https://www.voguebusiness.com/sustainability/adidas-allbirds-announce-zero-carbon-trainer-shoe
Adidas and Allbirds team up to produce a zero-carbon sports shoe
The two footwear brands, one a behemoth, one a startup, consider the project a “race” to get the shoe to market and have set aside competition to reach their goal.
Footwear competitors Adidas and Allbirds are setting aside strategic and intellectual property concerns and embarking upon an unusual collaboration to quickly and jointly develop a high-performance athletic shoe with little to no carbon impact.
Adidas, based in Herzogenaurach, Germany, and Allbirds, based in San Francisco, announced the collaboration on Thursday. The concept, which has been in the works for nine months, is for a mass-market shoe technical enough to compete at the Olympics or other world-class events while reducing the carbon footprint created throughout its life cycle to something near zero. “Nobody is looking for a sustainable shoe,” says Tim Brown, co-chief executive of Allbirds, emphasising the need for a shoe with technical prowess that would be the basis for future designs that could be manufactured by either Adidas or Allbirds.
The companies have not yet identified which sport the shoe will be designed for, but they say they are moving quickly and intend to have a shoe completed within a year.
The fashion industry is awash in brands pledging to make greener products. Those promises are often poorly defined marketing initiatives, bandying around terms like sustainability and carbon footprint with few clear measures or standards. What stands out about this initiative isn’t the sustainability platform but who is doing it, and how.
Most fashion brand collaborations take place between brands and artists who don’t compete in the apparel arena. Adidas and Allbirds are rivals. Allbirds was founded on a commitment to sustainable materials; Adidas has pursued green initiatives, including re-using plastics fetched from the oceans. The two brands are otherwise competing to sell shoes to many of the same customers.
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Generally, when an industry giant wishes to gain expertise from a small rival, it will acquire the company. Executives say there have been no talks of mergers or acquisitions between Adidas, an athletic wear behemoth, and Allbirds, a privately held Silicon Valley startup valued at $1.4 billion, whose wool sneakers have sparked a spate of copycats.
“It hasn’t come up. It hasn’t been part of the conversation,” says Brown. “This is not a financial situation.”
“It’s not considered typical to collaborate with someone who could be the competition,” says James Carnes, vice president of Adidas brand strategy.
Carnes and Brown spoke about the initiative as a race to develop a zero-carbon shoe — measured throughout the life of the shoe from design to production, shipping, warehousing and its end-of-life in a trash heap — that could improve upon the impact of 20 billion pairs of shoes manufactured each year. “We feel the urgency. It’s a race,” Carnes says.
The rivals have set aside many typical corporate hurdles, including the secrecy of most apparel design projects. Other innovators will be invited to use the carbon footprint methodology, though the design of the shoe itself will not be open sourced. Allbirds, in the spirit of broadening its sustainability efforts, has open-sourced its sole materials in the past. The companies have not yet decided on materials for the collaborative shoe.
The project kicked off after a happenstance meeting late last summer between Brown, who is a former New Zealand footballer, and an Adidas executive who is also a New Zealander. After that meeting, Brown emailed an Adidas board member, who introduced him to Carnes.
The pair began discussing how they might approach a project, flying to introduce their teams last autumn.
Someone, Brown says, pointed out that flights over the duration of the project would have a sizable carbon footprint, which was the antithesis of their goal. They asked if the teams in San Francisco and Herzogenaurach could work by Zoom or a similar telecommunications technology.
“Normally you need to get together to know one another. So we laughed at it,” Brown says. As coronavirus halted global travel, the teams began working via several telecommunications technologies, often never having met in person.
“And now, fast-forward,” Brown adds, “here we are.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the shoe would be open-sourced. (29/5/20)
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