HeartBreak Footwear By: KC Marie Rebadomia

MANILA, Philippines — In 1990, bank employee Vilma Fontilla decided to leave her glass-walled office and step into the gritty but booming shoemaking industry in Marikina City.

She and her family had just moved to the country’s shoe capital and bought a factory to start a shoemaking business. But, she confessed, the necessary know-how did not come with the structure.

“I bought an entire factory, but I had to study the shoe industry for a very long time. It was difficult because I had to start from scratch,” Fontilla, 65, told the Inquirer.

As the years wore on she grew accustomed to the smell of leather in the factory, where she spent her mornings ensuring that there were sufficient personnel and materials for the production of durable yet affordable footwear with the Fontelle Shoes brand.

Instead of jostling with other families in malls to celebrate Valentine’s Day each February, Fontilla, her husband and their children got busy packing hundreds of pairs of shoes they had stocked in the famed Marikina Shoe Gallery on Riverbank Avenue. Then they headed north to reach Baguio City for the annual Panagbenga Festival, where her regular clients eagerly awaited their products.

This, Fontilla said, was what she loved about the business: Wherever she went, there was always the warm welcome of clients wearing Marikina-made footwear and waiting for their next pair of evening or dancing shoes—the family’s signature product. Heartbreak

Fontilla never imagined that her business would come to a painful halt decades later, when the deadly coronavirus forced even the thriving shoe industry to its knees.

On Nov. 27, just weeks after Typhoon “Ulysses” (international name: Vamco) battered Marikina, Fontilla received a heartbreaking message sent “with deep regret” by the Marikina Shoe Gallery management: “Our beloved store will cease operating.”

She recalled telling her children: “What will happen to us now? Where will we bring our stocks?”

Fontelle Shoes had actually been suffering dismal sales for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It did not help that at least 100 pairs were left incomplete by the great flood or caked in thick mud.

The closure of Marikina Shoe Gallery—home of the world’s largest pair of shoes—deepened the wounds inflicted by COVID-19 on the city’s shoemakers. The retailers who used to rake in P2 million to P4 million a month became casualties of the domino effect suffered by the Philippine economy.

Competition

Manufacturers like Fontilla lost their source of income. And their regular clients could not reach them because the Marikina Shoe Trade Fair, where they had displayed their products, was temporarily closed by the local government for rehabilitation.

The Marikina shoe industry has long suffered sharp losses due mainly to the competition posed by products coming from China, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

When at one point the industry was contributing 70 percent to the city economy, this had dwindled to a mere 15 percent in December 2019.

Fontilla’s son Jonathan said they had been buying raw materials, such as shoe buckles, from China. He expressed hope that other Philippine industries could develop local materials to help boost the struggling economy.