Deichmann

Deichmann traces back to 1913, when Heinrich Deichmann, born in 1888, opened a cobbler's shop in the working-class Essen district of Borbeck, running it together with his wife Julie. Their early customers were largely coal miners from the surrounding Ruhr industrial area, who needed inexpensive shoe repairs rather than new footwear. After the First World War, the workshop began producing its own shoes in addition to repair work, and Heinrich later started buying inexpensive stock directly from shoe factories to resell alongside the shop's own output. The business opened its first large-format store at Borbeck Market in 1936. Heinrich Deichmann died in 1940, and Julie Deichmann took over running the company through the difficult years that followed. Their son, Heinz-Horst Deichmann, had trained and qualified as a medical doctor but gave up his practice in 1956 to run the family shoe business full-time; under him the company expanded rapidly through West Germany, opening its 100th store in Würzburg in 1974. Two generations after Heinrich's original cobbler's shop, Deichmann had grown into Europe's largest shoe retailer by store count, still privately held by the founding family, with roughly 4,700 shops across 36 countries today.