For lots of, the Clarks emblem is a byword for strong faculty footwear and purposeful shoes for the ones of extra mature years. The producing and retailing corporate used to be arrange two centuries in the past in Somerset, England, within the shadows of Glastonbury Tor, through brothers Cyrus and James Clark. In 2025, it’s celebrating its 2 hundredth anniversary and stays a powerful drive each at the top side road and on-line.
Much less widely recognized is that the Clark brothers, like chocolatier households Cadbury and Rowntree, had been Quakers. This small spiritual group has produced a outstanding and disproportionate selection of scientists, thinkers and campaigners for justice, peace and human rights. As well as, its contribution of moral companies has ruled many industries in the United Kingdom.
The Lloyds and Barclays of the banking dynasties had been Quakers. The Jacobs (of biscuits and crackers repute) had been Quakers. So had been the Rathbones (fund control), the Penroses (founders of Waterford Crystal) and the Waterhouse circle of relatives (accountancy), to call only a few.
The Quakers – extra officially referred to as the Non secular Society of Buddies (Quakers) – have a historical past of just about 400 years in Britain and the USA. Whilst Quakerism has Christian foundations, Quakers additionally emphasise ethical commitments to peace, reality, integrity, simplicity and equality – the 5 testimonies in Quaker theology. Those got here to outline how Quakers means the sector, and their companies.
As early Quakers had been deemed radical and challenged the established church, they was persecuted through the state all the way through the seventeenth century. They had been excluded from political and public existence, in addition to from universities. Possibly as a right away outcome, Quakers was extremely lively marketers and got here to dominate many industries via a mixture in their testimonies and outward entrepreneurial motion.
This ended in the popularity that Quaker companies had for trustworthiness and integrity. Their have an effect on used to be possibly so acute as to constitute a particular type of moral entrepreneurship.
Whilst no longer all Quakers had been engaged in trade, and no longer all those that had been succeeded, a disproportionate quantity did. Such business luck is all of the extra intriguing, because the Quakers had been an overly small (and, from the mid-18th century, declining) minority of the United Kingdom inhabitants (about 20,000 in general as of late).
0-waste beginnings
Quaker values and the entrepreneurial spirit are woven throughout the historical past of Clarks. As an example, the unique industry concept through James in 1825 to provide sheepskin slippers used to be born of a want to do away with waste, with slippers made from off-cuts of sheepskin rugs.
Like many Quaker companies, Clarks has all the time supported social and environmental reasons. Members of the family took a central position within the anti-abolitionist motion and in girls’s suffrage.
It additionally invested a share of its earnings in area people facilities, corresponding to development houses, establishing study rooms, investment a theatre, a library, an open-air swimming pool, a the city corridor and enjoying fields close to the corporate’s base in Boulevard, Somerset.
Nowadays, Clarks continues to play an lively group position. It champions company accountability and top sustainability standards in its industry operations and provide chains. This focal point attracts attention-grabbing parallels with the fashionable social undertaking sector, and moral, purpose-driven industry accreditation schemes corresponding to B Company standing, which assesses profit-making companies on their environmental, social and governance credentials.
The ethical commitments of the contributors of the Clarks circle of relatives in those adolescence of the company have left their mark and formed its later building. The 200-year historical past of the company represents an in depth affinity between the values of the corporate and the values of Quakers.
A vintage – the Clarks Wallabee shoe.
Rushay/Shutterstock
On the other hand, all companies every now and then face demanding situations to the way in which they do industry. The stability between economics and ethics could be a high quality line to tread. It’s no other for Clarks. Suffering to continue to exist the have an effect on of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and with losses mounting, the Clark circle of relatives offered its stake to a non-public fairness company.
Inside twelve months, Clarks staff accused the brand new homeowners of betraying the corporate’s philanthropic roots through threatening them with dismissal if they didn’t settle for important pay cuts. Clarks stated on the time that renegotiating staff’ phrases can be a “very last resort” and that just about part of the employees within the distribution centre in query would obtain a pay upward push.
The dispute concerned strike motion and mediation, sooner or later resulting in a solution. Afterwards, Clarks stated in a joint remark with the Neighborhood union that the solution had safe staff’ livelihoods and recognised their loyalty to the company.
This demonstrated how companies can face repeated cycles of crises, together with aggressive, monetary and financial shocks that carry debates about ethics into focal point. Those disaster occasions are usually extra acute when a founder, CEO or circle of relatives departs, and particularly when the ones concerned with the corporate honour its custom and legacy. Rathbones, the fund control corporate with Quaker origins, used to be confronted with equivalent demanding situations when the circle of relatives used to be not actively concerned.
But regardless of the commercial and fiscal pressures that Clarks confronted on this remarkable length, the company could also be making an attempt to give protection to the core of its ethical spine. It echoes an affinity – albeit a extra far away one – with the Quakerism of the founding circle of relatives.
This stance can probably be fragile, alternatively. Companies will have to stay viable as companies – and best remaining 12 months Clarks used to be dealing with as much as a troublesome buying and selling surroundings through reducing 150 place of job workforce. Certainly, the former dialog inside the company and the group about betrayal obviously expresses a powerful ethical view, formed through the hyperlinks to Quaker values. Additionally it is a dialog concerning the long term energy of the ones ties, and one who puts values on the center of its long term.
