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Thanks in part to Birkenstock’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Alex and Christian Birkenstock are now worth a whopping $3.4 billion (R65 billion), and a large part of the group’s success is thanks to a German hippie with chronic foot pain who started a US Birkenstock craze.

The late Margot Fraser began importing the shoes to health-food stores in California in 1966 after they helped her chronic foot pain, but at the time only the ‘hippie stores’ would stock them.

Despite this initial reluctance from retailers, Fraser – who died in 2017 at age 88 –  helped transform the Birkenstock brand from a German medical shoe to a global fashion trend. 

Fraser purchased a pair of Birkenstock Madrid sandals to ease her persistent foot pain in 1966 while she was travelling back to Germany, her native country. According to Birkenstock lore, her toes straightened, her back felt better, and she was so impressed that she contacted Karl Birkenstock to explore importing his family’s ‘odd-looking sandals’ into the US.

Fraser’s friend suggested she set up a booth for the shoes at a health-food expo in San Francisco after she failed to win over American shoe store owners with the ‘ugly’ footwear. Fraser reported that after she did, the store managers who had initially rejected her idea suddenly begged her for a pair.

Fraser wrote in her 2009 book Dealing with the Tough Stuff: “All women’s shoes were narrow and had pointed toes. Even the so-called healthy shoes still had heels. Because millions of women in the United States had painful feet, I thought it would be easy to get them into this marvellous footwear”.

The original Birkenstock style, the Madrid, featured a contoured cork foot bed and a crossed buckle strap over the toes. The shoe’s purpose was to force the owner to grip the toe strap to prevent the shoe from falling off so they would tone their calf muscle. Germans called this phenomenon ‘Angstreflex’ which means ‘fear reflex’.

The Arizona sandal, the brand’s most well-known design, was introduced in the 1970s, but for many years even the new design was dismissed as merely a ‘hippie shoe’.

But then Steve Jobs began wearing a pair as part of his chilled wardrobe and Birkenstocks exploded into the fashion world, and popular culture – even Kate Moss wore a pair of Birkenstocks in one of her first photo shoots when she was 16 years old.

By 2019, nearly 24 million pairs were sold in more than 100 countries. The company was on the ups, and after the shoes appeared in the recent Barbie movie, the sale of Birkenstocks increased by 300%. Even Steve Jobs’s old worn-out pair of ‘hippie shoes’ were recently auctioned off for $200,000 (R3.8 million).

After Fraser died in 2017, Birkenstock put out a press release that credited the German-American lady with their success, stating: “Ms. Fraser is responsible for bringing Birkenstock products to the U.S. and for building the brand over its first 40 years in the market”.

Fraser was inducted into the Footwear News Hall of Fame in 1997 and the National Shoe Retailers Association Hall of Fame in 2014. At the time she was described as a “humble trailblazer who built a multimillion-dollar business that brought comfort to millions of people”.

Thanks to Fraser, Birkenstock is now worth $3.4 billion (R65 billion). Not bad for an old lady with ugly hippie shoes.

[source:robbreport&dailymail]