The parents’ dream is about to come true. No more endless – and expensive – shopping sessions to renew the stock of shoes for your angels. A British brand is currently working on a stretch shoe system that grows with your child. The project, which has just received a £250,000 (€290,000) boost, aims to reduce the waste and waste inherent in children’s fashion.
Every four months it’s the same chorus… You have to change the shoes of children whose feet are growing at breakneck speed. And if the second hand makes it possible today to resell the less worn models, most pairs of sneakers, sandals and other boots purchased always end up in the dump. In the UK, of the approximately 80 million shoes bought each year, more than eight in ten end up in the bin; something that undoubtedly prompted the founder of the brand Pip & Henry, Jeroo Doodhmal and herself a mother, to present sustainable shoes, and even more.
Pip & Henry is the story of a mother who quickly realizes the weight of children’s fashion and who, after much research, leads her to participate in the transformation of the world’s second most popular polluting industry. The idea? Changing the way shoes are made and then destroyed, through a responsible brand that focuses on sustainable materials and packaging (organic cotton, pineapple leaf) and a free recycling program to recover worn-out models. But faced with the mountain of waste caused by the many pairs of shoes worn by the little ones every year, she chose to take it even further with an innovation that should (really) change the lives of parents.
Double the life of shoes
The shoe brand Pip & Henry is working on an expandable shoe that would adapt to the evolution of children, with the possibility of extending it by one and a half sizes. The goal is to wear the shoes as much as possible and not – just – to have to replace them for size reasons. An innovation based on a material and/or an extendable sole, intended for children under seven, an age where feet grow particularly quickly. This mechanism would make it possible to double the life of the shoes, as Jeroo Doodhmal explained to the Daily Mail.
The innovation is currently under study and could be launched in the course of 2023, as the founder hopes. Things will move faster thanks to a £250,000 donation received from the brand, which is one of four winners of UK retailer John Lewis’s Circular Future Fund, which rewards “ideas and innovations that can accelerate the transition to a more circular economy”†
If Pip & Henry’s ‘classic’ shoes are currently priced around £60, it will cost £20 extra to afford these durable models, which could inspire many other kids’ fashion players.
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