A conversation with Martin Koller
and Christoph Mayer,
Business Unit Think!

Martin Koller

Martin Koller, brand founder of Think!, was in his mid-20s when his professional life took a new direction. In 1990, the great-great-grandson of a family of Austrian shoemakers was faced with the question of whether to continue running the family business as before, i.e. specialised in men’s shoes, or whether to take a different path with a new strategy and new products. He chose the latter. “I asked myself at the time, What do you really want to do in your life? If you made shoes just for yourself, what would they look like? What materials would you use?”. That was the starting point for Think!. At the time, the new brand pioneered sustainable footwear made from vegetable-tanned leather. “But not because we recognised a trend that we wanted to capitalise on. Rather because we thought it was right and made sense. To this day, nothing has changed in that regard,” Koller explains.

While Think! was for many years largely a lone wolf and niche player in the field of sustainable footwear, the segment has now taken off in wider society and is addressed by all companies in the footwear industry. “Others are just discovering sustainability for themselves. At Think! it has always been standard practice,” says Christoph Mayer. The brand’s shoes are produced exclusively in Europe (Hungary, Romania, Bosnia, Italy). Materials are also sourced as far as possible from suppliers on the home continent. And that applies to all the brand’s shoes. Vegetable-tanned leather is used and sustainability is also a top priority for component parts. “It’s our DNA, we don’t do anything else,” Koller stresses.

The focus on ecological products is restrictive in some areas, because not every material can be used for Think! shoes. The company principal sees this as an opportunity: “If all the ingredients are available to a chef, it’s relatively easy to create a great dish. But if you can only use five ingredients and want to conjure up even a better dish from them, that’s a tall order.” The shoes from Kopfing, Upper Austria, are expressly intended to be worn for a long time. And they can be sent to the in-house workshop for repair and reconditioning if necessary. Up to 1,000 pairs of shoes are renewed in this way every year – and continue to be worn.