The original penny loafer, still made in the fjords of Norway

Aurlands builds on the legacy of Nils Tveranger, the great Norwegian shoemaker who lived and worked in the village of Aurland. In 1891, Tveranger left his native Norway for Boston, Massachusetts, where he learned to make shoes, including moccasins in the Native American style. When he returned to Norway and settled in Aurland in 1894, he opened his own shoemaking workshop.

Decades later, Tveranger combined his memory of the American moccasin with a longstanding local shoe to create what we now call the penny loafer. Aurlands makes these original penny loafers today, in Aurland, in the oldest running shoe factory in Norway. Though penny loafers now travel the world, from fjords to campus quads, their ancestral home will always be Aurland.