Thorogood

Thorogood's roots go back to Peter Weinbrenner, a German cobbler who emigrated to the United States and set up a small shoemaking shop in Milwaukee in 1855, giving up his German citizenship in the process. His son Albert apprenticed under him and grew the business well beyond its original scale, and in 1892 Albert Weinbrenner formally opened his own cobblery in Milwaukee aimed at outfitting workers in the 'jobbing' trades — the founding point for what became the Weinbrenner Shoe Company, with the Thorogood label following soon after.

Production scaled quickly: by the turn of the twentieth century the company was turning out roughly 60 pairs of boots a day, and by 1905 that had grown to about 2,500 pairs daily. In 1917, Thorogood introduced its 'Job-Fitted' concept — boots engineered for the specific demands of individual trades such as mining, farming, railroad work, foundry work, oil drilling, and construction, rather than a single generic work boot.

Weinbrenner's workforce unionized under the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the brand still manufactures domestically today from two plants in north-central Wisconsin, staffed by union craftspeople — the basis for its long-running 'union-made in the USA' identity and its association with the moc-toe wedge boot style worn on American job sites.