If you’re the company behind the "original" sneaker – a design established around 100 years ago and, in its modern incarnation, selling a reported 100 million pairs a year – change is necessary but strictly controlled.
The Converse Chuck Taylor All Star, a simple canvas shoe originally designed for basketball players, is a global streetwear staple, an enduring icon and for Boston-based, Nike-owned Converse, an enormous cash cow to be handled with care.
Of course, there have been multiple tinkerings and refinements to the Chuck Taylors over the last century, different colours and materials have been offered, and the radical introduction of a low-top version way back in 1957, but the essential design lines, silhouette and component parts have remained steady.
Until now. Launching July 5, Converse Renew, a series of Chucks produced using recycled PET from plastic bottles and, arriving later, up-cycled denim and off-cuts from its own manufacturing process, could be the company’s most significant innovation for decades. And, crucially, Converse can engineer that shift without fundamentally altering the design of the Chuck or how they are put together.
Sneakers have become sustainable fashion’s key battleground. That’s because there’s a lot to play with and play for. Most sneakers use a number of different materials (leather, nylon, synthetic rubber, plastic and viscose) and different manufacturing processes (injection moulding, foaming, heating, cutting and sewing). All of that uses a lot of resources and energy, as does moving all those parts around. Coming up with alternatives that leave less of a footprint is becoming big business. (If you want to really get to grips with the complexities of the sustainability issues around the design, materials, manufacture and transport of trainers, check out the Better Shoes Foundation website. Just block out an afternoon).
The Renew project began four years ago when Brandon Avery, head of Converse’s innovation lab, the Converse Concept Creation Center ("C4"), decided to push the Chuck’s possibilities further. The brand had long considered and promoted the Chuck Taylor as a blank canvas, something that the wearer battered, customised and cherished over time. Avery had a fresh twist on that idea. He asked 25 Converse staff to hand over an old item of clothing they no longer wanted but was rich in emotional resonances; unravelling sweaters, sentimental dresses, paint-splatted sweatshirts.
Avery then had C4’s micro-manufacturing set up turn these items into pairs of wearable Chuck Taylors (Avery had two pairs made from his baby blanket, one being for his mother). It was a neat trick and would have made for a next-level (and hugely instagrammable) customisation service. But it wasn’t scalable, and Converse (despite the occasional limited edition ‘collab’, naturally) is all about scalability.
“We needed to go from product innovation to process innovation,” says Avery. He started to rethink the idea. Rather than one-off upcycling, Converse could use upcycled and recycled materials on a massive scale. “The Chuck Taylor’s simple form, and our ability to scale, was the unlock we needed,” says Avery (an ex-athlete, arts grad and passionate Bostonian, Avery says ‘unlock’ a lot). “We have made this shoe for a very long time. And we could have a very big impact”.
It’s the simplicity of the All Star’s design – and the relative simplicity of the existing manufacturing process – which makes Renew feasible and potentially such a big deal. While Nike and Adidas have made moves towards more sustainable manufacturing – Nike’s Flyknit material reduces waste and Adidas has committed to transitioning fully to recycled plastic uppers by 2024 – the new star players of sustainable sneaker-making are newish and niche, nimble startups with a declared mission. They have been able to establish sustainable processes from the get-go.
A giant legacy brand such as Converse has to work with what’s there, embedded ways of producing its shoes in massive volumes. Converse needed processes that its existing manufacturers in Asia could adapt to without investing in all sorts of fancy new machinery and produce shoes at accessible price points that looked and felt like people expected.
Renew Canvas, the programme’s debut launch and a partnership with Thread International, is made using recycled plastic bottles, roughly 11 per pair of Chucks.
“Thread International is sourcing plastic bottles from developing countries,” says Avery. “They’re taking waste out of those environments, providing jobs to those communities and creating a new life for that product as a material. For us, the innovation was how do we take that plastic and turn it into a material that was right for our consumer and that gets better over time.”
Converse’s material’s director Jessica L’abbe says it took a few attempts to get the PET yarn right. “The first ones came out a little bit too shiny,” she says, “but eventually we landed on something that felt as timeless as what we already had.” There are also advantages to the PET canvas. “It takes colour really well so there’s lots of ways we can tap into this. It’s a really scalable opportunity.”
The battle now is cost. “We want to stay within a $5-10 (£4 - £8) increase on anything we have in our core range which proposes new challenges for us,” admits L’abbe.
To create a series of up-cycled denim Chucks, Converse partnered with Beyond Retro. The British vintage store chain, owned by the Canadian up-cycling giant Bank & Vogue, had the capacity to sort and process the amount of ‘post-consumer’ jeans Converse were looking for.
The scalability ‘unlock’ with denim came after Avery had shipped boxes of secondhand jeans to one of its manufacturing sites. “There’s a big difference between shipping them 10,000 pairs of jeans and a big standard roll of canvas. That is going to disrupt the process. So we’re having a conversation with them and see that there was a line dedicated to producing leather product. And we worked out that if we butterflied the jeans open, we could cut them in the same efficient way we cut leather hides.”
Using those machines Converse can magic two pairs of Renew Denim Chucks out of a single pair of ‘post-consumer’ jeans.
Converse also looked at its own waste at its partner mills. Strict colour-matching standards for its classic black and white Chucks means waste canvas. C4 and L’abbe worked on grinding down that canvas and mixing it with polyester to create a new yarn calling "Renew Cotton". The team are now looking at using the process on other colour scraps to create new combination colours and on using waste from factories as well as mills.
Initial production runs of the Renew range will be relatively limited: Canvas in the hundreds of thousands and Denim and Cotton in the tens of thousands (Converse is reluctant to give exact figures). That will be ramped up over time.
Avery insists that these first launches are just the beginning of Converse’s sustainability project. “I’m more excited about what’s coming,” he says. And both Avery and L’abbe understand that launching sustainable products invites critical attention.
These new processes produce 20 per cent less carbon and use 30 per cent less water than traditional manufacturing. That won’t be enough for lots of sustainability watchers. But bringing some startup chutzpah to the Renew project, iterating and re-iterating, Converse promises it can make small advances on a massive scale.
“The challenge will never end,” says L’abbe. “With every advance that we make, something new is going to come up and we’re going to say, 'Maybe this isn’t the best way to do it, so let’s do it this way.' You’re never going to reach the most sustainable, best way of doing anything. And if you feel like you have, you’re not doing enough to move forward.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
