Birkenstock: the orthopaedic sandal that fashion kept coming back to

Birkenstock traces its roots to a family of shoemakers registered in the Hessian village of Langen-Bergheim in 1774. The step that defined the company came in 1896, when Konrad Birkenstock developed a contoured footbed that shoemakers could use to make shoes shaped to the foot. In the 1960s Margot Fraser, an American who discovered the sandals in Germany, began importing them to the United States, and in the early 1970s the Arizona, with its two broad straps, became the model most people now picture.

For decades the sandal was associated with comfort, health and a certain counterculture more than with style. Fashion kept borrowing it anyway. In 2013 Phoebe Philo showed a fur-lined sandal inspired by the Birkenstock at Céline, and the press called it the furkenstock. In February 2021 the company sold a majority stake to L Catterton, the private equity firm, and Financière Agache, the Arnault family’s investment company. In July 2023 the Barbie film used a pink Birkenstock to stand for the real world, and by the end its heroine wears a pair; shopping platforms reported a sharp jump in searches for the Arizona. On 11 October 2023 Birkenstock listed on the New York Stock Exchange at 46 dollars a share, valuing it at about 8.6 billion dollars, and closed its first day almost 13% lower. In the fiscal year to September 2025 it reported revenue of about 2.1 billion euros, up 16%.

A premise that never chased fashion

Every value proposition starts from a premise: who the offer is for and, as clearly, who it is not for. Birkenstock’s premise was written by the footbed. The sandal is shaped like a foot, so it looks wide, flat and a little clumsy next to shoes shaped by fashion. People who want their feet to look elegant at any cost are politely shown the door. That refusal, applied for more than a century, is an antithesis in our books’ sense: a value the market treats as central, here the slim and pointed silhouette, that the brand openly declines.

The antithesis is what made the brand useful to fashion. When designers wanted to signal ease, honesty or indifference to trends, they needed an object that obviously did not try to please, and Birkenstock was the most recognisable one available. Birkenstock’s premise held still for decades, and fashion kept arriving at it from the outside.

Riding a wave without becoming a passenger

The Barbie moment is a textbook case of what our books call value bandwagoning: riding value that someone else has set in motion, here the cultural weight of a global film. Bandwagoning is fast and it scales, and its risk is becoming a passenger, a brand assembled from other people’s waves.

What protected Birkenstock is that the film used the sandal for exactly what it already meant. In the story, the pink Birkenstock stood for the real world, comfort and the choice to stop performing. The wave carried the brand’s own value to a new audience, so it added meaning in the same direction. The Céline sandal of 2013 worked the same way, borrowing the plainness the original stood for, while the footbed itself stayed unchanged.

What the market priced, and what it doubted

The IPO came three months after the film, and the first day was weak. Outside readers should not read too much into one session: investors were weighing the price of the shares as much as the brand. Still, the gap captures a real question for any brand that fashion adopts. Fashion attention moves on, while the need the footbed answers stays where it was.

When it sold the majority stake in 2021, Birkenstock named growth in markets such as China and India and in direct sales among its aims, and its revenue was still rising in fiscal 2025. Whether the brand can keep its premise stable through the next cycle, when fashion turns to something else, is the test that matters, and it is still running.

For a company with a product that looks unfashionable for a good reason, the lesson is to keep the reason intact and let the culture come to you, then accept the waves that carry your own meaning and refuse the ones that would change it. If you want to write a premise that can survive both neglect and sudden fame, see what we do and how we build it with you.