San Francisco-based Allbirds has blazed the trail for planet-friendlier footwear since its launch in 2016, creating shoes out of wool, sugarcane, tree fibres and castor bean oil. With its new running shoe, the ‘Dasher’, it looks poised to disrupt a $50bn performance footwear industry that, despite valiant efforts, remains closely entwined with petroleum-derived synthetics.
‘We’ve been told many times by people more experienced than us that for a product to be performance-based, it needed to be synthetic,’ says the brand’s co-founder Tim Brown. ‘The idea of challenging that is part of the inspiration for this whole project.’
This story is from the Summer 2020 edition of Wallpaper.
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This story is from the Summer 2020 edition of Wallpaper.
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