FEATURE : ROSCOMAR
If Covid-19 was to thank for one single, solitary thing, it’s that it’s forced us to stop traveling so much and helped to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change, at last.
To our shame, it took that to achieve some decent results in preserving our planet. With fewer flights in and out the country and reduced traffic on the roads, it’s said that the UK — and, in fact, the world over — has had a record drop in greenhouse-gas emissions (of 13% to be exact, according to the Global Carbon Project.)
Now, to further flatten that CO2 emissions curve, one can, at an individual level, ride their bike, be vegan (every other day helps, too), and, also— make conscious decisions about the shoes they buy. Because once thrown in the bin, a pair of shoes usually ends up somewhere in some landfill together with a couple hundred thousands of other pairs, most of which will take up to a thousand years to break down. If landfilled today, most sneakers’ midsole, which are made of petroleum-based EVA, would still not be fully decomposed in the year 3000.
Which is why Roscomar’s Johan Olsson has made circularity the sole focus of his brand. Like most, he’s taken lockdown to reflect on what he’s done and what he wishes to do. And so, the once leisure- and lifestyle-oriented shoe has grown into one that’s more conscious and less harmful to the environment.
TNO caught up with Johan to find out what Roscomar is all about /
To begin with, what made you decide to get into the sneaker industry?
Fashion was becoming overdependent on digital marketing channels. Most people understand that organic brand-customer relationships created in the physical world are stronger, whether through retail stores, events and so forth. So we built Roscomar as a sneaker brand through experiences – music festivals, pop-ups, artist collaborations, you name it.
If your brand first focused on bringing people together, then the pandemic must have hit hard. Did it force you to reconsider what you were previously doing?
In those first few years I became quite disillusioned with the industry, in particular with respect to sustainability and transparency. When the pandemic came and we lost a lot of business, I decided to rebuild the brand by using the lessons learned and being guided by science. It was basically like a big experiment: given the set of limited resources available to us (time, money, etc.), what is the lowest-carbon-footprint sneaker that we can make? And we decided that no matter what we do, we will be transparent about what goes into our products.
On that subject, do you think the industry does enough to inform consumers about the transparency of the origins of the textiles/sneaker materials that are being used?
No, it’s actually shocking how little we know about what we put ON our bodies. Compare it to the food and drinks we put IN our bodies: we’re interested in provenance, ecological credentials such as organic, calorie content, etc. Nutrition Facts labelling helps us make better choices when it comes to eating and drinking. The same should happen in fashion, which is why Roscomar provides full material compositions, source information and cradle-to-cradle carbon footprint data for our sneakers. More brands should do the same and hopefully this will help customers to make better purchasing decisions in fashion as well.
What makes your material choices as sustainable as they can be?
Our goal is Footwear at Zero Expense to the Earth. The main tool we use to measure success is carbon footprint, and I’m pleased that our Rv3 sneaker has the lowest cradle-to-cradle carbon footprint of any sneaker we’ve seen in the market. It also is 100% vegan with uppers made from TENCEL lyocell, a cellulose fiber sourced from trees. In addition we offer a leather sneaker called Court, made exclusively from Leather Working Group Gold Certified sources. So we offer both a vegan and non-vegan option, both with significantly lower carbon footprints than the industry average. Another key to our low footprint is using a midsole made from 69% sugarcane instead of traditional petroleum-based EVA.
What’s the team’s dynamic like when it comes to tackle the damaging realities, the issues around making a pair of sneakers?
Our design and development teams work directly with nominated Tier 2 and 3 suppliers who fulfil our environmental requirements, so that we can guarantee the quality and sustainability features of our sneakers. In addition, we work continuously with a third-party environmental audit agency. They track our entire supply chain including logistics and manufacturing to calculate and certify our carbon emissions data.
Can you walk us through the design of your shoes?
Roscomar sneakers are centred around a unique silhouette built on our own mid- and outsole shape, which is distinctive and recognisable but also has really clean understated lines. We love the sophistication that comes from combining innovative and luxurious materials in sleek shapes.
If we were to be honest, the sneaker industry is overproducing and likewise, we’re consuming too much. Once disposed of, a pair of sneakers will end up in a landfill somewhere. How do you avoid this from happening?
Roscomar sneakers come with a free and easy end-of-life recycling solution called Afterlife. Each pair has a unique serial number that is registered with your email address. When you’re finished with them, you can return them so that we can deconstruct and recycle the materials. We believe that circular fashion is a necessary solution for the future of our planet and that no shoes should end up in landfill or incineration (currently the fate of 95% of the roughly 20 billion pairs of shoes sold globally each year).
If both the Court and the Rv3 were released on the first day of the new year, are there going to be further similar drops moving forward? Will they stick around and possibly alter in the coming years? What will it take for you to release a new style?
Upgrade cycles should replace seasonal fashion. It’s crazy that our industry is governed by “seasonal” collections that have nothing to do with actual seasons. Tons of new products are created for the sake of newness alone and that cannot continue if we want to live sustainably. New product development should be guided by upgrades, in other words continuously improving. It’s like an iPhone; each year Apple releases a better version of the same product. You can expect the same from Roscomar. We’ll keep it interesting from a design perspective, but we won’t force ourselves to create a huge new seasonal collection if there isn’t a strong product-related reason to do so. Also, the shift to online shopping is a huge tailwind in this effort because it decouples brands from physical retail patterns.
Will the way you do things evolve as new sustainability standards get formed?
Absolutely. Since we already publish cradle-to-cradle carbon footprint data for all of our sneakers, it forces us to improve. We would never release a new product that has a worse carbon footprint, only better. Which actually makes our design and development really compelling; we can create shoes that we love but we also have a strong set of guard rails to keep us on track to the mission of — as we like to call it — Footwear at Zero Expense to the Earth.