The English shoemaker brand, James Taylor & Son has been abused for more than two years in China.
James Taylor and Son is a bespoke shoemaking house locating at 4 Paddington Street in London with more than 150 years history. Its main service is orthopaedic shoes making. Although it is not as famous as other London bespoke houses such as John Lobb, George Cleverley and Foster & Son, it is a undeniable heritagous and traditional bespoke shoemaker.
In China, there is a RTW line from the same brand which claims they are the official James Taylor & Son doing business in China. This company only sells the shoes on Ecommerce platform Taobao (Subsidiary of Alibaba).
Recently, the managing director of James Taylor & Son London told me that this behavior is unauthrozied and his brand has been abused in China for two more years!
Below are the history he disclosed.
Some years ago we employed a Chinese guy called Dong Zhang as an intern in our bespoke shoemaking company. He was very talented and hard working and he wanted to work for us permanently. But in the end he could not get permission to stay in the UK after his studies at the London School of Cordwainers.
So he returned to China and we agreed that he could set up a James Taylor & Son brand, using high quality leather and lasts designed in the UK, and making classic Goodyear welted shoe styles. I visited him in China in 2017 to finalise our agreement and meet his manufacturer. It all looked very good and I was very happy to have the link with China which I hoped we would develop over time to include providing our bespoke services to Chinese clients.
He began making and marketing shoes under our brand and we purchased several hundred to sell to our customers in the UK. The quality was excellent and sales in China went well. He paid us regular royalties for the use of our brand as agreed.
Then a few things went wrong. Dong received a large number of badly made shoes from the factory, which I know caused him difficulties. Then there was an issue involving another Chinese company who had apparently illegally registered our brand name as their own. I believe they were trying to force Dong to pay them money or even close him down.
I did not find out the full details behind these issues because, in July 2018, I was told that Dong had suddenly died. The company web site disappeared at the same time. Because his business was essentially him alone, there was now no-one I could contact commercially to maintain the relationship.
Later on I discovered that the James Taylor & Son branded shoes were still being actively marketed through the Taobao online platform. We were receiving complaints from Chinese customers, mainly around issues of delays in delivery and suspicions that these were not, in fact, our shoes.
I have tried contacting Dong’s family and Taobao, but I can make no headway with anyone. In the meantime the shoes continue to be sold as ours, despite the fact that there is no agreement to allow this.
I don’t want to see the James Taylor & Son brand destroyed in China. I believe what Dong was doing – taking a strong brand and making high quality shoes locally so that they could be bought at an affordable price – is worth supporting. The shoes I saw n the beginning compared very well with leading makers like Churches and Crockett & Jones, and were much more affordable. But to be credible the quality has to be correct and the link to the brand has to be real. That is simply no longer the case and the business in China is now simply trading under our name illegally.
I tried to contact with this merchant many times, no reply is received. It was manufactured by the same factory making Mattina, but current production is needed to confirm.