Salzburg / Austria
Bespoke shoemaker with a Salzburg shop on Pfeifergasse. Contact the workshop about made-to-measure shoes.
Shoes of Austria
13 stores · curated ORBIS register
Vienna's bespoke shoemakers count their work in hours; sixty per pair is the figure they quote. Scheer hand-makes bespoke shoes requiring about 60 hours of work each since 1816. Ludwig Reiter Schuhmanufaktur makes welted leather footwear, bags, belts, wallets as a Vienna family shoemaker at the workbench. Rudolf Scheer & Söhne remains bespoke shoemakers since 1816, seventh generation. A welted shoe can be resoled for decades; a first wear on carpet rather than cobbles protects the sole you will eventually replace. Ludwig Reiter sells bags and belts alongside the shoes, so a matching set is possible from one bench.
Visit official site ↗Legero
Heritage HouseAustria
A family-owned Austrian footwear maker founded in Vienna in 1872 by Bernhard Strakosch, now headquartered in Graz; produces adult and children's shoes under the Legero, Superfit, Think! and VIOS lines.
Best for Lightweight comfort shoes
Legero traces its roots to 1872 Vienna, where Bernhard Strakosch, the son of a Jewish clothier family, founded a workshop producing men's and women's shoes using nailed, sewn and goat-stitched construction. The business grew under his son Otto Strakosch, whose finely embroidered silk women's shoes were exported as far as the United States, Australia, South Africa and South America by around 1900. The company later relocated its operations to Graz, Austria, where its present-day parent, Legero United, is headquartered with roughly 2,300 employees across 26 nationalities. Today Legero United operates as an umbrella for four footwear brands — Legero (adult comfort shoes), Superfit and VIOS (children's footwear) and Think! (a sustainability-focused line based in Kopfing, Upper Austria) — continuing the firm's original specialization in constructed, comfort-engineered shoes rather than moving into unrelated categories. The company markets its longevity — more than 150 years of continuous family and corporate lineage — as central to its identity, distinguishing it from newer entrants in the European comfort-footwear market.
Visit official site ↗Innere Stadt, Vienna
A Vienna family shoemaker selling welted leather footwear, bags, belts, wallets, and shoe-care products. The family business has made leather shoes in Vienna since 1885.
Best for Vienna family shoemaker selling welted leather footwear, bags, belts, wallets
Visit official site ↗Bräunerstraße 4, Vienna
Bespoke shoemakers since 1816, seventh generation — imperial-royal cobblers whose lasts of the Habsburgs rest in the workshop museum.
Best for Bespoke shoes of dynastic patience
In the workshop museum at Bräunerstraße 4 rest the lasts of the Habsburgs — the carved wooden forms of imperial feet, kept by the house that measured them. Scheer has been making shoes since 1816, and became imperial-royal cobblers to a court that demanded perfection as a condition of employment. The emperors are gone; their lasts remain, archived beside the lasts of seven generations of ordinary distinguished customers, because at Scheer every client receives the same treatment the crown did: measured once, carved in wood, kept forever.
The house is now in its seventh generation of the same family — a succession longer than most nations' constitutions — and it works at a pace it calls, without apology, dynastic patience. A first pair of Scheer shoes is not an errand but an undertaking: measurements, the carving of your personal last, fittings, and the slow hand-sewing that cannot be hurried without becoming something else. The customers who come to Bräunerstraße understand they are commissioning, not shopping.
What the museum of lasts really displays is the house's theory of time. A last outlives fashions, outlives the shoes made on it, often outlives its owner — and while it exists, the house can make you again. Emperors accepted these timescales; moderns must relearn them, and the relearning is part of what Scheer sells. Seven generations at one Vienna address, still carving feet in wood, still keeping every record — bespoke shoemaking as an act of institutional memory, with the Habsburg archive as proof of concept.
Visit official site ↗Innere Stadt, Vienna
A bespoke shoemaker producing custom-fitted shoes by hand in Vienna. Vienna Tourist Board describes each custom shoe as requiring about 60 hours of work. Established 1816.
Best for Hand-made bespoke shoes requiring about 60 hours of work each since 1816
Austria
Austrian ski maker founded in 1955 by wheelwright Alois Rohrmoser; skis and Hawx boots are still developed and built in Altenmarkt im Pongau, near his original workshop, and raced on the World Cup circuit.
Best for Ski equipment
Atomic traces to 1955, when Alois Rohrmoser, a trained wheelwright from the Austrian Alps, began hand-carving race skis in his own workshop, turning out around 40 pairs a year. Production scaled quickly: about 2,000 pairs by 1957 and 5,000 by 1960. In 1968, Olga Pall won Olympic downhill gold at Grenoble on Atomic skis, an early marker of the brand's racing credibility. In 1971 the company built a second, larger factory in Altenmarkt im Pongau, in Austria's Pongau Valley, and that plant remains the center of Atomic's ski production today, a few kilometers from Rohrmoser's original workshop. By 1989 Atomic had become a one-stop supplier of skis, bindings, boots and poles. The 1990s brought financial strain, and in 1994 the Finnish sporting-goods group Amer Sports (which also owns Salomon, Arc'teryx and Wilson) acquired Atomic; insolvency proceedings that followed were resolved by 2006. Today Atomic makes roughly 400,000 pairs of skis a year, alongside boots, bindings, helmets, poles, goggles and apparel, still manufactured in the Alps. The brand has remained a fixture on the Alpine Ski World Cup circuit - it was the top-winning brand of the 2022/23 season, with 31 race victories and 6 discipline globes - and has equipped skiers including Mikaela Shiffrin and Hermann Maier.
