As managing director of the firm bearing his name, Charles Clinkard is proud custodian of a family shoe business started in the North-East by his grandparents. He talks to Sarah Millington

FOR the young Charles Clinkard, rising through the ranks in shoe retail, the family business was both a blessing and a curse. Having started helping out at the Middlesbrough shop at 14, he’d ended up working as a manager for Bally Shoes. A job came up at Charles Clinkard – then run by his father Roger – and Charles was torn. Should he stay with Bally, with whom he had a good track record, or return to the family fold? In the end, the decision was taken out of his hands.

“I was enjoying what I was doing at Bally – Clinkard’s wasn’t doing that well at the time – and I went to see my area manager and said, ‘What’s my potential here to go further?’” says Charles. “He was very honest and said, ‘You do a good job for us but if you would like to go back to your family business, I’d take the opportunity.’ I was becoming privy to things like margins, their supply base and just general financial information that was probably fairly sensitive. We traded in different areas, but used the same supply base. We were a customer of Bally as well.”

Charles applied for the job, was, at Roger’s behest, interviewed, and got it. He has never looked back and now, at 50, heads up a company of 33 UK stores, a growing internet business and the subsidiary wholesaler Intershoe. It’s a far cry from when his grandparents, Charles and Eveline, established the first shop in Middlesbrough in 1924 with the aim of providing good quality, affordable footwear.

It proved a winning formula and the firm quickly expanded in the region and beyond, weathering storms including the Second World War. Charles remembers Eveline, after whom the firm’s Teesside head office is named, as an indomitable character with great prescience.

“When I was about 12 grandmother said, ‘You’ll be the one who will take the business on,’” he says. “She was a very shrewd lady and I suppose that probably stuck in my mind. She used to say things like, ‘If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves.’ She didn’t like men with beards. She didn’t trust them.”

Roger, who died in 2005, was a strong character who left his stamp on the business, establishing Intershoe and becoming an agent for Gabor. A good frontman, he gave Charles a valuable piece of advice. “He always used to say, ‘If you’re ever in any doubt, buy black,’” he says. “It’s absolutely right – particularly in a winter season, black tends to dominate. Over the years I’ve had good advice from a lot of people.”

An early experience which opened Charles’ eyes to regional differences was working as a manager in London for Bally, first at Golders Green then at the flagship Regent Street store. “Golders Green is a big Jewish community and, my, did you have to work hard to sell shoes. As for Regent Street, it was a good time to be there. The Americans and the Arabs were there spending lots of money.” Charles, who lives in Busby, near Stokesley, recounts the story of how a rich Arab once sent round a chauffeur to pick up 50 pairs of shoes – and bought every pair.

Having been in the business so long, Charles is clear about the company’s brand – distinctly middle-of-the-road with no pretensions to high fashion. While it does stock names like UGG, core sellers are the likes of Clarks and Gabor, with a customer demographic of mainly 40-plus and a sales breakdown of 50 per cent women's shoes, 20 per cent men’s and 30 per cent children’s. Charles is unapologetic about its ethos.

“Our business is not sexy at all,” he laughs. “It’s fairly safe – we will not be all things to all people. We look after the grey pound. For the first time, more than 50 per cent of the UK population is over 40.”

Like all retailers, Charles Clinkard faces tough competition, with the overall dominance of supermarkets and High Street shops being increasingly squeezed by the internet. The biggest threat is discounting. “Once you start discounting, it’s a catalyst that affects everyone else,” he says. “People think they don’t have to pay full price for anything, but the brands can’t afford for that to happen long-term. If people want to buy cheap shoes, they can go to the supermarket to buy them. What frustrates me is that brands do an awful lot of work to create their DNA. You can’t buy that in a supermarket.”

Both within the shoe industry and as a local businessman, Charles feels that networking is key to success. It was a conversation over squash with Ken Campling, owner of Williams Music, in 2003, that convinced him to set up the website. “He said to me, ‘I’m doing £1m worth of musical instruments online, Clink, you should be having a go at this. It’s dead easy. It’s money for old rope.’ I took his advice and we’ve never looked back.”

With no plans for the mass acquisition of new shops, Charles has identified the internet as an area for growth and hopes to increase the online share of turnover from 17 to 30 per cent. He’s generally happy with where the business is, having recently moved to a new head office in Middlesbrough, and feels that his grandparents’ aim of providing quality, combined with good customer service, is still valid.

The one thing he hasn’t worked out is who will take the reins when he retires. It could be one of his two daughters, Lottie, 14, or 12-year-old Evie, but he doesn’t want to push them. “They like shoes, but they don’t like the shoes we sell,” laughs Charles. “Lottie is already working in the shop in Northallerton but whether it is for her or not, I don’t know.

“It would be nice to hand it on to the next generation of my family, but it’s a very different business to when I joined it. For one person to come in and head it up, they’re going to have to be a good all-rounder.”

charlesclinkard.co.uk