Torfs Brand Guidelines: A 1948 Lier Shoe Shop, Four Generations and a Temse Warehouse

A market trader from Lier and four shops.

Torfs is a Belgian shoe chain, trading in Dutch as Schoenen Torfs — “Torfs shoes” — and, in French, as Chaussures Torfs. Dutch Wikipedia traces it to Lier, in the province of Antwerp, in the years after the Second World War, when Louis Torfs, a Lier man, sold shoes on the market in Mechelen. In October 1948, it says, he and his wife set up four shops. RetailDetail, reporting the company’s 75th anniversary on 14 October 2023, placed the first Torfs shoe shop in Lier in 1948.

It has stayed a family business. Dutch Wikipedia says the shops were carried on by the founders’ two sons, Karel and Herman Torfs, together with a son-in-law, Staf Verlinden, and later by Wouter Torfs, Karel’s son and a member of the third generation. Sources differ on when he took charge: Dutch Wikipedia gives 1986, while the Mediahuis business site Made in wrote in September 2022 that he had been chief executive since 1989, and VRT NWS quoted him in May 2022 looking back on 35 years with the company. Dutch Wikipedia says the number of shops rose from 26 to 72 under his leadership.

The handover to a fourth generation was announced in May 2022. VRT NWS reported on 18 May 2022 that Wouter Torfs would leave the chief executive’s role at the end of that year to chair the board of CAW, the umbrella body of the Flemish general welfare centres. RetailDetail named his successor the same day as Lise Conix, his niece, who had been the chain’s marketing director since 2017. Made in reported in September 2022 that she had then worked at the company for ten years, and that she would lead it on her own from January 2023. In the anniversary report of October 2023, RetailDetail quoted her as chief executive.

Shops in Flanders, a webshop in Temse.

Torfs sells shoes for women, men and children, and its shops also carry bags, accessories and womenswear, according to Dutch Wikipedia. Made in reported in September 2022 that the chain stocked more than 250 brands and employed about seven hundred people; at the anniversary a year later, the company spoke of 650 colleagues, RetailDetail reported.

Its shop network is concentrated in Flanders. Dutch Wikipedia says Torfs took its first steps in Wallonia in 2018 and has two shops there, in Dinant and Marche-en-Famenne. The counts move over time: Made in gave 76 shops in September 2022; RetailDetail gave 75, two of them in Wallonia, in October 2023; and in April 2025 RetailDetail, citing an interview in De Tijd, reported 74 shops in Flanders, which it described as close to the chain’s ceiling in the region, plus the two in Wallonia. Dutch Wikipedia says some eighty shops have been refitted in recent years to a more modern shop concept, and RetailDetail reported in November 2023 that the refitted shops included a range of clothing and accessories.

Online selling came later. Dutch Wikipedia dates the Torfs webshop to March 2012. A Dutch webshop followed two years later and closed at the start of 2021, when the company judged that building awareness of the name in the Netherlands needed too much investment; deliveries to the Netherlands continued through the Belgian site. A French-language version of the webshop, Chaussures Torfs, was added in 2018.

Orders are handled at the company’s distribution centre in Temse, in East Flanders. In November 2023 RetailDetail, again citing De Tijd, reported that Torfs was adding four floors inside the Temse warehouse, making it more than a third larger and creating room for the head offices, until then housed in a separate building nearby. The same report described a new packing machine with a capacity of 800 parcels an hour, against 500 before, and a strong focus on automation in the enlarged building. Dutch Wikipedia records the work as an investment of 2024.

Design and documentation.

The Netherlands and Belgium have a dense network of discount, home, fashion and grocery chains, and many of them present themselves first through the shop front. A fascia on a shopping street is often the most visible part of the brand: when Blokker restarted in 2025, NOS reported that the old logo, in block capitals and without its full stop, went back up on the fronts of the reopened shops, and in April 2024 RetailDetail reported that Xenos would put its logo on eight former Casa shops it had taken back.

Websites carry the rest of the identity. Xenos groups its range online into departments such as furniture, garden, cooking and table, household and party goods, with trend pages and a customer club called Xtra Xenos; both Blokker and Xenos publish a folder, the retail leaflet, on their sites next to a shop finder. Xenos says it follows trends closely and buys new ranges in large volumes, so the assortment changes quickly.

Ownership is part of the story, and the companies describe it plainly. Some of these chains grew up inside family groups: Blokker Holding, built by the descendants of a couple who opened a shop in Hoorn in 1896, once owned Xenos, Leen Bakker, Bart Smit and Intertoys before selling them off between 2017 and 2019, and Xenos now describes its owner, Nieuwgeluk Group, as a Dutch family office. Restructurings, bankruptcies and restarts have reshaped several familiar names, and corporate pages and the trade press record those changes with dates.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, how its shops, ranges and logos have changed, and what has happened to it. Company statements are marked as such, and counts of shops and countries are given with the date of the source.

A surname on the door.

Torfs has long put its staff at the front of its public image. For the 75th anniversary in October 2023, RetailDetail reported, the company hung flags bearing the names of its employees at the entrances of its shops, head office and distribution centre, to stay up until March 2024, and gave staff an extra day of leave. Lise Conix told the publication that the business had carried the name of its founder and its shareholders for 75 years, but that on the anniversary it was the names of its colleagues that mattered. The same report recalled the “Foertdag” of 2019, a day off that staff could take for themselves and which made the news at the time, and its replacement, a volunteering day called the “Troefdag.”

The name is a family surname, and it works as a plain trade name: in Flemish press, from VRT NWS to RetailDetail and Made in, the chain appears as Schoenen Torfs, the word for shoes placed in front of the surname, while the French-language webshop turns it into Chaussures Torfs. The surname is shared by other public figures in Flanders, such as the canon lawyer Rik Torfs, and Dutch Wikipedia lists the shoe chain separately from them, so the full trade name is the safer search term. The company’s own website, torfs.be, carries the short form.

Its growth pattern is that of a regional retailer rather than an international one. By the counts RetailDetail gave in April 2025, almost every shop is in Flanders, with Wallonia limited to two towns, and the one attempt at a separate Dutch webshop closed in 2021. The webshop, the Temse warehouse and the refitted shop concept are where the recent investment has gone, according to the reports of 2023.

For a design guide, Torfs shows how a family surname paired with a plain trade word can carry a regional chain for three quarters of a century. Compare ZEB, another Flemish multi-brand fashion chain, and Primark, a fashion retailer that also trades under two names. For this guide we use a saddle brown, a shoebox cream and a lace blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Torfs’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.