At a glance…
- In a picturesque Danish town near the German border, a family-owned shoemaker, ECCO Shoes, has been quietly making its mark on global fashion for more than six decades.
- The Weekly goes behind the scenes at ECCO’s headquarters to discover the people, craftsmanship and innovation behind its shoes.
- From the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen to the feet of royalty and Hollywood stars, we explore the Danish philosophy of walking in comfort and style.
About four hours’ drive south of Copenhagen, you’ll find picturesque Tønder, a fairytale-cobblestoned town of fewer than 10,000 people a stone’s throw from the Danish-German border. Just out of town, a sculpture of a giant foot sits atop a hill surrounded by farmland and fields of spring flowers where three black ponies are grazing on the grass, welcoming visitors to the headquarters of ECCO, one of Denmark’s most recognisable family-owned shoe brands.
It is an odd thing to build a monument to – the foot, not the ponies! – but “form follows foot” is ECCO’s mantra, and nowhere is it more visible than here, in the flat, windswept farmland of southern Jutland where Karl Toosbuy bought an old industrial building in the neighbouring village of Bredebro in January 1963 and began, a few months later, turning out the company’s very first shoes.
More than six decades on, the Toosbuy family still owns and runs ECCO from this same quiet corner of the country. Karl’s daughter, Hanni Toosbuy Kasprzak, is now the company chair, with the business employing more than 21,000 people around the world, including in Australia where it launched in 1999.
We are here to visit ECCO’s Research and Development (R&D) Facility, and on the floor we see staff hand-shaping the green wooden “lasts” – the foot-shaped forms every shoe is built around – using techniques barely changed since Toosbuy’s day, alongside ECCO’s patented direct-injection technology, which fuses upper and sole into one seamless, waterproof unit.
When The Weekly visits towards the end of the Danish summer, we discover a modern, open-plan space full of light, pale timber and potted greenery, the whole floor humming with that unmistakable, unfussy calm of Danish design – less research facility, more architect-designed campus that just happens to create shoes.
In a quiet corner, we find the real heart: a group of seamstresses, several of whom have worked there for over three decades, standing smiling beside their machines and welcoming us into their world. There’s something almost fairytale about it – the same patient, stitch-by-stitch devotion that Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark’s most famous storyteller, once wrote into his own “Old Mother Shoemaker”, who fashioned shoes by hand in a village not unlike Bredebro.
As one lovely seamstress shows me how to stitch together a leather tote, I remark that she must marvel at seeing visitors like us walk in wearing the latest sneakers – shoes she would have hand-stitched the prototypes for, months earlier. “Yes,” she grins, “I never look at people’s faces. I always look at their feet.”
Just beyond the sewing stations, behind curved glass walls, sits a temperature-controlled laboratory – a world away from the seamstress’ needle and thread. Here, a colourful character with a Batman motif on his safety shoes walks us through the secret machinations of ECCO’s direct-injection technology, housed in a giant, red conveyor-belt-style machine. “It’s our Ferrari!” he jokes.
It’s a wonderful collision of old-world craft, Scandinavian engineering and sustainability. Since 1985, the company has owned and run its own tanneries and recently produced the BIOM 720, a shoe built from what used to be tannery waste.
The brand’s fans stretch from royalty to red carpets: Denmark’s King Frederik has been photographed in ECCO, as has Zendaya, whose paparazzi shot walking her dogs in the brand’s BIOM C-Trail Lace-up – a hybrid ballet-style “sneakerina” born from a collaboration with former Chloé creative director Natacha Ramsay-Levi – promptly sent the style viral.
Walking, and the ability to fuse comfort, quality and fashion, sits at the centre of ECCO’s current global campaign, Walk Your Walk. The day before our visit to ECCO HQ, we put that philosophy to the test with a walking tour of Copenhagen – 10,000 steps over six hours encompassing Danish design, royal history, plenty of canals and culinary delights, and a genuinely fantastic way to see a city.
“Quality and comfort are the foundation of the brand,” says ECCO’s Global Creative and Design Director Niki Tæstensen, a fifth-generation shoemaker. “You can only achieve real walking comfort by getting the engineering right – the comfort, the quality, all of it. And that’s what ties every walking moment together, whether you’re walking in the office, on a mountain; walking fast or slow, or just standing still. A heel or a pump will never be as comfortable as a flat sneaker, but in every walking moment, that’s what we’re always striving for – designing with the intent that your feet are being looked after, even after many, many hours.”
The author travelled to Denmark as a guest of ECCO shoes.
