NOTEBOOK – One Good Read: Red Wing Shoes

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Drive about 55 miles southeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul and you’ll arrive in Red Wing, Minn., a town of about 16,000 located on the Mississippi River. More than 100 local and regional artists have shops in a renovated train depot, and its historic downtown area, called the Pottery District, is home to dozens of family-owned businesses. The town is also home to Red Wing Shoe Co., a business that’s been around for 114 years. For years, the shoe manufacturer did not develop any new products, Chief Executive Mark Urdahl told Ruth Simon of the Wall Street Journal. That meant when the company finally decided to launch a new brand, it didn’t have workers with the skills to develop the footwear, Urdahl told Simon. It took two years to get production of the new boot up and running. Instead of looking outside the U.S. for workers, company officials decided to “hire for potential” instead of hiring workers with specific skills. The company created a program to train people how to cut leather and use equipment tied to the shoe-making business. Forty new workers were hired to produce the new boot Red Wing Shoe is selling. “The reality was that we had not developed a lot of new products for U.S. manufacturing,” Urdahl told Simon. “You start to lose the skill set — through retirement and attrition — of people who have the ability to develop footwear here.”

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