Meet the Shoe Brand Bringing ‘South African-ness’ to the U.S. Through Atlanta

When Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens pulled on a pair of custom-stitched leather “vellies” this week in Cape Town, he was stepping into a 300-year tradition while making strides toward the city’s future ties with South Africa.

Veldskoen, the most prominent maker of the country’s signature suede boot, sees itself as the caretaker of “the oldest shoe brand in the world you’ve never heard of,” says Nick Dreyer, who co-founded the brand after a chip-on-the-shoulder moment in 2016.

While “veldskoen” — or “field shoe” — is the general term for the shoes first worn by tribes of the South African bush, the company is now taking the brand to the world as a symbol of the Rainbow Nation’s unity in diversity.

The company set up its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta last year, gaining a more solid foothold in a market it has always seen as vital for spreading the “sole of South Africa” abroad.

Mr. Dickens visited Veldskoen’s museum and headquarters along with U.S. Ambassador Reuben Brigety, who hosted the mayor and a delegation on a reciprocal mission of Atlanta Phambili, an initiative the U.S. Embassy in South Africa launched in March with a roadshow bringing high-level investors and government officials to Atlanta. The two men donned custom-made Veldskoens with the bright colors of the Atlanta Phambili logo etched into their outer ankles.

Stars Aligned

Veldskoen found a hospitable landing pad in Atlanta independently of the embassy’s efforts, but the emphasis on its new U.S. hometown was a welcome bit of serendipity, Mr. Dreyer told Global Atlanta in an interview after a reporter visited the headquarters during a June trip to South Africa.

“It’s just amazing how the stars align,” he said.

Veldskoen gravitated toward Atlanta for a variety of reasons, only a few of which were directly related to dollars and cents.

“The truth is, we just liked Atlanta,” Mr. Dreyer said. “It just felt very familiar to us.”

That could be because one of his earliest exposures to the city was at a brai, a South African barbecue, held in honor of the city’s Major League Rugby team, RugbyATL, which has since decamped to Los Angeles.

Ironically, the team was a significant reason that Veldskoen, a sponsor of South Africa’s world-champion national rugby team, the Springboks, decided that Atlanta would provide a better platform for growth than California.

“Our U.S. entry was riddled with ambition and luck. We really wanted to go to the U.S. early on in Veldskoen. We realized that it was the biggest market and we had to play there,” Mr. Dreyer said.

In 2019, Veldskoen landed an investment from the company behind Slyde Handboards, a Shark Tank startup backed by Mark Cuban and actor/investor Ashton Kutcher. The investors bought 50 percent of Veldskoen’s fledgling U.S. operation, which began operating out of the Slyde headquarters in San Clemente, Calif.

But as Veldskoen grew, their strategies diverged, especially when e-commerce exploded during the pandemic, extending the brand’s reach into 32 countries.

Utilizing the infrastructure of a like-minded niche brand in the U.S. seemed like a good idea at the outset, but the time difference between South Africa and California was a challenge, and it soon became evident that Veldskoen needed to control its own destiny. That led to a “very friendly and amicable parting of ways where we in fact bought them out,” Mr. Dreyer said.

In 2023, Mr. Dreyer stepped out of the CEO role, making room for chief operating officer Driekie Zondagh to step up and lead the global business as he pursued the U.S. expansion.

“We’ve taken back the day-to-day running of our U.S. business, because we believe the best people to tell a South African story and sell a South African product anywhere, is the home team,” Ms. Zondagh said in a news release at the time.

Atlanta “ticked a lot of boxes” as the company looked for a new home in early 2023, Mr. Dreyer said: a re-established nonstop flight to Cape Town, a slim six-hour time difference, a healthy South African diaspora, and the (ill-fated) rugby team.

“We then decided almost instinctively that Atlanta is the place we should go,” Mr. Dreyer said.

The company is now operated out of a shared office at the Cobb County headquarters of Valor Hospitality Partners and is seeking to establish a distribution center in Buford.

A “hero space,” such as the one Mr. Dickens visited in an industrial corner of Cape Town, will only come after the brand is better established in the market, Mr. Dreyer said.

