How it starts

The idea of ONEDR came about during a hike in the mountains with my wife. Afterwards we wanted to go somewhere to eat. However, my wife felt uncomfortable walking into a restaurant with her traditional mountain boots. That's why she first walked back to the car to take off her walking shoes and put on her beautiful sneakers. At that moment I thought: Why don't there be fashionable hiking shoes? Something that looks nice and that you can also wear in everyday life.

With that in mind, I went to the Shoe Center and spoke to 1 of the most famous hiking shoe brands. I asked why no nice walking shoes are made. The answer was simple: "Why should we? This sells anyway." Then I realized: this has to change. After 25 years of experience in my own shoe stores, I knew that it should definitely be possible to develop a stylish hiking shoe.

I did wonder: is this well-known hiking shoe brand right, or should we do research first? I suspected that there was a need for a fashionable hiking shoe, but I wanted to investigate that first. That is why we started an extensive study, in which around 2000 people participated. The results were clear: most people buy today's hiking boots not because they are beautiful, but because there is simply no alternative. And that they desperately needed something they could wear on a daily basis. It was clear to me then that there is a market for a hip, trendy hiking shoe.

I then called Vibram, the best sole manufacturer, and asked if they wanted to work together on a new hiking­shoe. Then we started working with a designer friend and we made a beautiful design. With this design, we went to different factories and explained that we wanted to work with Vibram. We had five factories make a prototype.

We gave them a Lowa model as an example, with the assignment that our shoe had to meet the same quality standards: fit, dirt-repellent, waterproof and windproof, but completely according to our own design. And our hiking shoe had to be made of 100% leather on the outside. After a month and a half, we received the first samples. One factory clearly stood out; We continued with them.

There we had twenty new samples made, which we handed out to walking influencers and people who walk a lot during their work, such as catering workers and even an RTL4 correspondent who walks a lot for her work. After two months, they had to return the shoes, after which they went to the factory to assess whether improvements were needed. That was not so bad; Only a few small pressure points had to be adjusted.

After this test phase, we immediately put the shoe into production. We officially started sales on November 1, 2024. And that was a huge success from the start. Now we don't call them hiking shoes but hiking sneakers. A nice combination of quality and fashion!