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Tracing The Path Of Sustainable Luxury Back To 1970s Peru

November 21, 2019
How Circular Sourcing Powers Renewable Retail There plenty of firms, big and small, in the shoes and apparel sector that are “going green” to some extent. But new shoe start-up Thousand Fell is taking the quest a bit more seriously than most, with a fully recyclable shoe and a vision for what co-founders Stuart Ahlum and Chloe Songer call circular sourcing that cuts keeps old shoes out of landfills. Greening the apparel industry has been something of a growing theme in recent years - as clothing, accessories and shoe firms large and small have made pledges to incorporate recycled materials, or clear up their supply chain or commit to using sustainable sourcing. How much and how seriously any given brand takes these greening efforts is largely individual. Some brands are legitimately built on and around green concepts that they adhere to with near religious fervor. Others… are perhaps less genuinely invested in building a clearly retail environment that is friendly to the planet’s long term health, and more interested in the branding effect and good PR that go along with being green. The founding team at recently launched shoe start-up Thousand Fell, Stuart Ahlum and Chloe Songer are decidedly of the first troop of greentailers - to the extent that they’ve largely oriented their entire supply chain around building fully recycled products. And they mean fully - in the rubber sole of ever Thousand Fell Shoe there is a set of instructions stamped in small letters - “Please return for recycling.” And they dont’ mean in general, Thousand Fell offers their customers free shipping to return their old shoes once they are approaching the end of their wearable life. Once returned, Thousand Fell disassembles the old shoe and reuses the component parts to rebuild a new shoe. The customer who sent the shoe back, gets a $20 credit toward their next pair. The brand calls it “circular sourcing” and while they are not quite the first brand to incorporate some level of circularity in their raw materials supply chain, Thousand Fell has made it a more foundational pillar of theirs than others have. A move they made, according to co-founder Chloe Songer noted, because they had to. Shoes, she noted, don't really have much a second life. Consumers have some interest in solving the problem but don't actually have much in the way of good mechanism for doing so. Some people donate old shoes, they frequently show up at clothing banks, the Goodwill and the Salvation Army - but if they show any sign of wear and tear they aren’t going to the floor she noted. They are going to a landfill where chemicals will leach out of the, reusable products like leather will rot, and where the plastics will take thousands of years to biodegrade. “Is it okay to stamp your logo on something and then have it sitting in a landfill for 1,000 years, for eight to 10 generations?” she says. “I don’t think so.” Which is not to say that building a better alternative was necessarily and easy thing to do - despite the fact that both founders saw a big need in the market for a better shoe recycling mechanism it took two years of sourcing materials and finalizing design before they has a solid concept for a simple, slip-on sneaker and a simple lace-up. The top is made from recycled soda bottles made to look like leather, the sole is made from zero-carbon rubber and the insole is made of recycled yoga mats. All three of the components, moreover, are made to be very easily separated from each other when they shoes are returned for recycling so that they can be reformatted into a new shoe- or disposed of by composting. Footwear is a challenging business - particularly on the manufacturing side and breaking in with a new idea and new set of textiles, both of Thousand Fell’s founders note, is not easy and involves a higher cost of production. But, they said, consumers aren’t blind to their environmental effects - and a not insignificant number would like to be offered a product that is easy to recycle - particularly when it is at a fairly reasonable price points. Which means the next step for this burgeoning company, is to figure out how to go greener with the product in ways the keep the product affordable for buyers. Fewer adhesive and less stitching seem to be their starting place thus far. “We want to make it really easy and kind of encouragement as a group or as a community to step up,” Songer says, noting that form what they’ve seen in beta they believe people will.

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