When Paula Perez co-founded her pioneering Portuguese-made vegan footwear brand Nae in 2008 – Nae stands for No Animal Exploitation – it was more to fulfil an unmet personal need than to build a sizeable business. ‘Although I knew it would be a challenge I just figured that I couldn’t be the only crazy person who wanted vegan footwear, even if that was a just a small niche market back then,’ she says.
She was certainly proven right in that figuring: Nae now sells internationally. In part that is down to its unusual positioning: Nae shoes are made with materials free of animal derivatives but, where at all possible, ecological too – no virgin plastics are used, for instance. But it’s also down to the fact that they’re as stylish as any competitor that makes with neither sustainability nor animal welfare in mind.
Vegan Footwear Expansion
That hasn’t always been the case. For a long time the market for vegan footwear was so small that options were few and, to be frank, most customers happily placed ethics way before aesthetics. Now the vegan footwear market spans high heels to court shoes to (more fashion-oriented) sneakers – you can even buy vegan football boots – and is on a huge growth trajectory.
According to research company FMI, it’s projected to double from US $30,000 million in 2023 to around $US 60,002 million by 2033. That small brands the likes of Native, Thousand Fell, Momoc, Aeyde, Nomasei, ATP Atelier, Rothy’s, Reformation and Ethletic are doing well – if not exactly on the cover of ‘Vogue’ – is testament to this progress.
‘The vegan footwear market is still a niche market now,’ reckons Massimiliana Delu, the owner of the Italian vegan footwear brand Noah, ‘but with more information available online about the harm caused by meat and leather production, more and more consumers are looking for these alternatives. It’s growing fast now. And the fact its that it can now offer products that rival traditional footwear.’
Getting the look right has only been one of the challenges however. Another is defining exactly what a ‘vegan’ shoe is. As notes Mirrin Lewis of The Vegan Society, UK – the organisation that coined the word ‘vegan’ – ‘while choice has been a major issue in the past, there’s still no legal definition for ‘vegan’, so a lot of companies are liberal when it comes to making vegan claims.’
Initially conceived as one that didn’t use animal-derived products – from the standpoint of animal welfare – ‘vegan’ footwear has more recently come to encompass those shoes that are more environmentally-sound too. These two attributes often go hand in glove – consider, for example, the carbon intensity of cattle farming for hides. ‘Being free of animal-derived materials and being sustainable are not the same thing, but they clearly have common aspects,’ as Perez notes, ‘and while it’s a balancing act I really I don’t see how, for instance, anyone could now make a convincing claim of being ‘sustainable’ without also being animal-free.’
But then these attributes also often clash, sometimes leaving consumers to choose which is their stronger motivation for buying. The production of non-animal ‘leathers’, for example, is not always sustainable: PVC and the less problematic PU polyurethane-based ‘leather’ alternatives – sometimes called ‘pleather’ – are environmentally-damaging in their production, often making use of all manner of toxic solvents in their application.
Meanwhile, what looks to be a sustainable shoe might not be entirely free of animal-derived products: many dyes and glues are animal products. Sometimes you need advanced tech – the likes of what’s called Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy – to screen for the presence of animal proteins in order to tell. Not many people carry that around when they go shopping.
‘I think you can argue that, if we compare the damage caused to the environment by a pair of leather shoes – considering all that goes with it, the farming, tanning and so on – and that caused by a pair of vegan shoes made from quality materials with a low [if not non-existent] environmental impact, we see that the vegan shoe definitely comes out on top,’ reckons Delu.
All the same, it has made shopping perplexing for consumers looking for an ethically purist product – often it’s a question of buying something ethically better but still imperfect – and challenging too for brands and their marketing. What claims can they really reliably make, given their long supply chains? And how to explain this to customers without getting bogged down in details, or without sounding that they’re only offering some half-way house?
Real Leather V Leather Alternatives
‘You see the same confusion around fast fashion – because a lot of it is cheap it uses non-leather products anyway, but you wouldn’t rush to say it was ethical. And, by the same token, because the performance of these alternative leathers has, historically, not been very good that has left many consumers still thinking of ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ leather as a desirable luxury product,’ explains Rachel Jones, shoe designer and senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Westminster, UK. She notes how the leather industry has even sought to protect the definition and use of the word ‘leather’ accordingly.
