CLIENT:
The Footwear Collective
ROLE:
Creative Director / Designer
TEAM:
Other Tomorrows—Maria Risueno, Hannah Oh, Lee Moreau, Pat Bitchell
MIT—Dr. Yuly Fuentes Medel, Lasse Lindqvist, Julia Viner, Lewis Campbell
The Footwear Collective is building a circular future for footwear by creating safe spaces for brands that are traditional competitors, to work together, fail, develop, and scale new solutions for the greater need of the planet. It’s not just about shifting manufacturing processes, it’s about shifting mindsets across the industry—from how shoes are produced to how consumers experience them.
I worked with the Other Tomorrows team to create a foundational visual brand for the TFC team to leverage for their annual circularity workshop. TFC had a defined purpose and a set of attributes—I directed and designed a brand direction built off of their strategy, including guidelines and contextual mockups for digital and print.
I absolutely loved this quote from Yuly, “Creativity is inherently a fearless act”. The brand needed to communicate its fearless mission towards circularity—a visual representation of creativity and fashion credibility—a “sketch in progress”. On the other hand, it needed to feel inviting and easy to understand. A striking palette with bold accents and flat, universal shapes that mimic forms of communication, textural fabrics, and motion-blur photography became a flexible language.
“Shoes have long empowered humans to discover unexplored territories. However, the industrialization of shoemaking has created unintended consequences for the planet. The footwear industry must now accept a new mission: to keep us exploring while preserving the health of our planet.”
— The Footwear Manifesto by Dr. Yuly Fuentes-Medel, Leslie Yan, Karo Buttler
