Source: https://www.comunitymade.com/
The buzzword for the entire sneaker industry is “sustainability”. Every brand has made it a point to highlight what they are doing to become carbon neutral. Saucony ran an ad during the Super Bowl. adidas has heavily invested in Parlay for the Oceans to utilize recycled plastic. Nike and Under Armour are both signing agreements to improve their environmental impact and footprints. The issue is that for all of those companies to truly be sustainable they would all have to stop producing so many sneakers. Think about this, the average sneaker production run in a general release for a company like Nike is 10,000 pair. The company makes almost 30 different styles that are shipped to the U.S. monthly. No matter how much these billion dollar companies do to become more sustainable, while it is commendable, the sheer volume of footwear being produced is counterproductive to actually being ‘sustainable’.
COMUNITYmade sits in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. Utilizing local shoe dogs and factories, they create handcrafted, artisan, custom made footwear. Every item sold a portion is donated to non-profits. They just made their first Vegan model in the Westsider Mid. When a company actually lives their name Community-Unity-Handmade and they utilize hemp canvas, Coronet Vegan Leather and they provide customers with an opportunity to upcycle their favorite leather coat into a pair of sneakers. The result is a company that is truly living its values.
I made it my mission for the next few weeks to learn as much about the process utilized by COMUNITYmade to create a handmade shoe. I connected with the Product Manager Noah Chavez-Stedman to talk about the process and to begin working on my own version of an ARCH x COMUNITYmade Traction. Here is the first video in the series. I hope if you’re reading this you will subscribe and follow along with the journey to creating my first pair of handmade sneakers. This is going to be a lot of fun.
COMUNITYmade https://www.comunitymade.com/ is based in Downtown Los Angeles. All of their shoes are handcrafted by artisans in LA bringing jobs back to the community and providing fundraising for local non-profits.
I connected with their production manager Noah, to work on building a shoe from scratch. This is the first video in the series and will walk you through the process we are taking to pick the materials and work out the details around the design of the shoe. I hope you all tune in to this process.
If you’d like to build your own handcrafted pair of kicks by COMUNITYmade this is the link: https://www.comunitymade.com/pages/custom-shoes
