikipedia 2026) The company had been making boots in Tasmania for well over a century. On the romantic account, that is the moment the brand died.
It did not die. Blundstone sold around 3 million pairs in 2023 across more than 70 countries, and TIME named it to its 100 most influential companies of 2024 under the title “The Everywhere Boot”. (TIME 2024) Offshoring cost it neither its customers, nor its price, nor its name.
The first version of this argument called offshoring the hero product a fast death by losing the soul. The record is unkind to that. Moving production did not end the brand: it ended the one sentence the brand could say that nobody else could, which is that the boot was made where the story came from. TIME’s word for what Blundstone became was everywhere, and everywhere is the opposite of from somewhere.
That relocates the gap. It is not a commercial gap, because Blundstone occupies the commercial ground completely and so does every import at half the price. Put the two rates side by side and the point is embarrassing: 3 million pairs a year against 100 pairs a day, which the Dunedin benches would need about 120 years to match. Nobody in this country is going to out-sell that. The opening that is genuinely there is provenance: a heritage boot still made in the place its story comes from, which is the one claim an offshore competitor cannot buy back at any price.
What the boot carries
Provenance is not all-or-nothing, and treating it as though it were is what makes these brands impossible to run. The value of a heritage brand is concentrated rather than spread evenly across a catalogue. The craft, the story, and the reason anyone pays a premium live in a small number of objects, and the rest is range around them. Almost nobody buys a heritage brand because its t-shirt was sewn locally. They buy it because the boot is real.
Which sets the strategy, such as it is: spend the expensive local capacity where the value actually sits. Keep the boot made in Dunedin, say so loudly and specifically, price it like the object it is, and make the broader range through a controlled offshore supply chain that carries the brand and pays for the bench.
The middle path already has a tenant
This is the point where the argument has to stop congratulating itself, because the position it describes is occupied.
RM Williams has held it since the 1930s: boots cut from a single piece of leather, made in Adelaide, sold at a price that assumes you know both of those things. It is also the clearest available evidence of what holding that position costs. The brand was sold in 2013 to L Catterton, the LVMH-backed investor that refocused it on the handcrafted one-piece boot, then bought back into Australian ownership in 2020 by Andrew Forrest’s Tattarang for about A$190 million, after which Adelaide production expanded and more than 350 jobs were added. (SmartCompany 2020) (Tattarang 2020)
Read as a business plan rather than as a nice story, that says two things at once. The premiumise-the-hero model works. It also took a private-equity house and then a mining fortune to hold it steady, around a boot that was already famous before either arrived. A family firm making 90 to 100 pairs a day, funded by selling boots, is being asked to reach the same position from a standing start with none of that behind it. The New Zealand gap is not empty because nobody thought of it. It is empty because the entry price is high and nobody here has been able to pay it.
The offshore half of the plan carries its own bill, too. The buyers who care where a boot is made are precisely the buyers who check, and a range with two origins invites the question of which part is the real one. Every offshore item is an invitation to audit the hero. That is survivable, but only if the split is stated plainly on every product and never blurred in the marketing, which is a discipline rather than a footnote. All of this is an argument about somebody else’s business, made from outside it, which is the easiest kind to make.
What pays for it
Ninety pairs a day is not a scale problem waiting for a fix. It is the divisor. Every pair off those benches carries a share of a Dunedin building, 14 wages, and a wage rate several times what the same work costs in the countries that would happily make the same boot tomorrow. Something has to pay that down, and there are only three candidates.
Volume cannot. The wage gap is the exact thing volume would have to beat, and losing that race is why the trade left in the first place. Capital can, which is what A$190 million bought in Adelaide, and a bootstrapped maker does not have it. That leaves price, and a price like that is not set in a strategy document. It is set one pair at a time, by somebody holding a boot and deciding that where it was made is worth the difference.
Ninety times a day, if the day goes well.