Unless Collective, Portland’s new plant-based streetwear brand founded by a former Adidas exec, announced what it’s calling the world’s first fully biodegradable shoe line.
The shoe, called the Degenerate, was created in partnership with Illinois-based plant based material innovation company, Natural Fiber Welding, and is made with 100% plants and minerals to make it fully biodegrade. The shoe comes in two colorways and starts at $139.
“The Degenerate is for anyone who doesn’t want to compromise their style to do what’s right for the planet,” co-founder Eric Liedtke said in a press release. “And thanks to NFW’s unparalleled innovation in plant-based material technology, this sneaker will live a long, useful life…and when it’s no longer useful, it will be turned into valuable inputs for new soil products, allowing Unless to use the decomposition process to birth something entirely new.”
Liedtke became a senior vice president of sport brand marketing for Adidas in 2006 and eventually brand president in 2014. He worked closely with creators like Kanye West and his Yeezy line while at Adidas, but left in 2019 to create Unless because of his passion for sustainability.
The company, with a valuation of $30 million, began in 2021 with a founding team of executives from Quicksilver, R/GA and Adidas, making it one of the most promising apparel startups in recent Portland history.
Shoes tend to be the hardest apparel product to make sustainable, according to Liedtke, with more than 300 million pairs of shoes thrown away each year. There are several different elements to a shoe — the sole, the fabric, the laces — that must be made without plastic, versus just a few components of a T-shirt or sweatshirt.
The difficulty of making a sustainable shoe partially drove Liedtke and Unless to create the Degenerate, he said.
“We're in this for creating generational change, and so we want to pick the hardest things to innovate against to be a lighthouse for others to follow,” Liedtke previously said.
