A break from professional practice put podiatrist Paul Griffin on a pathway to manufacturing sustainable footwear.
Limited-release, fast-fashion footwear is commonly associated with trendsetting retail outlets and long queues for special-edition products.
For Perth-founded shoe designer and manufacturer Make Good, however, that business model presents a contrarian opportunity.
In a bid to reduce the environmental impact of footwear, Make Good has started with school shoes, a product often made cheaply and most likely to end up in landfill within a year.
Western Australian school students are the first to be offered a reinterpretation of this item, designed both for sustainability and comfort.
In recent weeks, a few private schools in Perth’s western suburbs have become the first outlets to offer Make Good’s lace-up black shoe, with an upper made from materials derived from fungus and other environmentally friendly sources to replace plastics and leather.
It has been quite the journey for company founder Paul Griffin, a podiatrist who quit professional practice about a decade ago to take a long sabbatical in Europe with his family.
For many entrepreneurs, though, even moving thousands of kilometres from home for some time out can’t curb their innovative, creative streak.
This is the situation Mr Griffin found himself in.
“I got into the footwear industry,” Mr Griffin told Business News.
“Brands wanted a wider understanding of their products.”
As a result, Mr Griffin worked as a consultant to some big names in footwear, notably sports brands, where he learned a lot about building shoes from scratch.
Sports shoes
Mr Griffin said his work in Europe came to the attention of a specialist hockey brand called Osaka, which previously, and unsuccessfully, attempted to complete its sport equipment range with footwear.
On the back of that setback, the brand had sought out the expertise it needed to have another go, and Mr Griffin had helped build the team required.
After a meeting in the Swiss Alps with Osaka leadership, Mr Griffin found himself immersed in developing a shoe that suited high-performance hockey players’ needs, noting that, at elite level, the highly mobile game is played on a heavily watered artificial surface.
The group designed a shoe with several key aspects to deal with the demands of the users who tested them, including a sole broken into parts that moved independently, a ‘last’ (a 3D mould) having an anatomical shape, and reduced moisture retention, because each 100 grams of shoe represented a 1 per cent energy loss to the wearer over the length of a typical game.
He said the project was successful and the shoes designed for Osaka, a Belgium-based business, are sold globally.
Mr Griffin secured equity in the sports shoe brand before returning to Australia with his family to start the next phase of his life.
It was their arrival in Perth and preparing to put his children into a new school that alerted him to a new opportunity.
School shoes
“When we returned to Australia we had to buy school shoes,” Mr Griffin said.
“You [parents] have to buy new shoes once or twice a year.
“It is fast fashion, but it doesn’t feel like it.”
Not only were the shoes relatively high turnover, due to wear and tear and the growth of the user, but Mr Griffin recognised they were typically constructed using cheap, often-toxic materials, which created a significant and enduring waste legacy.
Well versed these days in the problem, Mr Griffin can cite the damning statistics around what he says is a typical shoe of the kind used by school children and, as it happens, in many service-driven workplaces such as hospitality.
Due to manufacturing techniques and the unique demands of the foot, synthetic and toxic finishes including chromium and PFAS are a significant element. That means more than 90 per cent of the material ends up in landfill, with all the inherent problems that comes with that.
In addition, Mr Griffin said a typical shoe consumed thousands of litres of water during the production process, during which between 60 and 80 kilograms of carbon may be emitted.
Despite this, he notes, footwear receives far less scrutiny for its environmental impact or sustainability than apparel or fashion accessories.
Mycelium
Given his background, Mr Griffin believed he could do something better and set about development in early 2021.
His research drew him towards mycelium, the dense web-like material that forms the root mass of mushrooms and has emerged recently as a substitute for leather and artificial versions of it.
“The biomimicry aspect was what drew me in,” Mr Griffin said.
“Nature already creates incredible fibre structures.
“Our role is to design with those systems.”
Mr Griffin has used mushrooms as a prop for explaining the move away from plastics and leather, although some are incorporated, even if the main fungal ingredient is the organisms’ root structure.
“The mushrooms grown in Vietnam are used for the food industry. The offcuts that aren’t used in food are sun dried and sent to the processing facility to blend with mycelium, natural latex and cellulose to make the upper material,” he said.
“We then bond the organic cotton backing to the upper material using a natural latex weld to maintain the bio-based and biodegradable characteristics.”
The key material for the upper part of the shoes is grown in Vietnam, where Mr Griffin found a supplier to solve many of the issues around this innovation.
Additionally, the manufacturing process is closed-loop, without hazardous chemicals, allowing water to be recycled.
In the initial commercial version of the shoe, the sole element is 51 per cent natural rubber blended with synthetic elements, which ensures the required durability.
Make Good said it planned to develop a recycling program to deal with waste from that part of the shoe, until materials science catches up and fit-for-purpose, fully biodegradable footwear can be manufactured.
Make Good
The business, which registered the name Make Good Collective in 2022, has raised about $400,000 from investors including the Bird family from Paramount Safety Equipment, and former footballer Peter Bell, to create a shoe worthy of sale.
Co-directors with Mr Griffin are Perth design services firm Pretty Soon founder Ben Wright, and Malaysia-based footwear logistics, sourcing and product development expert John Prescott.
Mr Griffin said it had been a slog getting to this point, producing 40 prototypes before reaching its first commercial product, of which 1,000 pairs have been manufactured.
“Initially the materials did not stand up,” he said.
“The first pair cost $600 from China and my hand just went through them.
“If you want to be first you have to be patient.
“It was three years of proper prototyping and wear testing.”
The next step was to test the market with a limited production run, to see if the message would be accepted at the price, and the that the shoes would prove them themselves in the real world.
“Last year we reached out to about 30 schools,” Mr Griffin said.
“We received a mix of responses, from hanging up on me to being very accepting.”
In the end, Mr Griffin said three Perth schools – John XXIII College, Iona Presentation College and Scotch College – chose to offer the shoes for sale in their uniform shops.
