WEAR Store - Refurbish your Sneakers!
Lots of people throw away their sneakers long before their functional life is over. This can be because they are no longer in fashion or simply because they are dirty. We are all pretty familiar with ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, but the fourth ‘R’ from ‘repair’ is often forgotten. WEAR Store Rotterdam is on a mission to create a positive impact on our environment and your style by turning old sneakers into fresh, new ones.
RE-WEAR
The main goal of WEAR is to extend the life cycle of sneakers. People used to go out and get their fancy shoes polished by a specialist. As Patagonia noted, repair didn’t used to be so neglected. It used to be the norm. Once there were 120,000 shoe repair shops in the United States. Today there are only 7,000 (Patagonia). The relatively recent trend of throwing away our worn-out shoes instead of heading to the cobbler is part of a strategy to make us buy, chuck and replace stuff. With sneakers largely replacing classic leather shoes and consumers spending increasingly more money on their favorite pair of kicks, it makes sense to look at the possibilities for sneaker cleaning and restoration. And since sneakers are notoriously hard to recycle at end-of-life, it is especially important to keep them in use as long as possible.
WEAR is jumping into the gap left by sneaker brands, which often do not care about what happens to the sneakers after they have sold them. By providing value to sneaker lovers and breathing new life into the art of shoe polishing, they show that refurbishment of sneakers is a real possibility to minimize our impact on the earth. The guys from WEAR went on a journey to find out which cleaning techniques are the best for your sneakers. They bought an Italian steamer to clean all types of materials, such as canvas, leather, suede, rubber and linen. Besides refreshing your sneakers, the guys from WEAR Store have also started acquiring donated sneakers, refurbishing and selling the ones that still look great for very accessible prices. Finally, they are creating jobs for people with a distance to the labor market. With natural and biodegradable DFNS sneaker cleaning supplies, they make sure that cleaning the sneakers is also done in a more sustainable way.
BRAND INITIATIVES
Apart from external parties like WEAR, some apparel brands are trying to start the extension of product shelf life themselves. Efforts towards a circular economy come in the form of buying back, revamping and reselling their used goods. Patagonia has been going at it for some time now and in recent news, Nike announced that it will start a new Nike Refurbishment program focused on sneakers that are quickly returned by customers. The program is meant to extend the lifespan for three types of footwear: like new (maybe worn for a day or two before being returned), gently worn (a little longer) and cosmetically flawed (think: something like a small snag that happened in manufacturing). After a shopper returns a pair of shoes to Nike within a 60-day return window, eligible footwear is added to the Nike Refurbished lineup. Each pair is inspected and refurbished by hand, and then given a condition grade. Once the shoes land back in a Nike store, the price is based on footwear type and condition grade.
Initiatives like WEAR Store are providing and capturing important value while shaping our economy to become more circular and sustainable. Entrepreneurs like this have a positive social and environmental impact, while creating a fun experience along the way and I am curious to see when we will see more WEAR Stores popping up around the country!
