中文Futurmoda Brings Back the President Who Redesigned It
Trade fairs rarely rehire their former leaders. Futurmoda just did — and the choice says a great deal about where the Spanish components industry thinks its next challenge lies.
Pedro Vives has been named president of Futurmoda, the international fair for components, tanned leather, textiles and machinery serving footwear and leather goods. He replaces José Antonio Ibarra, who led the event for the past eight years.
Vives is not an outside appointment or a fresh face. He held the same presidency for more than six years immediately before Ibarra — and during that tenure he was one of the principal drivers of the fair’s redesign, the process that established Futurmoda’s current identity as a business, trends and innovation platform rather than a conventional exhibition hall.
In other words: the man who rebuilt the model is back to run it.
Why Futurmoda Matters
For anyone outside the Spanish supply chain, Futurmoda can look like a regional event. It is not.
Held in Elche, at the centre of Spain’s footwear manufacturing cluster, Futurmoda is where component suppliers, tanneries, textile producers and machinery makers meet the manufacturers who actually assemble shoes and bags. It sits upstream of the glamorous consumer-facing fairs — this is where soles, lasts, adhesives, linings, hardware, finished leather and cutting systems change hands.
That upstream position makes it a genuine leading indicator. What is specified at Futurmoda in one season shows up in retail two seasons later. Sustainability claims that will eventually appear on shoeboxes are negotiated here first, between a component maker and a purchasing manager.
The Machinery Man
Vives brings a specific and increasingly relevant background. He is the Spanish distributor for Comelz SPA, the Italian manufacturer widely regarded as a world leader in CNC machinery and software for cutting synthetic materials, textiles and leather — technology deployed across footwear, leather goods, automotive and textile applications.
He has served on the board of the Spanish Footwear Components Association (AEC) since the early 2000s, accumulating more than two decades in machinery and industrial digitalisation.
That CV is not incidental to the appointment. Cutting technology sits precisely at the intersection of the three pressures currently reshaping the industry:
Material efficiency. Automated nesting software extracts measurably more usable area from a hide than manual cutting. When leather prices rise and sustainability reporting demands waste reduction, cutting yield stops being a technical detail and becomes a line item.
Labour scarcity. Skilled cutters are among the hardest roles to fill across European manufacturing. CNC systems do not eliminate the need for judgement — someone still has to grade the hide — but they dramatically reduce dependence on a shrinking pool of hand skills.
Flexibility. Shorter runs, faster drops and more customisation all favour digitally-driven cutting over fixed tooling.
A fair president who understands that stack from the inside is well positioned to shape what the event prioritises.
The Handover
Vives struck a notably collegial tone in his first comments.
“I face this new challenge with great enthusiasm and with the same commitment I already brought to the fair some years ago,” he said. “Futurmoda has grown enormously since then and I want to keep working so that the fair remains a solid meeting point for the whole footwear and leather goods industry.”
He was explicit in crediting his predecessor. “I want to thank José Antonio Ibarra for his work and his dedication at the head of Futurmoda during these last years. It has been a very positive stage for the fair and that also allows us to face the future with greater solidity.”
Graceful transitions are not universal in trade association politics. This one reads as genuine continuity rather than a change of direction.
The Context He Inherits
Vives takes over at an awkward moment for Spanish footwear. Exports have been running flat through the first five months of 2026. Domestic fashion retail has been sluggish. The sector has just signed a four-year collective agreement partly to remove one source of uncertainty from a picture with plenty remaining.
Trade fairs are unusually exposed to this kind of environment. When margins compress, travel and exhibition budgets are among the first things cut — and once an exhibitor skips a season, winning them back is expensive.
At the same time, the case for physical component fairs has arguably strengthened. You cannot assess the hand of a leather, the flexibility of a sole unit or the finish quality of hardware through a screen. Digital sourcing platforms have absorbed a great deal of transactional volume but very little of the specification work that happens when a designer and a supplier handle the same sample.
Futurmoda’s redesign — the one Vives helped drive — was built around exactly that logic: position the fair as a place for discovery, trends and technical dialogue rather than pure order-taking.
Bringing back its architect at a moment when that positioning is being tested looks less like nostalgia and more like a calculated bet.
Source: Revista del Calzado
