The Kumla Shoe Museum (Skomuseet) tells the story of the shoe manufacturing industry that once made Kumla one of Sweden's most productive industrial towns. At its peak in the mid-20th century, the town had dozens of shoe factories and was producing a significant fraction of all footwear sold in Sweden. The decline of domestic manufacturing through the 1970s and 1980s shuttered most of them.
The museum holds an extensive collection of footwear from across the centuries, including working-class boots, fashion shoes, and industrial production equipment. It is a genuinely good industrial history museum for a small town, and the collection has real depth. Kumla's shoe-making heritage is taken seriously here in a way that similar small-town museums sometimes do not manage.