Why don't wool shoes fit?
Thomas Glerup has been asking this question for 22 years. Across three companies and one bankruptcy. This is the story of how he finally answered it.
Act I · The Origin
Nanny Glerup at work. The hands that started it all.
My mother, Nanny Glerup, was 53 when she registered glerups. She made slippers by hand from the wool of our family's Gotland sheep, and people loved them. When a Swedish retailer ordered 200 pairs of children's boots, she had to turn the order down. She couldn't keep up alone. To simplify production, she picked one width and one shape. That single decision defined wool slippers for the next 30 years.
Nanny Glerup at work. The hands that started it all.
In 2003, my parents and I co-founded Glerups A/S together.
We made a deal that day. I would run the company as CEO. I would own 45% of the shares. After three years, if the company was thriving, my parents would sell me their majority and I would own Glerups outright. That was the agreement we shook on.
"You need everything when you start from scratch, so you have to come up with everything on your own. From building new machines to designing and attending sales fairs, from hiring new staff to getting credit at the bank."
For the first three years, we grew sales every single day. I worked harder than I ever have in my life.
My mother at one of our first trade fairs.
My mother at one of our first trade fairs.
the seed
In 2004, I went to a shoe fair in Düsseldorf with a 9 square meter stall for Glerups. They put us outside the main hall with the other newcomers. Right next to my tiny booth was another small startup nobody had heard of yet.
They were called Crocs.
"The minute I saw and felt their soft, cushioning EVA sandals, I thought to myself: these are the soles that belong on my woolen uppers."
I asked them about a partnership. We couldn't afford the development costs. They were focused on growing their own brand. The conversation lasted 10 minutes.
It started a 20 year obsession. I wanted to take the warmth and shape of a wool slipper and turn it into a real, everyday shoe with a real sole. That afternoon in Düsseldorf, I knew exactly what that shoe would feel like in my hand. I just didn't know how long it would take me to build it.
By 2005, manufacturing in Denmark had become impossible. Salaries were too high. So I drove to Transylvania with my father, and over a 10 day visit, we established a factory in Romania for Glerups.
We had also started a small workshop in Kathmandu the year before. A Danida-funded project, running in parallel with Glerups. Nobody else at the company thought much of it. I did.
Romania was the last major thing I built at Glerups.
My father Ove and Viorel. Romania. The factory we built in 10 days.
My father Ove and Viorel. Romania. The factory we built in 10 days.
Three years had passed.
The deal we made back in 2003 was that after three years, my parents would sell me their majority and I would own Glerups. That was the agreement.
I went to our bank and secured the funding to buy my parents out at the price we had agreed on. I gave them a generous offer.
To my surprise, they didn't accept. They paid me back my original investment instead, and the deal was off.
"I had made up my mind. It was either all or nothing. I had to leave the company."
On my way out the door, I asked if I should take the Nepal project with me. My parents didn't think Nepal was working. They would have shut it down if I hadn't taken it.
So I walked out of the company I had helped build into a category leader, and I walked out carrying Nepal with me. I decided right then to build a better company.
I called it Betterfelt.
Act II · The Struggle
First celebration with the management team in Kathmandu.
I flew back to Nepal alone.
ACP, the local craft organisation that had helped Glerups set up the original Nepal project, told me they didn't have time for me this trip. I was suspicious. I went anyway.
The moment I landed, I called the only person I knew outside ACP. His name was Prakash Maharjan. I woke him up and asked him to come meet me at my hotel.
Thirty minutes later, he was sitting across from me at the bar.
First celebration with the management team in Kathmandu.
Celebrating Prakash's wedding. The three founders.
By dawn, we had a deal. I would own the majority of a brand new wool shoe production unit in Kathmandu. Prakash and a man named Allen Thuladher would be my partners. Prakash would bring the best felt artisans over from ACP, find us a building, and register the new company.
I had been to Nepal once before, with my mother, three years earlier. What I had seen on that first trip was the reason I wanted to build the workshop here in the first place.
Celebrating Prakash's wedding. The three founders.
My first crew in Kathmandu.
"I concluded that I could do nothing as an individual. But I could start a healthy company, and create profits that fund the life of my workers as well as myself."
One week later, we had moved into a former school in Jawlakhel district. We had a workshop. We had a team. We had a new company.
My first crew in Kathmandu.
The Betterfelt store in home town Randers.
I rented a small store in my home town in Denmark and started selling Betterfelt shoes.
The Betterfelt store in home town Randers.
Inside the workshop.
How a shoe is made.
Every shoe starts as a cloud of raw wool in the corner of the workshop. From there, everything is done by hand.
These are archival photos from the early workshop. They are old and low resolution. The craft has not changed.
The hands behind every pair.
A pattern is laid out for a double sock.
Here is something most people would never imagine. Both shoes in a pair are made as one connected double sock first. Only at the very end are the two shoes separated.
The wool is moistened with warm soapy water.
The last is put into the sock, and the sock is shrunken around the last.
The wooden molds, the lasts, are carved by hand. This is where the fit of every shoe is decided. Every width. Every size. This is the step I obsessed over for 20 years.
After drying, the sole is mounted.
After a final quality check, the shoes are packed and shipped for you.
Two to three pairs a day per artisan. There is no shortcut when you are making wool shoes by hand.
Forty seconds inside the workshop.
