 Photographer: Philotheus Nisch for Bloomberg Businessweek For centuries, Burg Ockenfels was home to medieval knights angling to control traffic along the Rhine River. Today the stone castle flaunts two round towers, a row of Renaissance-style statues and a courtyard that looks out over hills and farms. To visit, you take a train from Bonn to the sleepy village of Linz, then climb a long, steep hill until you reach the compound’s elaborate gate. From there, the place looks something like Xanadu, the mountaintop palace in Citizen Kane. Since the 1990s, the property has belonged to Christian Birkenstock, the seventh-generation scion of the German footwear dynasty. Out front, the mailbox has a camera and buzzers for 19 corporate entities with “Birkenstock” in their name, along with almost as many others belonging to Christian personally, as well as the family office of his brother Alex. In early October, when Birkenstock capped off a decade of explosive growth with an initial public offering, Christian and Alex became billionaires. The man most responsible for their windfall, however, typically works out of an office about 300 miles southeast, in Munich. Standing about 6-foot-6, with a thick, bushy beard, a baritone voice and a dry sense of humor that can be intimidating, Oliver Reichert isn’t exactly what you’d expect from an orthopedic shoe company executive. Among those who’ve worked for or sat across the negotiating table from Birkenstock’s chief executive officer, a word sometimes used to describe him is “bully.” When Christian Birkenstock hired Reichert in 2009, the family business was in disarray, with stagnating sales and no coherent plan for the future. After their domineering father, Karl, stepped back years earlier, Christian and Alex—then in their late 30s and early 40s, respectively—began fighting with their older brother, Stephan, for creative control. It had been more than a decade since the public had fawned over Birkenstocks, and suddenly upstarts such as Crocs were jolting a category long relegated to stoners, geriatrics and German tourists. At the time of Reichert’s arrival, the one thing everyone at the company agreed on was that Birkenstock’s patented “footbed”—the bulky sole of the distinctive sandals—was the source of the magic. Beyond that, nobody agreed on what exactly to do. Plenty of company veterans, whom Reichert eventually referred to as “footbed fascists,” looked to change absolutely nothing. “It was almost like the Bible had been written, and we didn’t need a New Testament,” Reichert, who became the first outsider to run the business in its 250-year history, once told a German newspaper. “Then I came in like a mix of Martin Luther, Muhammad Ali and Napoleon.” Reichert’s unsubtle confidence worked. Before long, Birkenstock sandals were landing everywhere from Parisian runways and high-end department stores to the feet of entire families from Brooklyn to Boise. Gone were the days when you could pull off Germany’s autobahn and snap up a pair of Arizona sandals for under $50 at a rest stop. Under Reichert’s watch, Birkenstock became an accessible luxury, the company’s sales more than tripling, to $830 million by 2020. Tim Loh writes about how the 250-year-old German orthopedic shoe company transformed itself into a luxury behemoth in: The Ballad of Birkenstock |
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