With tepid overall demand for student shoes, GoldCity Footwear Thailand Co, a maker of student shoes, is expanding into sneakers to boost sales.
Wichcha Potipassa, the company's marketing director, said sneakers with a market size 2-3 times bigger than that of student shoes have fared well in the past few years, with the future trend still promising.
"Thai people have now welcomed several international sneaker brands, and we hope a Thai sneaker brand like GoldCity becomes their alternative," Mr Wichcha said.
Surasak Jinapun, GoldCity's managing director, said Thailand's student shoe market has been flat for the past 3-4 years, with this year's sales still far from recovery.
The market size for student shoes was worth about 5 billion baht (20 million pairs) in 2017.
The overall student shoe market contracted by about 20% by value in the first nine months of this year as consumers' purchasing power remained weak, Mr Surasak said.
Mr Wichcha attributed the drop in demand to Thailand's continuously declining birth rate.
The birth rate in Thailand was 10.3 per 1,000 people in 2016, down from 40.6 in 1967, according to the World Data Atlas.
The rate is likely to drop to 1.62 per 1,000 people in 2018, Mr Wichcha said.
Moreover, some schools allow students to wear only leather shoes, reducing sales opportunities for canvas shoes.
According to Mr Wichcha, GoldCity has expanded into other kinds of footwear such as athletic shoes, sandals and orthopaedic shoes for ageing people.
In a related development, the company yesterday announced a partnership with singer Tachaya "Keng" Prathumwan to co-design a shoe collection.
The GoldCity Keng series will feature both sneakers and premium student shoes, with a price range of 500-1,390 baht.
"We are moving further to middle price range shoes, which are considered a blue ocean market in which nobody is yet in the market segment," Mr Wichcha said.
Apart from new co-brands with famous artists, singers and startups, GoldCity will put more focus on e-commerce business and expand its distribution centre capacity.
The company will also provide individual insoles for specific groups of people such as the elderly.
GoldCity Footwear Thailand was set up 68 years ago to produce its own GoldCity brand and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) brands.
GoldCity controls roughly 25% of Thailand's 5-billion-baht student shoe market.
Sales at GoldCity Footwear were about 1 billion baht in 2017.
Of the total, 500 million baht came from overseas markets in Japan, Europe and the US, while the balance was from the domestic market.
The company expects 2018 sales to grow by 10% to 1.1 billion baht.
