Farida: from one tannery in Ambur to New Balance shoes

A tannery named after a daughter

Haji Mecca Abdul Majid Sahib started Farida Prime Tannery in Ambur in 1957 with about ₹15 lakh from his savings and bank loans, and named it after his youngest daughter. At first it sold half-finished leather, mostly to Britain.

His son Rafeeque Ahmed joined in 1963 and pushed for fully finished leather. After his father died in 1965 he ran the business, and by 1973 the tannery was selling finished leather straight to buyers in Italy and Germany.

One step up at a time

In 1976 the family started Farida Shoes to make shoe uppers, with Italian technicians on the floor. An order from the American firm Freeman Shoes in the early 1980s took it to a bigger scale. Soles came in 2000. In 2007-08 it bought an American factory making Goodyear-welted shoes and moved it to Ambur.

Hide, then finished leather, then uppers, then soles, then whole shoes. Each step kept more of the shoe’s value in Ambur.

Each step kept more of the shoe’s value in Ambur.

Reading the business

By 2014 the group had eight companies and 11 factories, nearly 9,000 people, about 90% of them women, and a turnover of about ₹1,100 crore. It made about 23,000 pairs of shoes a day for brands such as Clarks, Florsheim, Rockport, Timberland, Zara and Marks & Spencer. Europe bought about 47% of its sales.

When the 2008-09 slowdown cut revenue by about 10%, it cut prices by 10–15% and spent more on marketing rather than laying people off. Automated stitching in one unit cut labour cost by 10–15%.

The next brand

In 2025 Farida began making New Balance shoes in a joint venture with Taiwan’s CJ Enterprise: 2,500 pairs at first, then 16,000 pairs from a new ₹200 crore unit, with a ₹1,200 crore plant planned near Tirupattur–Ambur. Twenty of its supervisors trained for three months in Vietnam first.