Shane Anselmi, Managing Director

“My grandfather, Guglielmo (Bill), was an Italian immigrant who settled in the King Country in the 1930s. He worked hard and became a very successful farmer but was also quite entrepreneurial and after helping a friend in a business deal in 1948, ended up with three small King Country shoe stores. My father Tony, who was one of six children, much preferred working in the shoe stores to the farm. So, in the 1950s, he bought the stores from his father and grew the company – opening more discount shoe stores, as well as a shoe factory called Fabia, that became one of the country’s biggest.

Having spent my school holidays on my uncle’s farms, I wanted to follow in their footsteps and become a farmer. But two years into an Agricultural Degree at Massey I realised the farming life wasn’t for me! I got involved in Dad’s shoe stores, called Shoetown, in the late 1980s and, not seeing a future selling discount shoes out of high rent malls, came up with the Overland concept in 1990.“