Adidas & Allbirds Futurecraft.Footprint
Footprint Calculations That Stand for Much More Than Carbon
Words by Grace Warn
You don’t have to be a luxury fashion buff to know that collaborations between rival fashion brands have been happening in the high-end arena for some time. From Balenciaga and Gucci’s ‘Gucciaga’ saga last month to Bulgari’s collaboration with Champagne house Dom Pérignon earlier this year, it’s not jaw-dropping to see conglomerates making use of their stablemates. What’s more, your finger doesn’t have to be on the pulse to realise that these mutual hijacks work to double down on the luxury to double up on sales.
When it comes to footwear though, idea-sharing and synergy between equal counterparts is traditionally a business and trade no-go. With industry giants keeping their testing, materials, and intel firmly behind lock and key.
Until now. Earlier this week adidas and Allbirds unveiled the product of a year of number-crunching, zoom-calling, and barrier-breaking. Unsurprisingly, the brand’s collaborative aims were founded far from the monetary pursuits of their luxury fashion colleagues. Instead of going for cash, they joined creative forces to make the first pair of performance running shoes with a carbon dioxide equivalent of 2.94 kg, the lowest carbon footprint the industry has ever seen.
Sneakerheads, environmentalists and athletes alike flooded into the Futurecraft.Footprint Collaborative Canvas on Wednesday after being teased with the news last May that Allbirds and adidas were set to work together. Exactly 12 months on, the seemingly incompatible audience got their first glance into the world of collaborative design conferencing. They found themselves sat at the table of the industry’s top designers, sustainability leads, CEOs, and supply chain managers.
There is no doubt that this year has thrown up challenges when it comes to shoe launches, but this digital event felt far from the flat screen, 2D, Instagram-heavy ones we’ve all become accustomed to. With the individual power to move graphics, engage with others and create their own collaborative workspaces, those in attendance were encouraged to experience what forging unlikely partnerships in footwear design feels like in a pandemic. Leaving space for the slips of the tongue and sentence repetitions we experience every day when zooming in but never at scripted shoe launches of the past, the industry greats cultivated a hierarchy-free space with ease.
It’s this commitment to open-sourcing and synergetic conversations that lay the foundation for the brand’s footwear innovation: “When you go out and look for new possibilities to solve some of the biggest problems the world is facing, you realise that you cannot do it alone, you have to partner up! It’s only when we join forces that we solve problems,” says Brian Grevy, Member of the Executive Board responsible for global brands.
Despite their differences in supply chains, customer base, timelines, and periods of existence, adidas and Allbirds share the common goal to start the industry’s race towards producing shoes with 0kg Co2e. With the average shoe generating around 13 kg of carbon dioxide emissions - that’s equivalent to keeping a 100-watt light bulb on for one week - the industry, consumers, and the planet they walk on have been waiting to hear the start gun for this marathon for too long.
“We had to build from the molecules up. We started with the ingredients and designed by numbers which is such an inverse of the traditional design process”
Jamie McLellan, Head of Design at Allbirds
With 66 years between them, Allbirds and adidas may look like a strange pairing but their business discordances collide to create the perfect, sustainable cacophony. By utilising the strength of infrastructure at adidas and harnessing Allbird’s biotechnology intelligence, the collaboration encouraged a newfound compromise and awareness of one-another’s strengths and weaknesses.
“We never considered until now how to build a shoe with the carbon footprint in mind,” admits Florence Rohart, Senior Footwear Designer at Adidas Future and design-lead on Futurecraft.Footprint, who praises Allbirds for their innovation and design knowledge of not only natural materials but also carbon calculation.
Numbers and data lay the foundations for this moon-shot shoe. Through utilising Life Cycle Assessment methodology, which calculates the carbon emissions output of each stage of a shoe's life, the team behind the project chose to work with data above aesthetic vision: “We had to build from the molecules up. We started with the ingredients and designed by numbers which is such an inverse of the traditional design process,” explains Jamie McLellan, Head of Design at Allbirds.
After number crunching and data analysing, the teams concluded that the most carbon exhaustive period of shoes from cradle to grave was production. Only through pioneering the ‘Art of Reduction’ was the shoe born, the teams expertly pared-back every aspect of the nesting shoe design process to minimise waste and reduce environmental impact. The same technical simplicity has been applied to traditional packaging and transport processes. In playing with the geometric characterisation of a regular shoebox, the design team have created a recyclable vessel that allows for tessellation in transportation, meaning more shoes can be traded in a reduced number of vehicles.
On top of supply chain reconfiguration, the new carbon efficient running shoe is a testament to the biomaterials that have been cornerstones to the materiality of footwear at Allbirds. With a Lightstrike-inspired midsole made from sugar-cane derived Sweetfoam resin and a highly reduced carbon upper made from an amalgamation of recycled polyester and natural Tencel, the innovators have pushed the boundaries of close-to-carbon neutral footwear processing.
By enacting thorough, fast-paced, and parallel running material and performance testing, the team examined every aspect of the footwear from fibre to formation. In doing so, the collaborators successfully produced a shoe that produces 63% less carbon dioxide emissions without sacrificing performance. McLellan recounts a breakthrough: “Implementing Sweetfoam was a particularly rewarding process. There’s an assumption that naturally derived materials won’t perform as well but we were pleasantly surprised by how well these materials performed in this running shoe.”
Sourced from southern Brazil, where the plant relies on rainwater, the sugar cane used to make Sweetfoam is a fully renewable source. Not only does it extract carbon from the air as it photosynthesises, but the biomass generated when it’s processed is also used to fertilise the next crop and power mills. Launched back in 2018 to replace Allbird’s traditional EVA’s, Sweetfoam soles utilise the world’s first scalable biopolymer produced by Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem.
“It felt like I was breaking the rules! Throughout the process, I had to check myself and ask who made these rules?”
Hana Kajimura, Sustainability Lead at Allbirds
Not only does the shoe’s materiality and supply chain set a sustainable benchmark for an environmentally aware future of footwear, but the product also sets a precedent for the dismantling of the modern footwear industry. By nurturing open conversations, allowing trade secrets to drift between collaborators and questioning pre-existing sets of rules, two of the biggest names in the industry have opened the race to 0kb Co2e to anyone who’s brave enough to enter. Grevy says: “We have to create and co-create to find solutions that make the world a better place.”
But, what does this mean for the footwear makers who have fostered their careers in the competitive, secret-ridden culture?
“It felt like I was breaking the rules! Throughout the design process, I had to check myself and ask who made these rules? This is exactly the way it should be,” shares Hana Kajimura, Sustainability Lead at Allbirds. The foreign mindset shift was undoubtedly uncomfortable for both teams, however, by opening processes up to questioning to be asked and enabling accountability-weighted conversations, the teams traversed hurdles never jumped by their colleagues. Rohart explains the same sentiment: “At times it was uncomfortable to revisit our traditional ways of building products. We had to unlearn everything, forget what we knew and question whether all the aesthetic and functional choices we made were aligned with responsible choices.”
The three-stripe-free final product is a blank canvas, a blueprint for future generations and an innovative touchstone for the industry at large. It works to represent not only a more sustainable material future but also constitutes a catalyst for a healthier zeitgeist of next-gen design. One where mutual creativity and intelligence is shared not shunned.
FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT will see an initial launch in May with a raffle of 100 pairs to adidas Creators Club members, before a FW21 release limited to 10,000 pairs, and a wider release in SS22.