Visit official site ↗Kitzbühel, Tyrol, Austria
This Bichlstraße department store spans more than 1,000 square metres of fashion, sportswear, and one of the region's largest shoe selections, alongside ski, bike, and golf rental counters. A dedicated golf shop at nearby Schwarzsee extends the same family business into equipment for the course.
Best for Fashion, sportswear, and shoe selection under one roof
Visit official site ↗Austria
Austrian knitwear and boiled-wool maker founded in 1954 in Tyrol (sources differ on Reith im Alpbachtal vs. Brixlegg); introduced its first boiled-wool slipper in 1974 and remains family-run under a third generation.
Best for Merino wool shoes
Giesswein is an Austrian family company that began producing knitted wool sweaters in 1954. Sources differ on the exact founding town - Giesswein's own US site cites Reith im Alpbachtal, while the company's headquarters today is in Brixlegg, both in Tyrol - but agree on the timeline: through the 1960s and 70s the company grew into Austria's largest knitwear and boiled-wool manufacturer. In 1974 Giesswein introduced its first slipper made from boiled wool, an unplanned success that became the foundation of its present-day product line. The company remains a fully family-owned business, now run by Markus and Johannes Giesswein as the third generation.
Visit official site ↗Austria
Austrian shoe retail chain tracing to D.H. Pollak & Co., a shoe manufacturer founded in Graz in 1872; the Humanic name launched in 1907 with its first stores in Vienna, and the company remains headquartered in Graz.
Best for Fashion footwear
Humanic's roots go back to 1872, when D.H. Pollak & Co. was established in Graz as a shoe manufacturer — the founding entity behind what is today the holding company Leder & Schuh International AG, still headquartered on the same Graz site. The firm grew quickly, eventually running multiple factories and stores and producing around 20,000 pairs of shoes a week, making it one of the largest shoe producers in Central Europe at the time.
The Humanic retail brand itself came later: in 1907, 'the American Shoe House HUMANIC' opened its first two stores, both in Vienna — one on Kärntnerring opposite the Hotel Bristol, the other on Mariahilferstraße opposite Hotel Palace. The brand name and the manufacturing company are historically distinct threads that merged into today's group.
Humanic has since grown into the market leader in the middle and upper shoe-retail segment in Austria, and holds the number-one or -two position across seven Central and Eastern European countries under the Leder & Schuh group, which also operates the Shoe4You banner. The company remains headquartered in Graz.
Visit official site ↗Schuhhaus Laimer
Hidden GemBad Ischl, Upper Austria, Europe
Schuhhaus Laimer places Trachten shoes and Haferlschuhe beside contemporary everyday footwear rather than treating traditional dress as a separate costume line. The Bad Ischl shop also carries care products for maintaining leather pairs.
Best for Traditional Haferlschuhe and footwear
Visit official site ↗Kitzbühel, Tyrol, Austria
Facing the base station of the Hahnenkammbahn, this family ski shop has rented and serviced equipment for more than twenty years, keeping upwards of 700 pairs of skis and 100 snowboards in rotation each winter. Alongside rentals and boot fitting, the shop's trend corner sells sports accessories and Kitzbühel-branded gear.
Best for Ski and snowboard rental with sport accessories
Visit official site ↗Strolz Sport & Mode
Heritage HouseLech am Arlberg, Austria
Ambros Strolz opened a shoemaker's workshop in Lech am Arlberg in 1921, hand-stitching leather ski boots for the valley's early alpine skiers and eventually inventing the Strolz ski boot. Four generations later the family still runs a seven-floor sport and fashion house on the same site, with a ski depot, rental service and in-house tailoring.
Best for Century-old ski outfitter and rental house
Visit official site ↗Austria
Austrian vegetable-tanned comfort shoes — Kopfing pioneer, 30+ years sustainable design, hand-crafted in Central Europe.
Best for Comfort shoes, natural
Think! is an Austrian shoemaker headquartered in Kopfing, Upper Austria, recognized as a pioneer of sustainability in footwear for over three decades. The brand specializes in hand-crafted leather shoes using exclusively European vegetable-tanned leather and renewable materials like natural rubber and cork. Each pair requires up to 200 individual production steps, nearly all executed by hand, performed by experienced leather craftspeople in workshops across Bosnia, Italy, Hungary and Romania where the company has maintained long-term partnerships. Think! received the Austrian Eco-label in 2015, the first shoe brand to achieve this certification, followed by the Blue Angel label in 2017. The company maintains an in-house repair service at its Kopfing headquarters to ensure maximum longevity and durability of every pair produced.
Visit official site ↗Curated ORBIS register · official links shown where recorded