‘There was a time when leather alternatives were not only relatively terrible for the environment – PU, for example, will never break down in the way that leather eventually will – but they didn’t last like leather or wear like leather either,’ she adds. ‘The situation is improving, and fast – but to be honest the quality just hasn’t been there and most customers have cared about that before they’ve cared about ethical matters.’
‘One of the main challenges is the perception of quality and durability compared to traditional leather footwear,’ agrees Delu. ‘As non-leather footwear has only been produced in Asian countries for the last half-century, using inferior materials, there is still a perception among the average consumer that non-leather items are of inferior quality. That means only those who make a conscious effort to research alternatives know that there really are good materials out there that will last longer than poor quality leather – because, after all, even with leather there are many standards of quality.’
Indeed, take a look and there are now several leading leather alternatives derived from fungi, hemp, cork, apples and bananas, among other sources. Corn waste can be combined with PU to make corn fabric, which performs as well as leather. One of the most successful of these new materials is Pinatex, made of 80 per cent pineapple fibres and 20 per cent PLA, a plant-derived polyester that produces a mesh rather than a woven fabric that looks like leather and is breathable and strong. Really strong – it has a tensile strength more than seven times of that average leather.
Similarly, Tunera is the world’s first recyclable, plastic-free rubber moulded composite – ideal for soles – while Rise by Bloom is an algae-based material that can be used to replace the petroleum-based EVA foam cushioning found in sports shoes.
And then there is the likes of Parley, which rather than use virgin petroleum-based plastics has recycled reclaimed marine plastic into a new footwear material that doesn’t seek to imitate leather but which works for more technical-looking sports shoes.
‘There is just so much innovation in this field now,’ enthuses Lewis, ‘and a lot of investment too, including from the likes of the automotive industry – it wants these materials for its upholstery. What’s also telling is the demand for vegan certification increasingly goes right up the supply chain now. Makers of all the different materials and components that go into footwear want to make sure they’re part of what’s set to become a much bigger market.’
At least, in time. Jones stresses that scaling up the production of these new materials such that vegan footwear becomes both more affordable and an everyday rather than alternative choice won’t be easy, but will be necessary if they are to attract the attention of those footwear manufacturers that produce in the tens or hundreds of millions of pairs every year. Getting those on board would be the real game-changer, Jones argues, since it would mainstream the whole idea of vegan footwear. It would, unfortunately, also make it harder for small vegan footwear brands – ‘often those born and sustained by a true ideal,’ reckons Delu – to source these new materials in the more limited quantities they need.
‘With the global brands on board, in time vegan wouldn’t be the conscious choice that it is now,’ says Jones, ‘it would just become the new standard. Customers who weren’t ready to place their trust in little-known specialist brands, which is what vegan consumers largely have to do now, would still be able to buy from the global brands they favoured. Only now what they bought would be vegan or environmentally-sound, or some combination of the two, by default. Don’t underestimate what a tanker this is to turn around: remember that leather has been the default material for shoes for thousands of years.’
That is happening, but slowly. In large part thanks to its collaboration with Stella McCartney, Adidas, for example, has for the last eight years been working with Parley on a line. Nike too now offers a limited selection of vegan styles, as does the (mostly sporty or casual) likes of Vans, Tretorn, Superga, Puma, Dr Martens, Crocs, Birkenstock, Kickers and Kurt Geiger, to name just a few. And it’s good news that a few brands have managed to build an international, high fashion following based on a vegan pitch – most notably Vega, which is focused around upcycling waste plastics, cotton and polyester, but also Piferi and Loci, in which Leonardo Dicaprio and Nicki Minaj have recently invested.
‘What would really make a big difference is the development of an organic, low impact material that looks like leather and behaves like leather, because while some of the materials out there now are close, we don’t quite have that yet,’ says Perez. ‘But there’s going to be a lot more innovation to come. Eventually we’ll have footwear that’s both free of animal products and 100 per cent sustainable. We really need it.’