Inside the Le Chameau factory: how a wellington boot is made

Photographs: Le Chameau

I have come home from the Le Chameau factory looking differently at the boots in my porch. Like most people who work outdoors, I have worn the French brand’s rubber boots for as long as I can remember and never once thought about how they were made. So long as they kept my feet dry through a season of pens, feed rides and ploughed headlands, and still looked the part on a shoot day, the question never came up. They are not cheap, either, which is reason enough to ask what you are paying for. With the company closing in on its centenary, Le Chameau flew me to Casablanca to find out, from the raw rubber to the finished pair.

Why Le Chameau makes its boots in Casablanca

Morocco gets very little rain, which makes it an odd place to build a wellington boot factory. Nobody on the shop floor needs a watertight boot to cross a claggy ploughed field or wade a swollen burn. The answer lies with the founder. In 1927 Claude Chamot, a French agronomist, set out to improve on the traditional clog boot after years of hearing his customers complain of wet, sore feet. He left the land and taught himself bootmaking, aiming for a boot that could stand up to a working countryside. Using natural rubber and the vulcanisation process, his first rough boots sold so well that in 1939 he opened a workshop in Normandy. He soon outgrew it and put his money into a factory in French-speaking Casablanca, where he kept a holiday home; Morocco was still a French colony at the time. Claude ran the company until his death in 1963.

Today the 120,000sq ft factory employs 350 local people, a good many of them women, which is unusual in this Muslim country. The manager, Aziz Chiguer, is a bundle of energy and the modern premises are spotless. I was met by a senior management team of men and women and shown round a factory that runs like clockwork, with a plain professionalism about it and an obvious care for the people on the floor. It has the feel of one big family.

Chamolux, the secret rubber recipe

Over mint tea, Aziz explains that Claude Chamot came up with the secret recipe for “Chamolux”, a soft, hard-wearing rubber that only Le Chameau uses. “We have never filed a patent for the recipe – if we did that, anyone could use it after the patent expired,” he says.

Grade A natural rubber from Vietnam

As with any crop, the quality of raw rubber comes down to how it is grown and harvested. Le Chameau’s comes from Vietnam, the world’s third-largest producer, and from the same well-regarded plantation since 2005. The plantation is accredited by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, an international body that certifies sustainable forest management, taking in the ethics and the supply chain of timber production. Anyone who manages land will understand the point: no rainforest is being cleared to plant rubber trees for these boots.

Each tree is “tapped”, much as a maple is tapped for syrup. In the Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) that yields raw latex, a milky white liquid, and done properly the tapping does the tree no harm. The latex is left to coagulate, collected and processed into its dry form for shipping to the factory. It arrives as loaves of raw rubber weighing 35kg, the base material of every boot, graded from A to D on colour, purity and stickiness. Le Chameau uses Grade A only: light in colour, with little ash or dirt in it.

The first job when the loaves arrive is to turn them into a more workable sheet. With the secret ingredients added, the raw rubber is masticated, which leaves it strong, stable and supple. “It’s not unlike baking – there is an exact recipe, but you still need to be a good baker to make the ingredients into something special,” says Aziz. Next the rubber is rolled to the right thickness. The rollers work like giant pasta machines, turning out a thick slab that is cut and fed into the next roller, and the next, until the final set produces a sheet thick enough to hold its strength but thin enough for each maître bottier (master bootmaker) to work by hand.

Building and vulcanising the boot on an aluminium last

Soft and pliable now, the rubber is laid over a last, an aluminium mould in the shape of a boot. Layer goes over layer, bonded with liquid latex, and each one adds strength and stability. The sole gets the same attention, and it is the part of the boot that matters most to anyone who spends the winter on wet ground. Aziz explains: “We use a very durable rubber for the outsoles to work in combination with our special tread pattern. Together these different elements achieve grip whilst also providing a natural release of mud when the foot flexes. This combination ensures you get the best possible traction and stability in muddy conditions.”

Once the boot is built it is vulcanised. “Essentially, we cook the boots. This not only stabilises the rubber, it also fuses all those layers together, making it one incredibly strong substance.” Then every boot is tested before it leaves, and tested one at a time: it goes into a water bath and air is pumped in, so that no boot leaves the factory with a leak. For a keeper who will spend a wet February in them, that is the test that counts.

150 steps and almost 100 pairs of hands

It takes 150 steps to make a single pair of boots, and by the time a pair is boxed almost 100 pairs of hands have touched it. I walked the line station by station and met every worker. Some jobs are simple, such as gluing a sole; others, such as the maître bottier wrapping rubber around a last, are highly skilled, and none can be skipped. The factory turns out tens of thousands of pairs a year, yet every boot can be traced back to the one maître bottier who made it through its unique code. This is not a faceless plant churning out boots on a conveyor belt; it is a workshop of skilled craftsmen making boots by hand on a large scale.

Back home in Scotland, I walk through the front door and the first thing I see is my well-worn pair of Chasseurs in the hallway, still muddy from a day shooting with James Percy the weekend before. They say you never really know someone until you see where they come from. Now I know where my boots come from, and I will not look at them the same way again.