In 2022, footwear and life-style model Vivobarefoot bought a document 773,000 pairs of sneakers, however when you ask co-founder and Chief Ecosystem Officer Galahad Clark about his imaginative and prescient, he’ll inform you that above gross sales, the model has far more far-reaching targets: human and planetary well being.
I not too long ago sat down with Galahad to debate Vivobarefoot’s regenerative enterprise initiatives that embody aggressive sustainability targets, a recycle and restore platform, upcoming bespoke scan-to-print footwear, and why the model believes that trying to indigenous cultures will present us the best way to enhance fashionable footwear design.
Learn extra from our dialogue under.
Christopher Marquis: Inform us a bit of about your background. The final title sounds acquainted. How did you get into barefoot sneakers?
Galahad Clark: My household’s heritage lies deeply rooted within the footwear trade – we’re seven generations of cobblers from Glastonbury, Somerset England, courting again to 1825. Whereas Clarks Sneakers stands as one of many oldest and most acknowledged footwear companies on this planet, I started a private journey to revolutionize the best way society perceives sneakers by the arrival of Vivobarefoot.
Along with my cousin and co-founder, Asher Clark, we launched into a worldwide odyssey, immersing ourselves on this planet of shoemaking. We sought knowledge from each modern shoemakers and indigenous craftsmen, searching for to soak up their information and strategies. All through our travels, a paramount precept crystallized—the essence of barefoot design and the inherent goal of footwear is safeguarding our ft from cuts, chilly, and warmth. We consider essentially the most extraordinary piece of know-how ever included into sneakers is the human foot itself. Thus, our model pivoted round this profound realization, liberating ft to maneuver freely as supposed by Mom Nature.
Marquis: What does a regenerative enterprise mannequin seem like at Vivobarefoot? What are you doing as a frontrunner to influence social change?
Clark: At Vivobarefoot, we’re dedicated to being a regenerative enterprise each in and out. This implies our enterprise is one which helps the connection to pure techniques for the folks that work in our firm, those that make our merchandise and the folks that put on them. We wish to foster a working surroundings the place folks really feel welcome to deliver their entire selves to work and subsequently are in a position to uncover extra of their pure artistic spark. I consider this humanness invitations innovation, collaboration and purposefulness into the guts of on a regular basis conferences and decision-making. Our tradition of agility and empowered entrepreneurialism permits failures to be repeatedly reworked into learnings and reduces the burden of forms.
Wanting outdoors, we aren’t afraid to shake up the established order and revise ingrained, ordinary approaches to commerce. This implies swimming ever extra firmly towards the tide to attain substantial social and environmental influence. In 2020 we achieved B Corp certification and we’re going above and past the same old 3-year B-Corp evaluation by conducting self-assessments yearly.
We additionally consider in worth chains over provide chains. We provide full transparency by our newly launched Digital Worth Chains Map about precisely who we’re working with, the place they’re, and the way they’re performing towards Vivobarefoot requirements. Moreover, we created an in-house influence fund, the Livebarefoot Fund, which is an incubation hub for social and environmental initiatives that goal to pioneer regeneration options. We obtain this by driving analysis, innovation and motion in footwear, experiences and neighborhood engagement.
Marquis: Why do you consider historical knowledge is the inspiration for the way forward for human and planetary well being? Are you able to inform us extra about your tasks with indigenous communities?
Clark: We’ve got constructed our fashionable life on the assumption that we’re separate from nature. Consequently, our sedentary, cushioned, poisonous existence is making us and our planet sick. Our base fulcrum at Vivobarefoot is the notion that we’re nature and nature is us, so as a substitute of preventing nature we have to let nature heal us and the best way we consider we are able to embrace human nature is to “rewild” our lives.
We’ve got traveled the world on the hunt for the right shoe, and alongside that journey we had been launched to a few of final persistence hunters left on earth based mostly within the
Kalahari Desert of Africa, the Ju’/hoansi bushmen, artisan from the Saami neighborhood in Finland, the Mongolian feltmakers, the moccsain makers in Canda and cobblers in India. We started studying and collaborating with the cobblers who’ve been making sneakers for millennia, and gained great perception into how we may greatest simplify our designs, and enhance the pure perform and environment-specific efficiency in all our sneakers.
We devoted ourselves to working with the Ju’/hoansi tribe to create 2,000 sandal run that will probably be launched this summer season making a grassroots enterprise the place the income are reinvested straight again to the local people. Reviving this crucial historical craftsmanship with the San in addition to different indigenous communities world wide will stay core to our ongoing indigenous advocacy efforts.
Marquis: As you already know, numerous trade gamers have made lofty guarantees with their sustainability platforms however are lagging of their supply of circularity. What do you see missing within the trade’s efforts to deal with environmental considerations? Is there sufficient transparency?
Clark: The reality is, no sneakers are really regenerative and anybody who claims in any other case shouldn’t be being clear. At Vivobarefoot, we make the most of a Vmatrix instrument to internally assess the sustainability of our design rules and rating the whole lot from longevity to supplies and end-of-life potential. All of our sneakers are fabricated from biofabricated, recycled and pure supplies and we’re always engaged on methods to make footwear that’s extra simply recyclable repairable or biodegradable.
In 2024 we’re tackling our largest innovation but after we launch VIVOBIOME within the US. The undertaking will goal to unravel the overproduction and manufacturing waste that’s widespread within the months-long cycle it usually takes to supply a pair of sneakers with a radical scan-to-print round footwear system that can reimagine how footwear is created. Made-to-be-remade, the footwear will probably be made person-by-person, foot-by-foot, out of native supplies.
Marquis: Inform us extra about your e-commerce platform, Revivo. What can customers do to make a distinction at dwelling?
Clark: Yearly 22 billion pairs of footwear are dumped into landfills.
We wish to try to fight this in an actual manner, so we created our recommerce platform, Revivo. Launched in July 2020, it’s the first repair-for-resale web site launched by a footwear model. On Revivo, prospects should purchase professionally refurbished Vivos at 20-50% off the unique value. Worn Vivos are cleaned, sanitized, after which checked in order that any faults are repaired by a educated craftsperson earlier than they’re boxed and able to be bought. Which means prospects that store on Revivo obtain secondhand merchandise which might be licensed as refurbished by consultants, not like on resale marketplaces. Revivo sells to greater than 50 international locations and affords greater than 15,000 merchandise at any given time, many from earlier collections which might be not out there on the Vivobarefoot web site.
Revivo affords a worldwide take-back program that permits prospects to ship again worn Vivos to make sure that they don’t find yourself in landfill. Whereas we love seeing this round economic system applied by plenty of manufacturers lately, the footwear trade continues to be catching up. We’re most likely most happy with the huge of development in repairs we’re already seeing, with practically 31,000 final 12 months. So the extra Vivos which might be returned again to us (at the moment we see 48% return price), the extra we are able to restore and maintain them away from landfills.