What Is A Clicker Person?
A clicker is a person who works in a shoe factory cutting the uppers for leather boots and shoes.
A clicker will cut these from genuine leather or from a synthetic material.
It may sound like an odd name to give a person who is cutting leather for shoes in a shoe and boot factory, but they got given this name due to the knifes clicking against the brass edges as they were cutting the leather. It became a race against time with so many clickers working in a factory next to each other, to see who could make the loudest click and who was the fastest clicker yet still producing the finest handmade cuts of leather for shoes uppers.
Clickers were extremely skilled people, they were responsible for getting as many shoe uppers out of a leather hide, also making sure the sections being cut had no thin patches, or marks in them that were to ugly for the shoes and too far from looking beautiful and natural.
Clickers made everything to do with the uppers of the shoes or leather boots, including the stiffeners, facing, reinforcements for eyelets, linings, and the zip protectors.
Today you still get clickers in more luxurious handcrafted shoe and boot manufactures the only difference being you probably wont have the brass edging to protect the patterns from being worn away so the clicking sound won’t be the same, as the knifes won’t be clicking against the brass edgings anymore.
Take a look behind the scenes of Crocket & Jones shoemakers all about clickers in the clicker room.