Ten Years of Sustainable Leather Sandals

Today is Earth Day, and we've been making leather sandals the same way for ten years. Sustainability wasn't something we added to our business. It was built into the foundations of it, starting with the raw material.

Our leather sandals are not perfect and don't look like anything you'd find in a fast fashion outlet. As a handmade item, they will always bear the mark of the person who made them. Moreover, as we hold to the idea of being as environmentally sustainable as possible it also means that the leathers we use may be considered second or third grade and we work our way around naturally occurring scars which sometimes cannot be helped. We think they add something that cannot be mass produced. The idea of imperfection seems perfect right now.

With the industrial revolution we lost the appreciation and craft of handmade. We gave up quality for quantity. These days, the technological revolution has led us to confuse surface value (think airbrushing, face tuning and filtering which has invaded every aspect of our lives) with reality. This article from The Guardian is a perfect illustration of this idea.

We have not and will never hide that you may see a scar, scratch or some other mark that would usually be considered a defect. We think it's an important reminder that this sandal is made from an animal that was living and breathing. That is something we don't want to shy away from.

The reason our sandals look this way is rooted in decisions we made before we made a single pair. Before we could think about construction or design, we needed to know what our sandals would be made from and whether we could verify every step of that process.

In 2016, we spent months researching leather: what it is, where it comes from, how it's processed and what that means for the people and environments involved in producing it. The goal was a supply chain we could trace from the raw material outwards. That search led us to kangaroo leather, vegetable tanned, sourced from Packer Leather in Narangba, Queensland, a fifth-generation family tannery founded in 1891 and one of the last of its kind still operating in Australia. The leather arrives at our studio in Brisbane, where every sandal is made by hand.

Ten years later, nothing about that decision has changed. We still source from Packer Leather, and every sandal is still made by hand in Brisbane. We haven't found a material that better meets those founding criteria, and we've kept looking.

What's Coming Next

Over the coming weeks we're going to share more of what that research uncovered and why have made the choices we have in what we use. 

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