We’re working hard on designing and manufacturing our footwear to be as sustainable as possible. What is sustainable in footwear though??  Sustainable footwear considers: raw materials, product design, manufacturing processes, end-of-useful-life policy, and a whole slew of other components. So many in fact that the only way a company can truly produce a pair of sustainably made footwear is to tackle one element of the process of achieving total sustainability at a time. We at Common Soles are currently focusing our efforts on materials and manufacturing processes right now.  That is not to say we aren’t doing all we can elsewhere in the sustainability value chain – this is just our area of focus at the moment.

I wrote a bit about materials on October 22nd of this year. This post is on process. The big one we can influence as a band in the US making footwear overseas is how our factory sources materials. Sourcing is a blend of art and science and is a constant battle of quality versus cost. Being who we are (a social venture) we lean toward quality whenever we have a choice. The difficulty we run into often times is that we are quite small in the world of footwear manufacturing and thus often have little say.  Not an excuse though…

With that in mind we identified the areas of the sourcing process that we could indeed influence – the biggest of those being geography. The three styles we are currently selling online; Natya, Saahi, and Aiman are all manufactured in southeastern India. We chose to source all materials from vendors in close proximity to the factory assembling the flops for us in Vijayawada.  Sourcing from local vendors cut a good amount of unnecessary shipping from the supply chain and allowed us to come to market quicker with our product.  It also allowed us to utilize local styles and materials the factory was accustomed to working with which yields happier workers who did not need to re-learn processes or build new templates, patterns or dies = even  more resource savings!  So it’s not just money that we saved in making theses flip-flops, its fuel costs for shipping materials, tool costs, and labor hours.

Here is a graphic example of a typical component value chain for a footwear product:

These savings on both the cost and resource side benefit all members of our value chain.

1)    The suppliers - we can give local businesses the orders
2)    The factory – as stated above
3)    The environment – less pollution and resource consumption
4)    Common Soles – better margin and fulfill our goals
5)    The customer (you!) – less expensive product that you can feel good about!

-Dave