vanHaren Brand Guidelines: The Waalwijk Shoe Factory That Became Deichmann’s Dutch Chain

A family leather trade on the Langstraat.

vanHaren comes from the leather and shoe district around Waalwijk, in North Brabant. Dutch Wikipedia, in its article on the former Van Haren factory, says Johannes van Haren, who owned a modest shoe factory in Beneden-Leeuwen, bought a steam shoe factory in Baardwijk, now part of Waalwijk, in 1913, and that his sons moved there that September to carry on the family business. In 1920 one son, Ivo van Haren, left the partnership with his brothers and started his own leather trade in Baardwijk, which moved to Waalwijk in 1924.

In 1929 his business became N.V. Ivo van Haren’s Schoenfabrieken, and the same year it opened its first own shop, on the Hoogstraat in Rotterdam, the article says. Pages on the regional cycle-route site Fietsnetwerk give slightly different steps, with Ivo’s leather business in 1923 and his shoe factory in 1927; both sources date the company’s start to 1929.

What set the firm apart was its structure. Dutch Wikipedia calls Van Haren one of the first in the trade to control the whole chain, from tannery to shop, and Fietsnetwerk says the factory made shoes only for its own shops, sold at fixed unit prices. Production and the chain grew together through the 1930s: Wikipedia gives a weekly output of 17,000 pairs in 1936 and says the fiftieth branch under the company’s own name opened the following year, when it also took over a large local leather factory. Fietsnetwerk gives 1,400 staff and 21,000 pairs a week for 1937.

The sources used for this guide do not say how the company operated during the occupation of 1940–1945.

A factory in stained glass.

After 1945 the business grew again. Dutch Wikipedia describes a long post-war boom, with production branches in ’s-Hertogenbosch and a stitching workshop in Weelde, across the Belgian border, and says it remained a family company; from 1965 Ivo’s sons Johan and Jacques ran it. Like much of Europe’s shoe industry it then contracted. In 1977 the assembly department in ’s-Hertogenbosch and the tannery in Waalwijk closed, and the company turned into a large retail chain with its own production business.

The buildings it left behind are now protected. The former factory on the Hoogeinde in Baardwijk is a complex of national monuments, made up of the production hall with its sawtooth roofs, a staff house, a canteen and an entrance gate. Dutch Wikipedia describes the gate as a metal arch carrying the words “VAN HAREN”. The canteen has seven stained-glass windows by the Breda glass artist Louis de Swart that show the whole production process, from cattle supplying the leather to the sale of the finished shoes, framed by the arms of the eleven Dutch provinces and crowned by the arms of Waalwijk.

Inside the main building, the reception hall has hand-painted murals by the Waalwijk artist Theo van Delft showing the leather industry and the company’s own work, from leather processing and shoemaking to the laboratory and a shop where customers try on shoes, under a ceiling that filters daylight through a red and yellow panel. The wall around the entrance lists the places where the company had branches at the time. For a shoe brand, it is an unusually complete picture of how the business once saw itself.

Shop signs and owners.

Shoe store chains in Europe present themselves first through the shop sign. The name over the door, its lettering and its colours are what a shopper sees from a car park or a high street, and the same mark is repeated on carrier bags, loyalty apps and websites. When a chain changes hands or merges its banners, the sign can change with it: in 2024 the German group Kienast announced that it would rename around 250 of its shops under the Reno name, replacing the logo lettering inside and outside each store, as the company and the trade title Shoez reported.

The chains in this guide come from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, France and the United Kingdom, and they trade in different formats. As the companies describe them, these run from large shoe centres on retail parks and the edges of towns to smaller units on high streets and in shopping centres, and most now add an online shop and often an app.

Ownership varies as much as format. Some chains are still run by founding families, some are listed on a stock exchange, and some belong to larger shoe-retail groups that run several banners side by side, each with its own sign and its own own-label ranges. Ownership can also change quickly: Reno was sold by its long-time owner in 2022, entered insolvency proceedings in March 2023 and now continues as a brand of the Kienast group, according to WirtschaftsWoche and the company itself.

Each guide sets out what can be checked about one chain: when and where it was founded, who owns it today, how it describes its shops and its own-label ranges, and what its corporate pages say about founders and owners. Where a fact rests only on a company’s own word, the guide says so. The palettes and type pairings are our own unofficial interpretations; no logo or shop sign is reproduced.

A Deichmann chain with a Waalwijk head office.

The family era ended in 1985, when the German shoe retailer Deichmann took the company over, Dutch Wikipedia says. Deichmann, a family-owned group founded in Essen in 1913, lists the Netherlands among the markets it entered that year, according to English Wikipedia. Around 180 people worked in Waalwijk at the time of the merger; the production business closed in 1989, according to the factory article, while Wikipedia’s Waalwijk article says shoemaking stopped in the early 1990s. What remained was the chain, selling shoes made by others.

That chain has stayed roughly the same size. Dutch Wikipedia counts 125 shops in 1989 and one more in 2010, and the cycle-route site Fietsnetwerk puts it at nearly 150 shops in the Netherlands, with an online shop, while VisitBrabant describes it as one of the largest shoe retailers in the country. Its head office and logistics centre are still in Waalwijk, Fietsnetwerk says. Within Deichmann, English Wikipedia says, the business trades as van Haren in the Netherlands and Belgium, while the group’s Swiss shops keep the Dosenbach name. The company itself writes its name as one word with a lowercase v: vanHaren.

The chain also gave its name to a European trademark case. In 2012 Van Haren sold high-heeled shoes with red soles, and the designer Christian Louboutin and his company sued it in the Dutch courts for trademark infringement. The district court in The Hague asked the Court of Justice of the European Union whether a colour applied to a sole counts as a shape. In its judgment of 12 June 2018 in case C-163/16, the Court ruled that a mark consisting of a colour applied to the sole of a shoe is not covered by the prohibition on registering shapes, its press release said.

For a design guide, vanHaren shows a retail name that began as a factory and kept its home town when the factory went. Compare Dosenbach, Deichmann’s Swiss chain, and Scapino, another Dutch shoe chain. For this guide we use a canal teal, a tannery brown, an amber and a linen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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