How Australia’s leather boot manufacturing industry has changed

American leather artisan Weston Kay appears in a YouTube video with more than half a million views, staring at the RM Williams leather boot he has just butchered.

He’s not impressed.

“This is not good, not good at all,” he says to the camera, pointing out “fake leather” insoles and multiple synthetic elements as evidence.

Mr Kay, or Rose Anvil on YouTube, is not the first person to accuse the flagship Australian brand of declining quality, and RM Williams is certainly not the only major Australian boot brand to be accused of a drop in standards in recent years.

The slow decline of Australian bootmaking as a trade

For 17 years, Victorian artisan Jess Wootten has run a leather goods business started by his father, specialising in handmade pieces to order.

He’s one of just a handful of boutique bootmakers left in Australia, making about 400 pairs of boots each year with his small team from a former munitions factory in Ballarat, Victoria.

Mr Wootten estimates RM Williams, the only large-scale onshore manufacturer of welted leather boots, makes about half a million pairs.

“There’s no one in-between making welted footwear. There was about a dozen or so in-between when I started.”

That story is rooted in Australia’s history of tariffs, similar to the heavy tariffs US President Donald Trump has begun to roll out, with promises of job protection and boosts to local industry.

It’s a far cry from Australia’s booming bootmaking sector at its peak last century, with names like RM Williams, Baxter, Blundstone and Rossi synonymous with tough, high-quality boots made for life on the land.

“Bootmakers were a dime a dozen, 50, 100 years ago. Over the last 20 years, basically, it’s disappeared,” Mr Wootten explained.

He added there were a few brands making footwear with polyurethane soles, but very few making traditional — and more expensive — welted-sole footwear.

So, what happened?

Boots were not the only Australian-made product to all but vanish.

Old factories across rural and regional Australia bear the names of businesses that once kept entire regions alive.

According to Emeritus Professor Roy Green from the University of Technology Sydney, the disappearance of thousands of Aussie products traces back to a series of economic reforms by the Hawke-Keating governments in the 1980s and 90s.

Until that time, Australia’s makers had operated under the protective comfort of hefty tariffs on imports, and local manufacturing boomed to a peak of more than 30 per cent of the economy.

But that came with its own costs.

“Economists argued that, although manufacturing provided many good jobs … the cost of manufactured goods for consumers was far higher than what we would pay in other countries,” Professor Green said.

In some cases, shoppers might have found themselves forking out an extra 60, 70 or more than 100 per cent fee on a garment imported from overseas.

As tariffs were lifted and prices went down, exposure to market conditions left Australian manufacturing vulnerable.

Today, about 5 per cent of Australia’s economy is manufacturing, and many of those businesses that survived the rise of imports had to make sacrifices elsewhere.

Economic change pushes companies to go overseas or bust

In 2007, heritage Tasmanian boot brand Blundstone moved most of its production to Asia, killing about 350 jobs at its Hobart and Auckland factories.

It was a precursor to yet another seismic shift in manufacturing in the 2010s, during which Australia lost nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs in about five years as companies swapped local production out with far cheaper factories overseas.

“If we hadn’t made this decision, the market would have determined Blundstone boots irrelevant in a relatively short period of time,” Blundstone chief executive Steve Gunn said at the time.

“I would make the point that we are not the first Australian manufacturer to make this call, there are others that have been identifying the need to do it.

Blundstone’s offshore production may have attracted some critical reviews online, but the family-owned boot company continues to sell millions of pairs every year.

Capitalising on a cultural icon

While Blundstone shifted overseas, RM Williams stayed in South Australia, with the company now owned by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s Tattarang.

A spokesperson for RM Williams said the company created 350 new jobs since 2020, invested $8 million in a new manufacturing line for handcrafted women’s boots, and partnered with TAFE South Australia to “bring back lost apprenticeships in bootmaking and craft”.

“R.M.Williams’s success in recent years demonstrates that investing in Australian manufacturing, within the current policy context, can help businesses grow and create local jobs for Australians,” they said.

Mr Wootten acknowledged the importance of the brand to Australians, and its efforts to keep manufacturing onshore.

“RM Williams … broader Australia kind of defines it as part of our DNA, don’t they?” Jess Wootten said.

Mr Wootten has tracked the quality of RM Williams over the years, noting many of the observations Mr Kay pointed to in his videos.

“The argument has been that people expect the boot to be comfortable immediately, and so they use lighter-weight, softer, less-durable materials in order to give people what they want,” he said.

“That’s all OK if that’s what’s being communicated.

“I can see why the purchasing department has done what they’ve done, because large volumes, small increments in costs, mean large gains. If you can save a dollar or two a pair of boots and you’re making 3,000 pairs a day … [it] adds up pretty quickly.”

An RM Williams spokesperson said the public was welcome to “see firsthand the craftsmanship that goes into making our boots”.

“We source the best quality leather from tanneries around the world and use the same bootmaking techniques RM Williams used himself. Quality is our passion, and we strive to make the best handcrafted Goodyear-welted boot in Australia.”

Blundstone was also contacted for comment.