Say "Birkenstock" and most Americans flash on granola-eating hippie nature lovers who are (to put it mildly) not slaves to fashion. Look again. Birkenstock's new Footprints Architect Collection is winning converts among chic, young urbanites.

To be sure, Birkenstock has had its loyal followers ever since dress designer Margot Fraser discovered the German footwear at a Bavarian health spa in 1966. Impressed by its comfort, she opted to become Birkenstock's exclusive distributor in the United States.

Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, however, Fraser found that traditional shoe stores considered the wide curved-sole sandals simply too ugly to carry, so she peddled them to health food stores where the granola-and-sprouts crowd welcomed their orthopedic, eco-friendly design.

That mellow counter-culture image has been hard to shake, even though Birkenstock USA now offers some 500 shoe products, sold through 200 licensed independent retailers as well as its own brand-named stores. Outdoor lovers embraced Birkenstock, but the brand never caught on with city dwellers. So in 2000, Birkenstock set out to attract a broader audience by introducing shoes and boots designed for an active urban lifestyle. "Overall, we wanted to expand the brand and have sustainable growth," explains Patrick Hull, Birkenstock's vice president of marketing. "We were finding our customer demographic was getting older and there was a vacancy in the 20-30 age range. We wanted to develop products to reach them that would not destroy our reputation as a brand, but keep it consistent with our heritage of wellness and comfort."

To do that, Birkenstock chose fuseproject, a San Francisco cutting-edge industrial design and branding firm headed by Yves Béhar. What drew them to Béhar was a "Design Afoot" exhibition in 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which invited designers to create their vision of the shoe of the future. Béhar's entry was a "Learning Shoe" with an embedded microchip that gathered information about the wearer's walking style over time, so the store could convert the data into a final customized product.

The originality of this ergonomic thinking appealed to Birkenstock executives who went to see the show. Later, in a meeting at Béhar's studio, they decided "he was a perfect fit," says Hull. "He understood the marketplace, was very aware of our brand, and was one of the target customers we were trying to reach."

While Birkenstock wanted a new contemporary look, it was adamant about retaining its signature footbed with its roomy toe-box-the very feature that made the shoes look so clunky-and adhering to "green design" principles, i.e., that all materials be natural, recyclable and biodegradable.

For fuseproject, that required looking at the assignment from the inside out. Instead of starting the design process by considering looks and aesthetic directions, they had to work around a predetermined form. Béhar says that they began by digitizing the existing lasts (wooden blocks that determine the fit of the shoes), and from there they reshaped the insole and added comfort and stabilizing features (heel pad and front pad).

Another requirement that Birkenstock placed on the designers was that all technology and new material applications had to satisfy the environmentally stringent manufacturing standards of Germany and the European Union, where Birkenstock shoes are made. German environmental laws, particularly, are much stricter than in the U.S., and although Birkenstock has always adhered to a recyclable tradition, the company was determined to set an example by showing that green design could produce modern, elegant products. As a result, the design had to consider the entire life cycle of the shoe from the source of materials and the reduction of waste to energy-efficient manufacturing and the repair, reuse and recyclability of the finished product.

What fuseproject came up with was an insole made of a renewable mixture of recycled cork and natural rubber, lined with suede colored with natural vegetable dyes. The insole is repairable at any Birkenstock store. A long-lasting biodegradable polyurethane gel pad is inserted into the insole for comfort and detachable in case the insole is recycled. The sole is made of biodegradable thermoplastic polyurethane and cork-latex inserts.

It was only after appropriate solutions for all these issues were worked out that fuseproject could begin addressing the actual look of the shoes. Béhar says, "We started shaping and sculpting the shoe in a way that would lighten up its visual bulk." This was no easy task, since the very qualities that make Birkenstock so good for your feet also contributed to its gangly shape. "We didn't violate the boundaries of what Birkenstock believes is comfortable," Béhar stresses. "But what we did was break up the shapes into smaller shapes.

We sculpted the shoe very close to the insole that we created and essentially designed a product that looks more dynamic and fluid and much lighter."

During the process of designing the shoe, fuseproject thought simultaneously about the brand positioning of the new Footprints Architect Collection. "At fuse-project, we have integrated the process of branding into the process of industrial design," explains Béhar. The fuseproject staff includes a copywriter/strategist "who helps to analyze the notions of the brand and extract the right stories and words we need to work around in the industrial design process" and a branding and graphic design group that gets involved very early on.

"We don't design just the product, we really design the brand around the product," says Béhar. "Because we had that approach, we were able to rally all the players [at Birkenstock] around the ideas first before we got into the directional stuff. Then we were able to build the entire strategy based on the visuals and forms. Everything became very cohesive as far as creating the attributes of the brand, creating the product from the inside out, and then creating the communications."

For Béhar, the brand originated with the product itself. Béhar was intent on allowing the shoes to tell the story of what the new collection was about. "To be a good storyteller, we try to bring things up to the surface- expose them and reveal them," he says. The peek-a-boo glimpses of the underlayers-the cork and the cushy gel pad ball in the heel-suggest what makes the shoe special and add interest to the styling. "We felt it was important that the customer be aware that Birkenstock put that much effort into the products," Béhar comments.

All together, fuseproject produced 10 styles for women, unveiled in June, and nine styles for men, introduced in September. Over the summer, Birkenstock launched the new Footprints Architect Collection at private events in sophisticated urban locations, including the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Kartell Museo in New York's Soho. The choice of these trendy sites was quite deliberate, allowing Birkenstock to link its name to avant-garde art and fashion venues and further separate its identity from its early laid-back hippie persona. For the launch events, Béhar constructed an awesome architectural piece-a gigantic chandelier made of some 80 dangling Birkenstock shoes. The Footprints website (www.footprints.com) too has the edgy feel of a rock video. The high-tech impact has set off a buzz in the circles that Birkenstock wants to reach.

So have the shoes themselves. The Footprints Architect Collection is featured in the exhibition "The National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now" at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. It has also been selected among the best designs of 2003 by Business Week/IDSA and given the "Best Casual Lifestyle" product award at the winter 2003 femme show, "Magic International" East Coast Fashion Group trade-show. Even more important to Birkenstock, young urbanites are buying. The bright red maryjane-styled shoe model, called Avila, has already sold out. People are beginning to reconsider what the brand is all about and discovering that style and comfort are possible in a single package.

"Health, wellness, quality of life-that's what this organization was founded on," reiterates Birkenstock's Patrick Hull. Now an employee-owned company, Birkenstock still adheres to these principles. "We want to maintain and grow that by developing innovative products that meet our brand heritage," says Hull.

Fortunately, Hull adds, "Comfort products have definitely become stylish. When people have to be on their feet all day and their feet bother them, it affects their whole life. More people accept that and are buying more comfortable footwear." With a contemporary, new look, Birkenstock feels it is first in line to satisfy the growing demand.