Did you know that every pair of Birkenstocks passes through around 50 human hands as the individual components are stretched, snipped, sculpted, smoothed, set, glued and, eventually, transformed into functional footwear? Making a Birkenstock is meticulous work. The human touch is the most important element in our production process. Without you, our sandals wouldn’t exist.
No matter the model, it all begins with the footbed. Developed by Birkenstock over more than a century, the anatomically contoured footbed, is the heart and soul of every sandal, clog and shoe the company produces. Only the best natural materials are used to manufacture it.
Before the baking process begins, the cork and -latex mix is fed automatically into moulds, into which a base layer of jute (a super strong and durable plant-based material) has been added. Once the mix is in the mould, it is finished by hand to avoid any imperfections. When the form is correctly moulded, and just prior to baking, the top covering of jute and leather linings are applied. The magic formula of the cork-latex mix which gives our products their quality and consistency is Birkenstock’s best kept secret. Let’s keep it that way.
After baking, the footbeds are left to dry for 24 hours. They are then checked for small defects and splashes of latex and any imperfections are trimmed, sanded and scrubbed away. The perfectly-formed footbeds are then sent for sealing and coating, in order to make them hydrophobic.
Our buckles consist of the visible ‘superstructure’ of the buckle, plus a pin and a clip, which fastens the buckle to the leather of the sandal, clog or shoe. They are manufactured from rolls of steel, which have been sliced like a cucumber laterally, before being rolled out and fed into powerful presses, which punch out the buckle into the iconic shape. A pass through the unique wooden deburring drum takes place, before the buckles are transferred to a belt-driven ‘vibrator’ into which a small pyramid shaped ceramic stones are added. This vibration and scrub process works off any residual oil that remains after the press-and-deburr process is complete. The vibrator drum’s distinguishing feature is a red broom head, which slows down the finished parts to such an extent that the stones and buckles separate cleanly. This simple machine was created by Karl Birkenstock’s uniquely practical mind. After drying, galvanising and painting, the finished buckles are packaged. Every day, as many as 360,000 buckles and 1.8 million clips make the journey to the packaging machine where they are filled into bags, ready for shipment to the final assembly line.
If you’d like to find out more about how the magic works in our factories, take a look at the videos available on our website and on social media.
