Vivobarefoot’s newest impact report features a section most brands don’t work to highlight: its 2023 failures.
Those shortcomings include goals the company set out to achieve this year but missed the mark; places where there’s room for improvement and tidbits about internal miscommunications.
“We owe it to ourselves—as society and from an environmental perspective—to be doing our due diligence and be really, really open and honest about the things that we are doing really well at and the things that we aren’t doing so well at,” said Charlotte Pumford, head of sustainability. “We really love to discuss it openly… within the business… and so for us, it’s really important that we actually do that publicly. Hopefully, it might encourage other businesses to do the same.”
But the report also celebrates its “champagne moments”—call it the highlight reel.
The algae-based footwear maker toasted to the growth of its customer base, the uptick of its e-commerce sales and a new material innovation strategy that has yielded strong results.
Despite the company’s willingness to showcase its “fantastic failures,” several of those have led to success. The company counts its delay of the launch of its VivoBiome program with partner SmartMedia, which allows consumers to order shoes made specifically for their feet, as one of its failures in 2023.
Nonetheless, that program is now live, and is helping the company decrease waste.
VivoBiome isn’t the only program the company has implemented to curb product needlessly heading to landfills.
The Boot Repair Company partner also offers a program called ReVivo, which consumers use to send back their worn shoes to be repaired and resold, following in the footsteps of many other brands. This year alone, ReVivo sold 41,000 pairs of shoes.
Not every pair that gets sent back can be resold, though. Per the report, the company has over 16,000 pairs of shoes in a warehouse that it cannot refurbish or resell. It had been holding on to those until it found a suitable recycling solution. It has begun testing a partnership with Fast Feet Grinded, a recycling company that separates materials and uses them to create their own circular footwear or to sell to partners in other industries.
And for the smallest consumers, who quickly outgrow their shoes, Vivobarefoot teamed up with Bundlee for a kids’ shoe rental offering.
Even despite the wins, the brand has a long way to go, said Dulma Clark, head of the Livebarefoot Fund, the company’s impact fund focused on nature-based innovation for regenerative shoemaking.
The barefoot shoemaker uses the net promoter score (NPS) as one of its primary metrics for understanding customer sentiment. This year, the average NPS for the company took a dip. That, Clark said, could be partly attributable to long wait times in a key market.
“Shipping to the U.S. was a big problem. The U.S. is one of the biggest markets… and [in] 2022-23, we didn’t have any local warehousing. So we’d bulk it and send it by long ships… and it would take maybe two weeks even for the customer to receive the shoes in the U.S.,” Clark said.
The report points to other customer complaints that could have dinged the NPS—reverse logistics issues, high prices and improper fit the first time around.
While the company has set a goal to increase its NPS in 2023-24, that goal still falls lower than its average NPS score from 2021-22. It has other major priorities in the year ahead, said Pumford.
Per the impact report, 24.5 percent of the materials the Jean-Michel Basquiat partner uses are recycled polymers. Nearly 60 percent of its materials are virgin polymers, which have a questionable reputation where sustainability is concerned.
Vivobarefoot breaks down its material usage. Courtesy of Vivobarefoot.
The report notes that the Circ partner is “not proud” of its reliance on virgin polymers, but that it will continue seeking ways to integrate recycled and recyclable materials into its supply chain.
Pumford said the Circ partnership could help Vivobarefoot surge toward that goal.
For 2024, one of the main focuses will be ensuring the renewal of the B Corp‘s certification, said Pumford.
“[Being a] B Corp formed the foundations of our strategic approach as a business in terms of continuous improvement, especially around lots of the foundations for us wanting to, in the future, become a regenerative business,” Pumford said. “We use that as a best practice framework… so we’re really excited at the start of 2024 to hopefully receive the results of our recertification.”