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Adriaen van Bommel started the family business in 1718. Six years later, his brother Christiaen joined the Breda shoemakers' guild. The archives of the shoemakers' guild do not mention in which shoemaking workshop the brothers worked. However, all points to them having run a shoemaking shop together. According to the archives, Adriaen and Christiaen worked with the same apprentice shoemakers and in 1734, after the death of their father, they took out a mortgage on the parental house together.
These two scribbles are the only sign of life stemming directly from the two brothers. The lives of these men, their time and their shoemaking business are only a vague memory. These two signatures make their existence a little less abstract.
18th and 19th century
The very first Van Bommel shoe was made on 12 December 1718. This is the day Adriaen van Bommel, at the age of 20, joined the shoemakers' guild of Breda. With the payment of the compulsory craft fee, Adriaen is henceforth an independent shoemaker. For the previous eight years, he was the apprentice of master shoemaker Bernaert Verhoeven. In the 18th century, it was common for boys to be apprenticed to their father at a young age. They worked along for a living and learned the tricks of the trade at the same time. Adriaen, however, was not apprenticed to his father. From this we can infer that his father Reynier was not a shoemaker. It is possible that master shoemaker Verhoeven needed an apprentice, and that Reynier employed his son in shoemaking for a small fee. From the archives we only found out that father Reynier was a skipper on a barge transporting dung.
Of the many hundreds of Dutch shoemaker workshops that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, only the company of the Van Bommel family still exist todays. The trade was passed down from father to son eight times over a period of more than 300 years. During this time, apart from one year of compulsory closure during the Second World War, Van Bommel produced shoes continuously. Currently, the company is run by the ninth generation of the family: Reynier, Pepijn and Floris van Bommel.
Adriaen van Bommel became a member of Breda's shoemakers' guild on 12 December 1718. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, most trades could only be carried out if you were a guild member of the respective craft. The guilds had a lot of influence on everything that happened within the profession. They set prices, enforced strict rules, established quality standards and determined who could join the profession.
The Breda city archives contain cashbooks of 'The guild of shoemakers, leather tanners and other leather workers'. The cashbooks cover the period from 1449 to 1798. The following text was found in the annual report of 1718:
This is a photo of Maria van Gijsel-Van Bommel, the great-great-great-grandmother of the current management, from 1859. The invention of photography took place a mere 20 years earlier in Paris and London. Photography in 1859 was still very complex and photographs were of poor quality. Taking a photograph took several minutes, chemicals had to be applied to a glass or copper plate shortly before shooting, and the photo plate had to be developed in a darkroom right after exposure.
The Van Bommel shoe factory ran a small grocery shop next to the factory premises until 1915. In this shop, the whole village could do their groceries. However, the shop was mainly designed to foster the forced shopping that Van Bommel imposed on its employees. Forced shopping meant that salaries were paid partly in cash and partly in goods or vouchers. Usually, these vouchers could only be redeemed in the company shop. At Van Bommel, this was the case.
Shoe production can be carried out in three ways: Manual, machine or mechanised. Until 1912, Van Bommel made its shoes manually. This was done by block workers and lap workers. A block worker placed the shoe on a rotating cobbler's block made of cast iron in front of him, leaving both hands free to work on the shoe.
The abbreviation in the name Schoenfabriek wed. J.P. van Bommel stands for: ‘Widow Johannes Peter’. At the end of the 19th century, when a woman became a widow, it was customary for her to take the name of her deceased husband as her official name. Therefore, when director Johannes Peter van Bommel died at a young age in 1887, his wife Johanna van Dinther adopted the name ‘Widow Johannes Peter van Bommel’.
The widow J.P. van Bommel who ran the shoe factory for 13 years starting in 1887 was illiterate. Johanna was born in 1842, a time when education was anything but a given. In 1907, the widow signed a document detailing the ownership of a piece of land with a cross. Below the cross it says: ‘The undersigned declare that the above cross is the signature of Wed. J.P. van Bommel, who declares that she cannot write. August and Janus van Bommel’.
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