Alterre x Loulette Bridal Ivory Twist Sandal Alterre is a luxury sustainable footwear company crafting beautiful, modular shoes to increase versatility and comfort and decrease consumption. This month, the brand announced a collaboration with Brooklyn-based designer bridal boutique, Loulette Bride. The collection features thoughtfully designed wedding shoes for the conscious modern bride. Alterre Co-Founders, Harmony Richards and Shilpa Iyengar, and Loulette Bride Founder, Marteal Mayer, designed the shoes with a shared approach of comfort and playfulness. The Ivory Twist Sandal is paired with ..read more

On Monday, Twisted X joined forces with retail partners around the country for an Earth Day cleanup. The sustainable footwear brand hosted its annual Love of the Land community cleanup initiative at its Decatur, Texas headquarters. To extend the reach of this mission, Twisted X encouraged retail partners to join in, providing them with comprehensive cleanup kids that included compostable gloves, a biodegradable trash bag, and a gift certificate to show gratitude for the attendees’ participation. In total 33, retailers participated in their own cleanup, doubling the participation from last yea ..read more

Puma Re:Suede Sneaker Footwear Plus is glad to share this post from our sister publication, MR.  Sports company Puma has made a commercial version of its experimental Re:Suede sneaker, the Re:Suede 2.0, available for sale. The brand showed it was able to successfully turn the Re:Suede into compost under tailor-made industrial conditions during a two-year pilot project. As part of the experiment, which was successfully concluded in late 2023, Puma produced 500 special pairs of its iconic Suede sneaker with materials selected for their ability to decompose, such as Zeology-tanned Sued ..read more

Photography: Trevett McCandliss; styling: Mariah Walker/Art Department; fashion editor: Kathleen O’Reilly; models: Fekes/Supreme Management, Hannah Krum/ Q Model Management; hair and makeup: Clelia Bergonzoli /Ray Brown Represents; photo assistant: Eileen Viglietta. Aerosoles moto boots featuring leather uppers by Be Green Tannery. Cactus leather riding boots by O2 Monde. Twisted X cowboy boots featuing recycled foam footbeds and ecoTWEED recycled plastic linings. Wildling waterproof hi-tops made from 100 percent virgin wool, 75 percent recycled plastic membranes, and synthetic rubber out ..read more

Matt Thwaites OrthoLite launched Cirql, a 100-percent biodegradable and compostable foam cushioning midsole alternative to EVA, to great fanfare in March 2022. It marked the start of addressing a really big industry problem: Every year, billions of shoes end up in landfills worldwide, most of which contain harmful, man-made plastics and glues that pollute the environment for millennia. There has to be more sustainable solutions. OrthoLite is now taking that effort to the next level with the Q2 2024 debut of Cirql rTPU30, a patented material made with 30 percent post-consumer recycled TPU and m ..read more

Dr. Martins is aiming to come full circle, one meaningful eco-friendly program at a time. The latest two circularity initiatives are the Genix Nappa collection (made from reclaimed leather) and ReWair, the company’s first resale platform in the U.S. Genix Nappa leather is made from offcuts taken from tanneries that would otherwise be destined for landfills. The scraps are put through a process to separate the leather fibers before re-entagling them, producing re-engineered leather that the company claims produces a lower carbon impact than traditional leather and is just as durable and comfort ..read more

The Bata Shoe museum exhibit, “Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks,” is going on the road, and the first stop is the heart of American sneaker innovation in Portland, OR. The collection of nearly 60 designs first debuted in Bata’s home base of Toronto, Canada, in May of 2022. The exhibit pushes the boundaries of what footwear can be, spanning a mix of fashion, gaming, new media, architecture, and material arts as well as sustainable and collaborative practices. It includes works by Rem D. Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, innovators Mr. Bailey and Salehe Bembury, designers Rick Owens, St ..read more

Circular Project slip-ons are made from 85 percent foam scraps. Earth day is every day at Twisted X Global Brands (TXGB), makers of Twisted X, Black Star, and Wrangler footwear. The Decatur, TX-based company is eight years deep in its constant pursuit to better its sustainability score across all facets of its business. That spans materials, manufacturing processes, eliminating single-use plastics in the home office, and everywhere and anywhere in between.  “We don’t consider Earth Day or Earth Month to be just a single day or month of celebration, because this is what we do 365 days of t ..read more

Leah Larson Leah lARSON HAS been in the shoe game long enough to sense when a new concept has big potential. The 30-year industry veteran and former Ugg creative director believes she’s on the cusp of that again with the founding of Fleks Footwear in partnership with Blumaka, the company that transforms foam footwear scraps from other brands into a durable, high-performance foam. All it took was for Larson to see that repurposed foam—and a lot of bugging of Blumaka Founder Stuart Jenkins, a former Deckers Brands coworker and dear friend. “About three years ago, Stuart, the master innovator, sh ..read more

Clip slip-ons feature elastic recycled knit uppers and cork/latex outsoles. Asportuguesas started with a cork-based flip-flop in early 2016. To be precise, the Portuguese brand’s origins date back a few months prior, at the drawing table of avid surfer Pedro Abrantes, then a recent architect graduate, and now the brand’s Chief Director. His Base flip-flop design won an annual contest run by Amorim, the world’s largest cork producer, seeking innovative ideas that used the natural, recyclable, and renewable material. While minimal in design, that flip-flop held big potential. Not only would its ..read more