EXCLUSIVE: Fashion For Good Partners With Adidas, On and More Brands to Make Footwear’s Supply Chain More Sustainable

Fashion for Good is going all-in on solving footwear’s waste problem.

The Amsterdam-based platform for sustainable innovation is rolling out a new initiative designed to help shoe brands and retailers make their sourcing and manufacturing processes more environmentally-friendly. Working with its existing shoe-focused partners like Adidas, Inditex, On, PVH Corp., Reformation, Target and Zalando, Fashion For Good has identified four main channels in the shoe-making process that can benefit from sustainability innovation. They are: materials, design, traceability and end of use (disassembly, recycling and sorting waste).

According to Fashion for Good’s managing director Katrin Ley, it’s the right time to start leaning more heavily into footwear sustainability after the group had spent the last seven years mainly focusing on apparel innovation.

“In footwear, you have all these different components, it’s highly technical,” Ley said, explaining one reason the fashion industry may have focused more heavily on apparel sustainability. “I think now, policymakers are also looking into footwear step-by-step. And what’s even more interesting is that many of the sports brands that really saw this as their super exclusive competitive advantage — the innovation side and the material side — are now realizing it just makes sense to join forces and work collaboratively.”

Since 2017, Fashion For Good has served as the industry’s connector between sustainability innovations and the brands, retailers and manufacturers that can benefit from them. For example, the platform has helped various brands implement textile-to-textile recycling programs and has helped them source options for recycled natural fibers. Last year, Fashion For Good launched a pilot program to test and validate a footwear recycling process from innovator FastFeetGrinded with some of its brand partners. Fashion For Good’s newest effort will expand upon this progress and target other areas of the shoe-making process that can benefit from new innovations.

Adidas, which has partnered with Fashion For Good for more than six years on various sustainable innovation initiatives, will be one the brands that benefits from the innovations that come from this project. In a statement, Adidas’s senior vice president of product operations and sustainability Sigrid Buehrle said that Adidas is eager to expand its progress with Fashion For Good in the footwear category.

“Currently, there is a limited portfolio of low-impact materials which also meet the necessary performance requirements that are also scalable,” Buehrle said. “We hope this initiative will help overcome some of these hurdles.”

In addition to reaching new brand partners to assist, Fashion For Good is also looking for innovators in the shoe sustainability space to offer their expertise to the program.

“There is a real gap on the innovation side, as it relates to materials and recycling,” Ley said. “There might be folks that we haven’t been able to scout because they’re in some R&D lab and haven’t even thought of footwear yet. And we want to also mobilize other actors and other brands to join forces on this work.”