Olympic Origins

Veldskoen emerged from a conversation between Mr. Dreyer and co-founder Ross Zondagh (Mr. Dreyer’s longtime best friend and the husband of now-CEO Driekie Zondagh). It was 2016, and they’d just watched South Africa’s Olympic delegation trotted out at the Rio de Janeiro opening ceremonies in dull, ill-fitting track suits.

“We felt let down,” Mr. Dreyer said.

As they wondered how the team could have better represented South Africa’s creativity and vibrancy, they also pondered which product they would have used to create an iconic look. It occurred to them that the veldskoen, first manufactured in the Western Cape three centuries earlier, might be the ticket.

“It’s touched everybody— there is not a person in South Africa that doesn’t know what a veldskoen is,” Mr. Dreyer said.

But how could they make a mundane boot cool?

Mr. Dreyer had purchased some Cole Haan brogues in the U.S. that incorporated a colorful sole thanks to a collaboration with Nike. What if they tried that with veldskoens? He commissioned a designer from one of his earlier businesses to Photoshop each color of the South African flag onto the laces and soles of the plain boots. The company was off and running.

Custodians of the African Excellence

Veldskeon execs take great pains to point out that they don’t own the veldskoen name, but instead are heirs to its storied history.

In fact, many new purveyors of veldskoen boots have popped up since the brand started, a fact the company celebrates — as long as the shoes are made in South Africa by South African workers and not by imitators from Asia.

“We’re trying to make a bigger pizza, we’re not trying to take a bigger slice,” Mr. Dreyer says.

Outside South Africa, Veldskoen has trademarked the brand, in part because it sees itself as the global custodian of a word that embodies “South African-ness,” a know-it-when-you-see-it blend of creativity, diversity, hospitality and resiliency in the face of adversity.

It’s that story that Veldskoen is aiming to amplify globally, to the benefit of the 1,000 South Africans depending on the company’s value chain, from the farmers who raise the cows, to tanneries that finish the leather and the multi-generational factory making the boots in Durban on the country’s opposite coast.

While nearly 30 people work at the Cape Town headquarters, about 66 people touch each pair of hand-stitched Veldskoens, says Freya Bell, the company’s head of public relations, who happens to be Mr. Dreyer’s wife.

“We are trying to build a brand and educate people to buy more locally produced shoes,” Ms. Bell told Global Atlanta. “The more shoes people buy in South Africa, from us or from another company that uses the same manufacturer, that money stays in the country. There is absolutely no point in us having a Chinese supplier, because it’s not bringing anything into the country, except for a salary for these 26 people here.”

The U.S. expansion is also being undertaken with South African livelihoods in mind, said Mr. Dreyer, and the company is watching closely the conversation in the U.S. around the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

AGOA, as the U.S. law is known, enables many African products to access the U.S. market tariff- and quota-free. It is set to be renewed next year but faces an uncertain future with the return of President-elect Donald Trump, who is threatening blanket tariffs and recently called out the BRICS nations, of which South Africa is a member, for efforts to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Veldskoen, while hitching its wagon to South African positivity, doesn’t involve itself in politics.

“Whether our leadership makes decisions that are uncomfortable in a geopolitical sense is completely and utterly out of our control, and we very clearly position ourselves inside the room that does nothing but celebrate everything that is good about South Africa,” Mr. Dreyer said.

That’s also the hope behind Atlanta Phambili, an initiative the outgoing U.S. ambassador, Mr. Brigety, hopes has sufficient momentum to last well beyond his tenure, which ends Jan. 10.

Economic linkages like Veldskoen’s U.S. expansion will be critical to fostering that stickiness.

During his trip to Johannesburg, Mr. Dickens joined Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank, to unveil the Atlanta Phambili pledge, a call to action for “to mobilize stakeholders across both nations to deepen collaboration in trade, investment, and entrepreneurship,” according to the mayor’s office.

“The commitment of the South African government and its people has been vital in shaping this initiative,” Mr. Dickens said in a release.  “I look forward to building on these foundations for years to come.”