United India Shoe Corporation

Our place, United India Shoe Corporation, is located on M.C. Road in Sulur Village, which is part of Ambur in the North Arcot District. Ambur is famous for its leather, and we’ve been right in the middle of it for years. The air around here always has that distinct smell of leather and tanning. Our factory and office are pretty functional. We don’t have anything fancy like air conditioning in every room or modern furniture. It’s mostly benches, sewing machines, and stacks of shoe soles. We spend our days making sure the stitching is right and the leather is cut correctly. It’s a lot of manual work and we have a lot of local folks from the village working with us. We’ve known most of them since they were kids. It’s a quiet life in Sulur, though the road can get busy with trucks carrying hides. We don’t do much in terms of marketing. People know where we are if they need shoes made or leather work done. It’s a traditional way of doing things, passed down through the years. We just try to make shoes that last and keep the machines running. Sometimes a machine breaks down and we have to spend half the day fixing it, but that’s just how it goes. We’re proud of being from Ambur and doing things the way they’ve always been done around here. It is just our daily routine.