ARDOIX, France—After 15 years of manufacturing entirely in Asia, French sportswear firm Salomon SAS, eager to cut emissions and reduce bottlenecks, decided it was time to start making its signature sports shoes at home. The challenge, in a country where shoemaking died out years ago, was how to build the necessary supply chain.
The first phase of Salomon’s solution was to build an automated sneaker factory in this small town near the Alps. It also redesigned its shoes, drastically shrinking its supply chain by slashing the number of components in each sneaker by nearly two-thirds. That still left the matter of sourcing materials in a region largely devoid of suppliers. Until now it has sourced soles and other parts primarily from China and Vietnam, two of the main centers of modern shoemaking.
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