ECCO Sko A/S is a Danish shoe and leather accessories manufacturer founded in 1963 by Karl Toosbuy, in Bredebro, Denmark. ECCO opened its first retail store in Denmark in 1982. ECCO is family-owned and employs 21,300 people worldwide, with product sales in 101 countries from over 2,250 shops and more than 14,000 sales points.
History
ECCO was established in 1963 by Karl Toosbuy in the small town of Bredebro in southern Denmark.[2] Throughout the 1980s, the company expanded its operations internationally. By 1982, sales reached 1 million pairs of shoes annually. In order to accommodate the increasing demand, additional production was established in Portugal, and under license in Japan and Cyprus.[3] ECCO built its own research and design center, named "Futura", in Denmark in 1996, since 2009 Portugal is the R&D center of ECCO and opened its own beamhouse in Indonesia and tannery in Thailand a few years later. In 1998 the first flagship retail store opened on Oxford Street, in London. By 2000, ECCO owned every step of the production process, from design and leather production to branded retail sales.