Sustainable Fashion is More than a Statement

How We Stay Committed to Our Promise (and Our Planet)

When we set out to launch Rothy’s, we made a commitment to do whatever we can to close the sustainability loop—to create something beautiful but do it with abundantly available resources and minimal waste. It came down to wanting to care for our planet, this magnificent place we all get to move through and make our mark on in infinite unique and personal ways.

With 800,000 plastic water bottles saved from our landfills and oceans, our modest little shoe company is making a dent. But this eye-opening stat puts things in greater perspective—of the 12 billion shoes produced around the world each year, 85% end up in landfills. That’s 10.2 billion pairs of shoes.It's always been our goal to design Rothy's with this number in mind. We keep the design simple and only use eco-conscious materials (like recycled water bottles and non-toxic biodegradable adhesives) to lessen our footprint.

True to our commitment, we keep our factory and offices green. “But what about shipping?” you might be asking. It isn’t something we can dance around being a direct-to-consumer shoe company. Shipping means transporting and transporting means the production of greenhouse carbon emissions (until planes are electric, that is).

Where we can control our carbon output, we do. We lessen cargo loads by making our recycled (and recyclable) packaging leaner and lighter. We limit our shipping routes and keep them direct. Until shipping is a greener industry on the whole, the friendliest thing we can do is try to be carbon-neutral. To make a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we can’t control. Through a program called Carbonfree®, our partner Carbon Fund (carbonfund.org) helps us exchange our output for offset credits that directly benefit the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil and the reduction of pollution and conversion of biofuels in the U.S.

We’ll be blogging in the future about this mission that’s near and dear to our hearts. It may sometimes seem like part of a trend, but there really is purpose behind all that we do. We’ll probably never stop asking ourselves “is there a greener way?”