Crossroads. Notes from a small business. Day 5417.

Having started my footwear business 5417 days ago and having shipped over twelve million pairs of shoes from China to the UK (and other parts of the world) in that time, I find myself needing to pause and reflect on what has gone before and what is yet to come.

I am what is known in my industry as a Shoe Dog. I have worked in the shoe business for thirty years and it is safe to say that shoes and product development are in my blood. I have loved shoes since I was at school, since I ventured into Oxford Street as a fifteen year old to handpick my own two-tone, tan and black double strap monk school shoes from Freeman Hardy Willis. Or when I saved up eighty five pounds as a sixteen year old (a king's ransom in today's money) to buy the Adidas Etrusco Unico World Cup 1990 football boots.

So, I am lifelong footwear devotee.

Fast forward to today. We are sitting at a crossroads, in the middle of a global crisis driven by war, a sexuality and gender revolution, dizzying cultural transformation, globalization reversal, mass government change and an epic climate emergency. As a business, we also just got the biggest Covid-fuelled butt-kicking that lasted for…well, it is still going on.

However, most importantly, in terms of the climate emergency, our business is undoubtedly part of the problem.

We have been sourcing synthetic footwear for a volume driven UK high street market for fifteen years. We have acted as a responsible company in that all of our factories are visited by myself, third party ethically audited, we comply with European and US chemical policy towards the goal of eliminating harmful chemicals within the product and we build strong relationships with our suppliers, whom we pay on time. But the fact remains that we are a supplier within the fashion sector and we ship a lot of petrochemical based products across the globe.

This particular crossroads doesn't have any signposts. It is as though everyone is waiting for someone else to bang the sign in the ground to tell us all which way to go. Gains are being made in other parts of the fashion business, supported by bold claims and various roadmaps that are published in glossy PR campaigns. It is not all greenwashing, a slow transition is happening to making 'sustainable' material choices the norm. But this will not be something that the big players expect to pay a premium for. It must be crowbarred into an already pressurized price structure and it will not come with the warm assisting breeze of a corporate backed R&D budget. The answers will need to come from the supply base. Us.

We need to achieve continued meaning and fulfilment from our last fifteen years work, not just through continued commercial success but through the knowledge that, on the question of sustainability, we stepped up. One might argue that we would create the biggest impact by simply packing up shop and stopping the supply of such goods. But that would leave a hole that was very quickly filled. So in order to make a meaningful contribution to this journey, we have to stay on the inside and make change from within.

Having briefed our partners in China on the urgency of finding credible sustainable material options (the golden chalice being an affordable, aesthetically attractive and versatile biobased polyurethane alternative) I will attend Lineapelle material fair in Milan in February to see what is happening higher up the material food chain and to start, what I think will be the long and difficult process, of bringing it home.

To be continued.