Mum and Dad's Pie Shop

Would you believe that I used to make and sell meat pies for a living? That’s a long way away from selling sheepskin boots. But it seemed that one thing just lead to another as I came in contact with the Australian opal gemstone.  A luxury item which was and still is in big demand. One of my mates had just started ‘skinny’s Hideout’ a sheepskin shop in Toowoomba, and he offered to give me a few cattle hides and some boots to try out and that was the beginning of twenty years of activity.

I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back in those days.  I thought you just hired a shop, opened the doors, turned the lights on and waited for customers. Haa…well some of that was right but try paying for wages, electivity security, insurances, maintenance..Etc.etc and you have yourself a considerable amount of trouble.

We also had not thought about position, position, and position.  Everyone said the place was on the wrong side of the highway because people didn’t want to stop on the way to town and it was too difficult to park on the other side of the road on the way back from town, so how were we ever going to get customers with little or no walk past traffic?

Good question, and i guess if it had not been for the ultimate attraction of needing something to keep your feet warm, very few people would have bothered to come in.  but the ultimate attraction of owning a pair of these amazing cosy footwear made our little shop irresistible and customers started flowing in by the thousands.

Back in those years, about the late seventies, very few people had ever heard of sheepskin Ugg boots but it didn’t take long for the word to get around and a similar thing happened at our shop as was happening up in Toowoomba in the little sheepskin shop in Ruthven St.  Crowds of people up there were waiting down the footpath for the privilege of buying them. And even later when factories tried making synthetics to compete with the real thing, the public didn’t want to know about it.  They could tell the difference.

We then had the problem of supply. We learned pretty quickly that, in Australia at least, suppliers don’t always keep their word about sending stuff on time, or indeed sending stuff at all.  So we decided to start making our own. So if someone came in with a foot the size of Goliath or someone had a special problem of fitting, we would sort it out pretty quick and we rarely lost a sale.

This sort of service was hard to beat and the word soon got around.  So that’s one story among many i guess of how the sheepskin industry started in Australia. The rest is history, and now the world knows about Ugg boots, and they have become so popular that we are honoured to have the Americans running an international Ugg boot organisation using our name. That’s a real testimony to the success of this early work.

So, now the humble Ugg has become a household word throughout the world and its popularity is being spread in leaps and bounds with the help of the internet.  We are pleased to offer all you cold footed friends wherever you are in the wide world, the comfort and contentment of owning a pair of these cosy boots.  The comfort and contentment you get from having warm feet at last is captured in our company’s name ‘HUGGS’

So I guess you will forgive us for concluding this brief article with somewhat of a pun, and say:  Give yourself a warm cosy HUGG