Church’s Shoes Cost How Much?
Church’s Shoes - a great investment or just expensive?
In the last few days I’ve had a few customers make a point of bringing up the cost of Church’s in conversation. Now many of our clients are time poor and it’s not that often I get to have a good old chin wag with them, but when half a dozen in the space of just a couple of days go out of their way to make time to talk about their favourite shoe brand, it’s not just a coincidence!
So what’s the problem? Well, shockingly, it’s the price. Now traditionally a quality shoe like Church’s or Crockett & Jones (and even the much younger - and my favourite - Oliver Sweeney) is associated with a healthy price bracket of around £250-£500. The fact they can last for years with a couple of refurbs in between stands up to the value test in most discerning men’s minds. You’d never have dreamt of spending more than £700 unless you were going to get a pair of shoes MADE for you from Lobb or somewhere…
Yet all of a sudden, without warning, that’s what Church’s and their parent company, Prada, are expecting you to do. And that’s what’s got a lot of my good friends and customers in a bit of a tizz.
On a home visit today my customer made a point of running upstairs to bring down his brand new pair of Church’s monk shoes - absolutely beautiful, exquisite - everything you’d expect from a premium shoe. But these are most likely the last pair he’ll ever buy. He was shocked to be told that the shoes he was used to paying around £350 for had more than doubled in price! Looking at Church’s website I’m still rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
£720 seems to be your starting point now, going up to £750 and then onto £850 for so-called “Limited Editions”. What’s Limited about them? I honestly don’t know. Maybe the poor calf the leather came from was born with a particular twinkle in its doomed eyes, who knows.
I had heard somewhere on the tailoring rumour mill that Church’s had hiked their prices and suddenly decided their strategy would be to target rich Middle and Far Eastern businessmen, and anyone else with no sense of value and too much money to burn. But in doing so, the strategists at Prada have seemed to completely forget about the tens of thousands of customers who’ve been loyal to the brand for (in some cases) entire lifetimes.
None of us really minds prices going up - we expect it to happen over time. It’s a fact of life and it’s also known as a small thing called inflation. Prices rises due to changes in manufacturing processes are also acceptable if we can see the added value those changes bring.
But to just more than double your prices overnight and become a brand for the super-rich? Come on Prada.
Time - and sales numbers - will tell if this is a smart move but I can’t help feeling that the likes of Oliver Sweeney and Crockett & Jones are going to get a whole lot busier as we make our way out of lockdown and back into the big wide world.
