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A pair of blue Birkenstock Arizona sandals

Rob Younger is handing Birkenstock of San Diego to his son and his longtime manager

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Birkenstock Arizona sandals. Photo: TheHumanKite via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Rob Younger has run Birkenstock of San Diego Stores since he was 20. Now 70, he is handing the business to two people: his oldest son, Kevin O’Neill, and Matt Palkovic, the general manager who has helped run the stores for more than two decades.

The handoff is happening gradually, O’Neill told CBS 8’s Jeff Zevely in a September report from the company’s La Mesa store. “I have been taking over responsibilities from him gradually over the years and you feel the pressure start to mount,” he said.

How it started

Younger got into the business while he was in college, after meeting Margot Fraser, the president of Birkenstock USA. Fraser, a German-born dressmaker, had started importing the sandals to California in the 1960s after finding they eased her own foot pain, and she built the brand’s early American following largely through health food stores and small independent shops.

Fraser later turned her company over to its employees, completing an employee stock ownership plan in 2002, and Birkenstock USA was sold to the Birkenstock family in Germany in 2007. She died in 2017. The independent retailers she supplied in the early years, including Younger’s, were part of how the sandals spread across the country long before they showed up in department stores and fashion magazines.

Younger opened a small storefront near San Diego State University in 1976 and kept adding locations. The family now runs eight stores in the San Diego area.

He looks back on it as hard work. “You see how hard it is,” he told CBS 8.

Over those years the brand itself changed a lot. Birkenstocks went from a comfort shoe with a narrow following to something closer to a fashion staple, with several waves of popularity along the way. In 2023, the German parent company went public on the New York Stock Exchange. The San Diego stores stayed independent and family owned through all of it.

Two successors, two roles

The plan splits the business between family and operating experience. O’Neill represents the family line. Palkovic has been the company’s general manager since January 2000, according to his professional profile, which puts him in that job for more than 26 years.

Younger’s wife, Melissa, gave him the credit for getting the stores this far. “Only about two percent of small businesses make it to this length of time, and we are doing great because of Rob,” she said.

She described the staff and the regulars in similar terms. “It’s a family. It’s a big family,” she said. The stores have had their share of famous customers, she added, including Conan O’Brien and Luke Wilson.

Who buys sandals now

Younger said the customer base keeps renewing itself, which helps explain how a single-brand retailer has lasted this long in one region.

“That is what we see all day long: young people wearing them and moms and dads,” he said.

The company’s own website has a “Founder Pick” page where Younger writes about the shoes he wears now. These days, it says, he reaches for Birkenstock’s Melbourne PRO, a laced work sneaker, about as often as his sandals.

The long tenure runs both ways. Younger has been selling the same brand for half a century, and Palkovic has managed the stores for more than half of that span, which gives the next owners a set of supplier relationships, staff and regular customers that most new owners would have to build from scratch.

The stores marked their founding year in September with a monthlong customer event, including prizes and free customization of sandals.

Asked to sum up the business, Younger did not talk about the product first. “It’s been a wonderful ride; the product’s great, but it’s also the people,” he said.

Store locations and hours are listed on the company’s website.

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