Open the box of a pair of Myrqvist shoes and the brand reads as thoroughly Swedish: a Stockholm studio, a Scandinavian name, the clean, restrained lines that the Nordics have made into a design language. Turn the shoe over, though, and the story bends south. Every pair the company sells is handmade in northern Portugal. Myrqvist is a Swedish brand built, quite literally, on Portuguese craft — and it is far from alone.
Founded in 2016 by Sebastian Öhrn, Myrqvist set out to sell Goodyear-welted dress shoes and leather sneakers at a fraction of traditional luxury prices. The model that makes the maths work is geographic: design and brand sit in Stockholm, while production is handed to experienced artisans in the north of Portugal, with whom the company has built long-standing relationships — mainly one factory for dress shoes and another for casual styles. The leathers come from blue-chip European tanneries (calfskin from the Hermès-owned du Puy tannery in France, suede from Charles F. Stead in England), but the assembly — the part that decides whether a welted shoe lasts a decade — happens in Portugal. The brand has since opened a store in New York; the supply chain still runs through the Portuguese shoe belt.
The visible edge of a €1.7 billion machine
Myrqvist is the consumer-facing tip of something much larger. Portugal is one of the most internationalised footwear producers in the world: in 2025 the sector exported around 68 million pairs worth roughly €1,718 million, up 1.8% in volume and 0.8% in value on the year, according to industry association APICCAPS. More than 90% of national output is sold abroad, reaching 174 countries, and Europe is the engine — European sales grew 3.3% to about €1,420 million. Portuguese shoes long ago stopped competing on price; the country sells the second most expensive footwear in the world by average export price, behind only Italy.
That premium, flexible, design-literate manufacturing base — clustered around São João da Madeira, Felgueiras and Guimarães in the north — is precisely what a certain kind of Nordic brand needs. Scandinavian footwear labels tend to sell on quality, longevity and provenance rather than fast-fashion volume, and they care visibly about where and how things are made. Portugal lets them say “handmade in Europe” with a straight face, at a cost and minimum-order flexibility that Italy rarely matches and that Asia cannot reconcile with the sustainability story.
Why the Nordics keep coming south
Myrqvist is the clearest case, but the pattern repeats. Anny Nord, the Swedish women’s footwear label, crafts its shoes in Portugal and Spain from European leather, often with recycled materials — the same near-shored, sustainability-forward formula. Across the Nordic direct-to-consumer wave, “designed in Sweden/Denmark, made in Portugal” has quietly become a default. For the brands, Portugal offers proximity (two to three days’ freight versus weeks from Asia), shared EU regulation, smaller production runs, and a workforce that can execute Goodyear welting and hand-finishing that mass factories elsewhere have abandoned.
For Portugal, the relationship is the underreported half of the corridor. The Nordic market is small in absolute terms — it will never replace Germany, France or the United States for Portuguese exporters — but it is high-margin, design-driven and loyal, exactly the customer a premium manufacturer wants. Footwear consistently ranks among the Portuguese sectors that export most to Scandinavia, alongside automotive components, textiles, food and wine, and it does so by supplying brands the end customer assumes are entirely Nordic.
The corridor read
This is Direction B of the Portugal ↔ Scandinavia corridor at its most concrete: not a headline acquisition or a nine-figure energy deal, but thousands of pairs of shoes a year in which Portuguese value is invisible to the buyer and indispensable to the brand. The strategic question for Portuguese makers is whether to stay contract manufacturers — reliable, anonymous, margin-squeezed — or to climb the value chain toward their own brands and direct Nordic relationships, the way cork, wine and olive oil producers have begun to.
Expect the near-shoring logic to strengthen. EU rules on supply-chain due diligence, product durability and recycled content all tilt the field toward European-made footwear, and the Nordic consumer is among the most willing in Europe to pay for it. The brands on the box will keep sounding Scandinavian. The hands that make the shoes will keep being Portuguese — and the smartest Portuguese factories will spend the next few years deciding how much of that value they intend to keep.