Retailers Learn more about the new Adidas and Allbirds sneaker collaboration. The new Whether you live in a major city or a small town, if you look around the streets, chances are you’ll find someone wearing either a pair of Allbirds or Adidas sneakers. While Allbirds is a newer player to the footwear space, bringing slipper-like comfort to the sneaker world through industry-leading sustainable materials and a transparent business model, the six-year-old startup gained credible popularity fast.
And Adidas is, well, Adidas—a historically iconic sportswear giant leading almost all performance categories with massive manufacturing power. The two brands are setting the stage for collaboration over competition in 2021 to combat the climate crisis. And today, we’re giving you a first look at their cool collaboration: a running sneaker with the lowest carbon footprint ever made, FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT.
© Photos Courtesy of Retailers sneaker close upThe Journal of Cleaner Production says it is estimated that the carbon footprint of a typical pair of running shoes made of synthetic materials is around 12.5kg of carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Companies manufacture 24 billion pairs of shoes a year, extracting resources like oil, leather, cotton, sealing them together to create one pair of performance sneakers. Plus, they ship these materials in a complex supply chain where greenhouse gases are emitted in every part of the process, all of which are terrible for the environment—yikes.
The new FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT running sneaker is stamped with 2.94kg—the product’s ambitiously low carbon footprint compared to other performance sneakers. The style is based on Adidas’ popular Lightstrike (and tested to the same performance standards), but it’s reimagined with Allbirds’ sugarcane-based SweetFoam, along with recycled polyester and Tencel–a material made from wood pulp.
The design team kept it minimal, using only what was needed to keep the shoe’s performance properties. Normally, a running shoe consists of 12-15 different materials, which can be a major problem, because it then requires 12-15 different ways of recycling. The FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT is different.
“This is a call-to-action for other brands, and a milestone in the sports industry achieving carbon neutrality,” said Brian Grevy, Executive Board Member Global Brands at Adidas. “Our partnership with Allbirds is a beacon of what can happen when competing brands from the same industry see the possibilities in coming together to design.”
You can’t solve a global crisis by focusing on individual gain–that’s greenwashing. The FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRING is more than just a sneaker. It’s a beacon of hope for more collaboration among competing brands, proving we can be better together.
One hundred pairs of the FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT sneaker will be raffled off to the Adidas’ Creators Club, a free community where members get early access to limited-edition products and earn special offers. Another limited release of 1,000 pairs will be released this fall, and a much wider drop will be available in spring 2022.
