Collection: Veja Shoes

Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion, friends from school and fresh graduates of the finance world, travel the globe at the turn of the millennium examining the so-called sustainable projects of major corporations. They return with an uncomfortable finding: most of it is theatre for annual reports. In 2004 they therefore found Veja in Paris — Portuguese for ‘look’ — and build it on a calculation the whole industry knows yet nobody acts on: big sneaker brands spend roughly 70 per cent of their budget on marketing and only a fraction on materials. Veja scraps the marketing line entirely. Zero advertising, zero ambassadors, zero campaigns. The saved money flows to the opposite end of the chain: organic cotton from smallholder cooperatives in north-eastern Brazil and Peru, to whom the company provides agronomic support, and wild rubber from Amazonia — the only place on earth where the rubber tree grows freely. The tappers, the seringueiros, are paid two to five times the market price, fixed years in advance, so that it pays for them to leave the trees standing rather than clearing them for pasture. Since 2006, chrome-free leather tanning has been added, shoes travel from Brazil exclusively by ship, and Parisian logistics are handled by a non-profit workshop employing people with disabilities. And the punchline of the whole story? Without a single billboard, all of Paris and half of Europe now wears Veja. The best advertisement is a true story people tell one another.