Building Circularity in the Footwear Industry

Insights

Fearless yet approachable and fashion-credible.

A commitment toward circularity requires brands to be fearless as they work on a daunting challenge. As The Footwear Collective's founding and executive director, Dr. Yuly Fuentes-Medel, described, this fearlessness is about creating safe spaces where brands may fail. The brand must also be approachable to partners to strike the right balance between fearless and safe. This way, partners will feel empowered to openly discuss and collaborate on initiatives that may initially be imperfect. Finally, sustainability can't come at the expense of fashion. The brand and partner experience needed to feel at home next to the leading fashion brands of our partners to be credible.

Building cross-industry collaboration.

Collaborating with your competitors is not common, especially in the footwear industry. But the Footwear Collective's goals are large enough that they must bring companies together for the greater needs of the planet. Achieving scale is critical for circular operations, and collaboration is crucial. To ensure success, the Footwear Collective needed to facilitate an environment where brands felt empowered to move together toward the common goal.

The Footwear Collective and Other Tomorrows co-created activities to jumpstart this cross-industry collaboration at the workshop. Partner brand representatives were brought together by highlighting each partner's strengths, aligning on a shared mission, and prioritizing goals. Despite the diversity of expertise, customer base, and brand identities, participants bonded around shared stories and struggles toward their common goal.

Solution

Visually representing a fearless and fashion-credible brand.

The Other Tomorrows team designed a flexible and scalable visual brand system. The primary audience was internal teams and partner brands, but the team designed the system to be flexible enough for a consumer audience. We provided guidelines and design examples that brought the brand to life across digital, print, and workshop applications. 

The visual brand communicates The Footwear Collective's mission of circularity by visually capturing "a sketch in progress" and using a striking palette with bold accents. Simple, flat shapes highlight essential content and help keep the brand clean, accessible, and consistent across touchpoints.

Designing frameworks to facilitate the collective circular journey.

To support The Footwear Collective and its partners, Other Tomorrows created multiple frameworks to aid collaboration and communication. These included using existing models, such as a prioritization framework, and new models, such as The Footwear Collective Map, which visualizes the collective's three Core Pillars. We also collaboratively prototyped The Footwear Collective Canvas. This tool will serve as a roadmap for different working groups throughout their first year of collaboration and contains guidance for each phase. Though the journey toward a circular economy will be challenging, we're proud to have supported an inspiring team on a tireless mission toward a footwear industry with no footprint.

Read their press release here