It was a True Greenfield Start

Farmland stretched for miles around the small factory building on the outskirts of Bredebro where Birte and Karl Toosbuy had assembled a small team to get production up and running. Initially limited to ladies’ shoes under the Venus brand, it was a tough start. The Toosbuys worked extremely long hours, tackled endless problems and sometimes doubted whether they would succeed. On one occasion, supplies from India of a poor quality almost brought down the business.

Money was tight and recycling was commonplace. Every piece of string was rolled up and saved and boxes from a nearby TV shop were used to pack and dispatch the finished shoes. The dedication of the staff was total. Karl Toosbuy loved to recount the incident when a member of staff borrowed her father’s tractor to get through the snow to get to work. He had never experienced that in Copenhagen.

The first real breakthrough came in the late 1970s when ECCO’s designer Ejnar Truelsen created the “JOKE”. This was followed by a series of other revolutionary shoes, some of which are still in production today. At the same time, Karl Toosbuy bought his first direct injection machine to apply high-tech production technology to the business. So confident was he in the machine that he bought a second one before the results from the first had materialised.