Susanne Birkenstock says she may move to London, blaming a vendetta for the collapse of her footwear business.

“There is a fully fledged campaign against us here and we think we will have to operate largely out of London,” Dieter Kaltwasser, her business partner, told The Times.

Lumpy, cork-soled Birkenstock sandals were once compulsory footwear for ecologically sensitive polytechnic lecturers. After Susanne Papenbrock married into the Birkenstock family at the age of 18 she spruced up the design, making it attractive to the likes of Leonardo diCaprio and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The marriage collapsed in 2003 and the young designer set up her own rival shoe company — drawing down the ire of the family, which has been making shoes since 1774 and employs 2,000 people in Germany.

Frau Birkenstock, now 35, has been a constant thorn in the side of her former husband, Christian, and her in-laws. As part of the divorce settlement she was allowed to keep the elegant family house on the banks of the Rhine - just over the hedge from her father-in-law Karl, who could barely contain his fury at the maverick young woman. They became the neighbours from hell.

She has been fighting through the courts for the right to call her shoes by her married name and successive court judgments have restricted her right to capitalise on the Birkenstock trademark.

“There are many people called Porsche in Germany,” said a Birkenstock lawyer, “but that doesn’t mean that they have to right to go off and make sports cars”.

Now the family is close to achieving its secret goal: to drive Susanne Birkenstock’s main business out of Germany.

The immediate reason for the insolvency proceedings is a row with the distributor of Frau Birkenstock’s trendy sandals. The company claims it was misled over future sales targets and has been left with thousands of unwanted sandals. A factory in Spain is reported to be holding back deliveries because of unpaid bills.

Herr Kaltwasser said he was confident the business could avoid bankruptcy and made a success of its latest model, a sandal which has a sunken heel and is higher at the front than the back, and which, apparently, helps to improve women’s posture.

Until this latest setback, Frau Birkenstock has been a role-model for women in the male-dominated world of German business. Although she was not afraid of using her film-star looks to help to promote her sandals, she also gained a reputation for her strong management experties.

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