Franca
Franca, population 365,494, keeps a 33.2 million-pair shoe cluster alive with fair subsidies and 3.5% ICMS, treating footwear as a citywide habitat.
Franca still spends public money helping local shoemakers rent booths at trade fairs, which is a clue that the city's real product is not individual shoes but a manufacturing habitat. The official story describes Franca as a city of 365,494 people, 1,002 metres above sea level, in the interior of Sao Paulo, famous for men's leather footwear. What that misses is how much coordination is required to keep one niche dominant for decades after lower-cost producers should have broken it apart.
Franca's cluster still runs at industrial scale. Sindifranca's employment bulletin estimates 33.2 million pairs produced in 2023 by an average monthly workforce of 14,620. The municipality's own economic bulletin showed how concentrated that ecosystem remains: in 2021, footwear accounted for 4,313 of the city's 5,326 new industrial jobs. This is path dependence with teeth. Once a city accumulates tanneries, sole suppliers, machinery repair, modelists, freight routines, and a labour force that knows how to finish a shoe, it becomes cheaper to keep adapting the product than to rebuild the ecosystem elsewhere.
The local state keeps the habitat dense. In 2025, the Prefeitura put almost R$200,000 into a collective BFShow stand for 13 Franca companies, after earlier subsidising Couromoda and other sector fairs. At the state level, Sao Paulo renewed a footwear tax benefit that keeps the effective ICMS rate at 3.5% instead of letting it jump toward 18%. That is mutualism rather than nostalgia: small firms get access to buyers and tax relief they could not finance alone, while the city protects employment, payroll, and supplier density. The risk is obvious too. A place that can shift styles, price points, and export markets is still wagering that men's leather footwear remains a durable category.
Biologically, Franca resembles a leafcutter-ant colony. The colony's power comes from specialised tasks coordinated around one fungal crop. Franca works the same way. Cut the shoe cluster out of the city and much of the local ecosystem loses its reason to exist.
In 2025 the Prefeitura spent almost R$200,000 so 13 Franca footwear companies could exhibit together at BFShow, showing how actively the city maintains the cluster.