STRAP
Footwear Retailer of the month Cheryl Taylor talks to Eralp Bayram, of Parés Footwear
Q&A:
Name: Eralp Bayram Shop: Parés Footwear
Brands: Start-Rite, Geox, Clarks, Ricosta, Ecco, Kickers, Garvalin, Converse
Home town: London
How did you get into footwear? Tell us about your background and your current business? My family have been involved in footwear for three generations.
My grandfather used to manufacture and retail shoes within the RAF base of Akrotiri in Cyprus. Ever since then our family has been involved in footwear. Pares Footwear was established by my father, Mehmet, in 1985 with the
first store in Blackheath, London. My sister and I essentially grew up with footwear in our lives.
24 • FOOTWEAR TODAY • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
Where are your premises located and how many people do you employ? Do you have a high turnover of staff? Tell us about your shop(s), the local area, your customers and their requirements? Since 1985 we have grown to a four store business employing
approximately thirty members of staff. The vast proportion of our staff has been with us for over five years, with two for over 20 years! So our turnover is quite low. Our stores are all located within the M25: Blackheath, London; Blackfen,
Kent and Cockfosters, Barnet. Of our four stores, three are children’s fitting specialists and the forth is adults footwear.
Do you have an online shop/website and do you use social networking for business? We came to the online sphere quite late, establishing a website in 2009,
ParesFootwear.co.uk. It has been a successful venture and we continue to see good growth coming from the online side of the business. We also have a small social networking presence on Facebook which we use alongside email marketing to communicate with our customers.
How are you finding the footwear market currently? Footwear retail has been a very difficult place to operate over the last 24
months, driven by two factors: supressed consumer spending and weather. Consumer spending has seen a substantial drop as people have felt the
pinch from increasing prices, pay freezes and general austerity. This has had an inevitable impact on the footwear market and the wider economy. Footwear retailers have also not been very lucky with regards to the weather over the last three seasons. If the right weather doesn’t hit at the
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