Footwear has always been a fundamental part of the dynamic world of fashion. With an array of styles and materials available, consumers expect not only trendy designs but also high-quality products that prioritise comfort, safety, and durability, which is why our clients at Klassik request the same. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) recently stepped in to ensure that footwear manufacturing adheres to certain strict quality standards. We live in an ever-changing world and are always expected to adjust to the ‘new normal’. That being said, as a company, Klassik always ensures that adjusting to novelty is a seamless process for us as well as our clients.
The BIS, or Bureau of Indian Standards, is a national body in India responsible for setting standards for various products, including footwear. These mandatory quality standards are created to ensure that small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale footwear manufacturers produce safe, reliable, and high-quality products. These various norms for footwear manufacturing encompass a wide range of aspects, including material specifications, testing procedures, and labelling requirements.
“The standards prescribe what kind of raw material like leather, PVC, and rubber to be used in manufacturing footwear besides norms on making soles and heels, among other parts of the footwear.” says an article in The Economic Times.
This step is essentially being taken so that India can maintain the same quality standards that you see globally. As a country, we are growing and evolving and want to maintain the same standards as our peers.
As per the norms BIS all PVC products are now meant to be phthalate-free. Phthalates are a group of synthetic chemicals that are used to manufacture a wide range of products and are now banned from the PVC industry. They have many harmful side effects and we as a company stand against using chemicals that don’t benefit our clients in any way whatsoever.
Another part of the BIS norm states that the tearing strength of PVC products used as uppers should be more than 3kg to ensure durability, which essentially means that a force of 3kg or greater needs to be applied to tear the PVC textile through and through. For this reason, all products manufactured by us follow this norm very specifically and are termed as high-tear.
The change in norms made by the BIS did create a buzz in the manufacturing industry however, for us at Klassik, we were more than accommodating to this development. Klassik possesses all the required equipment and machinery to adhere to these standard norms. The PVR leather we manufacture for footwear already meets the requirements of these norms due to the state-of-the-art infrastructure we have invested in.
As a company, we believe in investing in the future, and that mindset has stood advantageous to us today as we can seamlessly adjust to the changing and upgrading norms of the industry and supply only the best material to our clientele in India and abroad. This is also the reason why the new BIS norms do not pose a threat to our production process, or change in prices. Thus maintaining the same high-quality standards without anything affecting our relationship with our clients and factory workers.
