History

Our foundations were laid by İbrahim Erdoğdu in 1968 with the trade of "footwear supplies" in the Çarşıkapı district of Istanbul. İbrahim Erdoğdu lost his father, Bayezid Erdoğdu, at a young age and moved to Istanbul in 1944 to learn the craft of shoemaking. Following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Hafız İbrahim, who practiced shoemaking in the 1800s and from whom he took his name, İbrahim Erdoğdu also dedicated himself to the shoemaking profession.

According to anecdotes passed down through generations, Hafız İbrahim was the first Turkish shoemaker apprentice to come to Istanbul from the Zile town of Develi district in Kayseri during the 1800s when the Ottoman Empire was in power. After working as a cobbler for a while, he began selling ready-made shoes in a shop in Karaköy. However, a large fire broke out in Galata, Istanbul, which was dominated by wooden architecture at the time. The Great Beyoğlu Fire on June 5, 1870, destroyed Hafız İbrahim's entire shop and shoes. Following the fire, Hafız İbrahim returned to his village. The apprentices he trained also left to open their own cobbler and shoe repair shops. As his apprentices and journeymen established their own shops in Beyoğlu and the surrounding areas, they took in the village children as apprentices. As a result, approximately 80% of the village's male children chose the shoemaking profession.

Following in his ancestor's footsteps, our founder, İbrahim Erdoğdu, practiced cobbling, shoe repair, and shoemaking between 1944 and 1968. During the 1940s and 1950s, cobbling was a common trade in Turkey, but it gradually gave way to shoe manufacturing, repair, and craftsmanship with the country's economic recovery. Determined to be part of the evolving shoe manufacturing industry, İbrahim Erdoğdu started trading "footwear supplies," also known as "civic work," in a 9 m² shop in Çarşıkapı in 1968. This marked the official foundation of Erdoğdu.