Padders Shoes
Padders Ladies Shoes
Padders Mens shoes
Northamptonshire has always been at the heart of the British Footwear Industry, plentiful in the raw materials - water, wood and livestock needed in the manufacture of shoes. Most of the towns had shoe factories and it was not uncommon to have several, providing employment to whole families for generations.
The Groocock family, already experienced retailers, owning a General store in Rothwell since 1905, founded their own footwear manufacturing company in 1914. Thomas Groocock was the founder of T.Groocock & Co (Rothwell) Ltd., making traditional welted shoes. This was the Edwardian era of fashionably small feet, where occasionally ladies even had their little toes removed to achieve a slimmer fit!
In 1922 the company expanded into a larger factory, and by 1939 the company was doing its bit for the war effort, making army boots and 'utility' men's shoes.
By the late 1950s, the company was working with Densons to produce the famous beetle-crushers and winkle-pickers favoured by the youth of the time. A new factory was built in Rothwell in 1959, and within a few years the company had introduced 24-hour shifts in order to cope with the 3,000 pairs of shoes being manufactured each day.
Fast-forward to the early 70's and it was stack-heel and wedge-platform shoes that were whizzing off the production line, at a volume of 2,000 per day.
In 1982 the company successfully launched the Padders brand with stock backing and direct-to-the-retailer service, aiming to deliberately move away from high fashion towards a more mature market that was steadily expanding. At this important time in Groocock's history, Padders created their feelgoodfeetTM concept. feelgoodfeetTM was and still is, all about exceptional comfort and support which was independently recognised by the industry's premier research and testing organisation SATRA; who gave Padders feelgoodfeetTM one of the highest ever scores, in their footwear Comfort Index tests. Such was demand that by 1987 there were four plants in action, producing well over one million pairs in that year alone.