Record sales for Vivobarefoot as it races into custom shoes
08/01/2024
This translated to sales of £73.4 million, 49% higher than 2022’s record of £49.4 million.
It delivered earnings of £1.5 million, an increase of £1 million over 2022, making it the most profitable year to date.
In its end of year 2023 report, it stated one of its biggest focuses will be on its Vivobiome project, which is currently in pilot stage. Around 200 testers had their feet scanned in a London store, and test the comfort and durability of custom 3D printed and woven shoes. It aims to sell 4,000 of these in 2024.
“We are investing a lot of our human resources and finances into this project,” Dulma Clark, sustainability lead at Vivobarefoot, told footwearbiz.com. “Essentially, it all goes back again to the way footwear used to be made: foot by foot, person by person, for your own body, for your own size, for your specific use.”
It noted its efforts to trace its supply chains has had the most success with leather, where it has mapped material to a group of farms in Thailand. Leather is one of its most used materials, making up 11% of the total. Most of this is classed as “wild hides”, or leather made from free-roaming cattle raised by independent smallholder farmers.
Vivobarefoot made 400,000 pairs of shoes made with Wild Hide leather in the financial year 2022-23, and ordered 1 million square feet of leather from Thai tannery Interhides over the past two years.
In terms of footwear recycling, it reconditions shoes through its ReVivo site, and has begun to send any that are of poor quality to Dutch company FastFeetGrinded to be ground up and used for insulation or playground flooring.
It has also worked with Made in Mongolia for a range of wool slippers, forgoing profits to feed funds back into local community projects.
Read our interview with Dulma Clark in the new issue of World Footwear.
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