Our History

İbrahim Erdoğdu laid the current foundations of Erdoğdu Group in 1968 in a shop in Çarşıkapı, Istanbul, where he conducted his footwear materials supply trade. İbrahim Erdoğdu lost his father Bayezid at a young age and migrated from Zile, a small Central Anatolian village in the province of Kayseri, to Istanbul in 1944. Intending to learn the shoemaking and cobbling trades, he followed the footsteps of his great-grandfather Hafız İbrahim, who was the first in a long tradition of shoemakers from Zile, and had established his own business in Istanbul in the early-mid 1800s.

Anecdotal accounts of family history dictate that Hafız İbrahim was the first person of Turkish descend to emigrate from the village of Zile to the capital and largest city of the Empire, Constantinople, in order to work as a shoemaker, during the late Ottoman period. After his initial apprenticeship as a cobbler repairing old shoes, he sets up shop in downtown Karaköy in Galata, selling ready-made shoes. Unfortunately, however, fires are a common occurrence in the wood-laden city, and the most destructive one, the Great Galata Fire of 1870, engulfs the entirety of western Galata. Hafız İbrahim survives, but his shop and all of his inventory are lost in the fire, after which Hafız İbrahim leaves Istanbul for his village. His apprentices, most of whom were also from the same village of Zile, and had migrated to learn the trade in his mentorship, disperse upon his departure. As those apprentices spread throughout Beyoğlu and its environs and became artisans in their own right, they settle down in the city and set up their own shops, bringing along their own relatives from the village as apprentices. Thus, approximately 80% of the male population of and from the village of Zile have chosen the shoemaking profession, a fact still apparent in today's footwear industry.

Following in the footsteps of his namesake great-grandfather, our founder İbrahim Erdoğdu also practiced the professions of cobbling and shoe-selling between 1944 and 1968. Cobbling —the art of repairing old shoes and crafting bespoke ones— was one of the popular crafts of Turkey in the 1940s and 50s, but was gradually rendered obsolete as mass produced shoes eliminated the demand for cobbling. Deciding to take part in the sub-industry section of the developing footwear production sector, İbrahim Bey began his own footwear supplies trade in a 9 square meter shop in the Grand Bazaar in 1968, where the foundations of Erdoğdu as it exists today were laid.