The Leixões Cruise Terminal hosted the BIOSHOES4All: The Final Step conference. On October 16, entrepreneurs, universities, and policymakers gathered to discuss the present and future of the Portuguese footwear industry.
The project – led by APICCAPS and CTCP – involves over 70 entities in the sector with a total investment of €60 million, making it the largest and most significant initiative in the history of Portugal’s footwear industry, currently achieving an 85% completion rate.
Luís Onofre set the tone: “BioShoes4All was not just another project. It has been — and continues to be — a concrete response to the major challenges of our time: the ecological transition, digital transformation, and the enhancement of human capital and national know-how.”
For the president of APICCAPS, “innovation is a key driver of industry transformation. To innovate also means knowing how to preserve. It means looking at tradition and understanding how it can be reinvented. That is exactly what we have done: transforming legacy into innovation, detail into differentiation, and commitment into leadership.”
Annika Breidthardt, representative of the European Commission in Portugal, praised the project’s results and highlighted the importance of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR). “The recovery and resilience mechanism has enabled European economies and societies to emerge stronger, more resilient, and more competitive.” For the European Commission economic advisor, “the path taken is a success story — first Portuguese, but also European.”
The Secretary of State for the Economy emphasized the importance of the PRR as “a guiding light that provided Europe with a vision of new opportunities to transform the European economy.” João Rui Ferreira highlighted the sector’s foresight, “which knew how to understand its past and recognize how it could project itself into the future.”
“And the sector projected itself onto what was essential, anticipating how Portugal could differentiate itself in a highly competitive and truly global industry — where the country’s comparative advantage is neither geographical nor based on access to raw materials, but on knowledge, history, know-how, and quality. It is about anticipating trends and repositioning itself in a clearly distinctive segment.”
Fernando Alfaiate, president of the Mission Structure ‘Recover Portugal’, highlighted BioShoes4All as a highly relevant project for the PRR, “for the innovation it brings and the contemporary relevance that positions our companies more competitively and demanding in an increasingly global market. It demonstrates a strong example of the Bioeconomy component.”
Additionally, Fernando Alfaiate praised “the work of many hands,” emphasizing “the importance of entrepreneurs and the partnership established within this consortium to successfully carry out this investment.”
“Many ideas, born from a collective will, are now translating into concrete results. We are building a transition path toward a more sustainable, more digital, and more resilient country. Today, we can say that BioShoes4All is further proof that the PRR has a transformative character, capable of uniting science, industry, and sustainability around a common goal: creating value from what is ours — the knowledge and capacity to innovate that Portugal has in the field of biological resources.”
BioShoes4All, led by APICCAPS and CTCP, “truly represents the spirit we want to see multiplied and replicated over time: a spirit of collaboration, innovation, and commitment.” “This consortium of 70 partners,” he explained, “is a remarkable example of how the public and private sectors can align to profoundly transform an industry — in this case, one of the country’s most emblematic, combining tradition and modernity, and which has learned to compete through quality and value. It is now expected to reach a new level in bioeconomy and circularity.”
