In 1909, Don Aurelio López Núñez opened a small shoe workshop in the capital city of the state of Jalisco. Around 1915, with six workers, the workshop was dedicated to making custom shoes and repairing used footwear with home delivery.
Around the year 1939, Don Aurelio's son, Salvador López Chávez, perceived that footwear manufacturing could scale to greater manufacturing and sales volumes, without losing the quality of the product, so he decided to take over the management of the small footwear factory. his father with the aim of modernizing it and moving from artisanal manufacturing to industrial production of shoes available to everyone.
On July 13, 1940, Salvador, with the help of his father, founded Calzado Canada SA in the workshop that was located at 130 Pedro Loza Street in the central area of Guadalajara. Three of his cousins later joined the project: Juan, Guadalupe and Pedro Benavides. For this year, Calzado Canada had 12 employees and manufactured 15 models of men's shoes.
This factory was the first to use computer equipment in Guadalajara, and the first to use IBM brand cards to maintain an electronic database, but one of the most important contributions to the Mexican industry was that it managed to adapt the band system used by the Ford industry , thus increasing the company's productivity.
In October 1961, Calzado Canada manufactured and sold more than 30 thousand pairs per week.
In 1971, the new factory known as the Canada Industrial Garden was inaugurated, on Dr. R. Michel Avenue. At the inauguration of the Canada Industrial Garden in 1972, the presidents of Chile, Salvador Allende , and of Mexico, Luis Echeverría , were present .
The industrial plant covered an area of 85 thousand square meters and was an architectural landmark: the walls were made of glass, which allowed the development of the production process to be observed, in addition to having numerous rose gardens. Being the largest factory in the world that did its entire process in one place.
This facility was an emblem of Guadalajara; these were the years in which Calzado Canada maintained upward growth that reached a network of more than 200 own stores and a thousand exclusive sales concessionaires.
In 1978 the factory employed 8,208 people, including workers and administrative employees; in addition to another 2 thousand employees who attended points of sale throughout the country, the majority of whom were young women.
Footwear Canada had its own: tanneries, rubber factories, synthetic leather factories, soles, molds, lasts, glues, hardware factories, buckles, laces, threads; advertising signs, illuminated notices, furniture for distributors and a machinery maintenance department, as well as heavy load transportation for the distribution of products to branches.
The company made fundamental innovations, including:
it set up a distribution structure to directly reach sales routes; opened its own stores, strengthened the brand with intense advertising for its products and created a savings system for employees known as DEFOVI (Department of Housing Development)
In 1960 Calzado Canada left Mexico for the first time and arrived in Los Angeles, California .
In February 1966, production work on the French line Charles Jourdan, luxury footwear for women, formally began. This Mexican factory made the same models and quality as those manufactured by the brand in Paris, France and international markets. The agreement was signed by Mr. Jack Hinton on behalf of Charles Jourdan and the President of Calzado Canada, Salvador López Chávez.
In the late sixties it produced the first Nike tennis shoes in history for the 1968 Olympics and the 1970 World Cup.
In 1971, Phil Knight , founder of Nike, asked Calzado Canada to order 3,000 pairs of the leather Soccer 70 model, with the plan to sell them to American football players in the United States. At that time neither the name nor the world-famous Nike logo existed.
Footwear Canada was one of the largest footwear manufacturing plants in the world, with about 12 thousand employees including shoemakers and administrators, in addition to a daily production of 60 to 70 thousand pairs.