Buying yak wool in China. The ECCO order.
By 2010, I had got in touch with the owner of ECCO, Dieter Kasprzak. Shortly after, we had an order for several thousand woolen felted shoes. I went to China and bought yak wool. ECCO supplied the yak hide for the soles.
By the end of that year, we had orders from the German brand Rhode too. 100 people in Kathmandu had work. We were making money for the first time.
We started paying extra benefits. We paid school tuition for our workers' children. We registered as Fair Trade.
Buying yak wool in China. The ECCO order.
"This is what we built. These are the people."
Our team in Satungal, around 2014. About 100 people worked at the workshop at its peak.
In a matter of weeks, we lost both ECCO and Rhode. I called Kathmandu and told the team I had lost our two biggest customers.
Their response:
"Don't worry. We'll manage. We'll keep working for local orders. We'll wait until you find a new customer."
I found a partnership with the Danish brand Green Comfort, and that kept the production line running. But the orders weren't big enough to cover what it cost us to run a workshop with 100 people in Kathmandu.
So I did something most people would call crazy. I bought more shoes from the workshop than I could sell, and I put the extras into stock. I was betting that next month would be the month my own brand sales would catch up. They never did. I bet wrong, month after month, year after year.
I paid the workshop out of my own pocket for years. Then out of borrowed pockets. A friend invested in me on the same bet. He lost his money too.
I knew exactly what the future could look like if the bet ever paid off. A wool upper bonded to a real rubber sole. A shoe that fit every foot. A workshop that paid its own way. I just had to keep the wheels turning long enough to get there.
In 2017, in the middle of all this, I proved something. I had been chasing one idea since the booth in Düsseldorf 13 years earlier. What if you could fuse a real rubber sole directly to a wool upper, with no glue and no stitching in between? In 2017, in the workshop, I made it work. I held the shoe in my hands.
The tooling to make it at scale cost more than I had. The dream had to wait again.
2017. The direct injection tool. It worked.
2017. The direct injection tool. It worked.
2020 · BANKRUPTCY
In 2020, I was close to break even. Not close enough. The cash ran out.
I had a promise to keep, and a team in Kathmandu depending on me. I tried until I had nothing left to try with.
"Easy now. I try to do good but I am no Mother Theresa."
I sold what I owned. I kept ordering shoes I couldn't sell, hoping the next month would be the one. The next month never came.
"I never gave up until I had absolutely no options. A lot of people would have simply cut their losses long before I did."
Betterfelt was sold to other people. I lost the company, the brand, and the workshop I had spent 13 years building.
But the skills did not die with the workshop.
Act III · The Return
For three years, I took temporary jobs in Denmark. Different industries, different skills. I kept hoping to get back in business.
Every evening, I went home and thought about wool shoes.
I decided to try again.
"The reason I made Wool2fit is because I got the chance. I still wanted to make the best possible shoes from woolen uppers and rubber soles."
Carsten Christensen and I in Kathmandu. Co-founding Wool2fit.
Carsten Christensen and I in Kathmandu. Co-founding Wool2fit.
The Wool2fit collection. Mine.
In October 2024, I bought out my last partner. From that day, Wool2fit has been mine alone. No outside investors. No outside vision. Just the freedom to build the shoe I have always wanted to build.
The Wool2fit collection. Mine.
Many of the people I trained at Betterfelt now run their own small wool shoe production units across Nepal. The workshop I built is gone. The hands I trained are still in Kathmandu, making wool shoes for me. The hands that make every Wool2fit shoe are hands I have known for 17 years.
"The workshop has been part of my life for 22 years. It survived three companies. It is still here."
The dream from Düsseldorf, finally.
20 years ago, in a 9 square meter booth at a German trade fair, I touched a Crocs sole and saw exactly what kind of shoe I wanted to build for the rest of my life. A wool upper. A real rubber sole. A fit that worked for the foot you actually have.
I have wide feet myself. From my first years at Glerups, I noticed pinky toes pushing out the sides of the shoes. I knew exactly why. One width can never fit every foot. Nobody complained loudly enough back then, so I let it slide. 20 years went by, and I never forgot.
When I started Wool2fit, the very first thing I fixed was the fit.
I found a study, the largest of its kind, that had measured 1.2 million real feet across North America, Europe, and Asia. I used that dataset to design a brand new set of lasts from scratch.
Three lasts per size. Narrow, Medium, Wide.
Built on barefoot principles. No heel spring. Proper room for the toes to spread the way they are shaped to spread.
101mm · 104mm · 107mm. Three lasts per size.
Shown for EU 42. Width varies by size. The quiz calculates yours exactly.
Today we design our lasts in 3D and print them for testing before production.
And the rubber sole. The one I dreamed about in Düsseldorf, the one I proved was possible in 2017 and couldn't afford to mass-produce. The dream is still moving forward.
"I have already started forming alliances with other companies and talented people to develop future generations of woolshoes, with outstanding comfort and a healthy walk in common."
This shoe is the dream that survived three companies.
Thomas
This is the shoe he spent 22 years learning how to build.
Three widths per size, designed from 1.2 million foot scans. 3D printed lasts. Rubber soles fused directly to wool uppers. Sold direct. No middlemen. 100-day free returns. 2-year warranty.
Find out which width is yours.
100-day free returns · Free shipping · 2-year warranty