On the outskirts of the beautiful coastal town of Swakopmund, Namibia, in the shadows of the highest sand dunes on Earth, sits the Herbert Schier shoe factory. Herbert Schier was a little boy when his German-immigrant family founded the first tannery in the country seventy-two years ago, and he still works there today. Although the tannery is now defunct, the leather workshop remains. There, a production line of eight Damara gentlemen assembles every velskoen shoe by hand. Each worker makes a different component, and the group turns out 30 pairs a day.
Pronounced "fell-skoon" and known colloquially as "vellies," the velskoen originated in the area that is now South Africa. The first examples were sewn from rawhide by members of the Dutch East India Company, inspired by the footwear of the Khoisan tribe. Two centuries later, vellies carried the Voortrekkers into the African interior on the Great Boer Trek. These days, hard-working vellies can be seen on all kinds of feet, from laborers to bush rangers to university students.
Since the Schier family first started making them in the 1930s, their version of the velskoen has become the most widely worn in Namibia.
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