Birkenstock

Birkenstock dates its story to 1774, when Johann Adam Birkenstock was recorded as a cobbler in the church register of a Hessian village. In 1896 Konrad Birkenstock, a Frankfurt shoemaker, devised the contoured footbed that still shapes every pair, and in the 1960s and 70s Karl Birkenstock built the Madrid, the two-strap Arizona and the Boston clog around it. L Catterton took control in 2021, and the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange two years later.