Kyrgies, the Richmond-based home shoe model, is making an attempt its hand at alchemy. They’re not fairly turning base metals into gold, however their new capsule assortment celebrating Earth Month goals to recycle scrap merchandise right into a slipper that’s higher than the sum of its components.
Because of a collaborative undertaking with Drexel College and Fabscrap, a nonprofit group that works to recycle and reuse material waste, they’re reworking textile trash into cozy, sturdy slippers.
In response to Earth.Org, 2.6 million tons of returned garments ended up in landfills in 2020 within the U.S. alone, and 92 million tons of textile waste are produced globally yearly. It’s a problem Kyrgies co-founder and President Barclay Saul is aware of all too properly. When a buyer returns a pair of Kyrgies that, for no matter motive, can’t be resold, it goes into the recycle pile, or what Saul calls the “figure-out-what-to-do-with pile.”
In August 2023, Saul first began exploring the thought of round design for Kyrgies, a mannequin that entails creating, repairing and upcycling merchandise to generate zero waste. Saul was on the hunt for companions who might assist Kyrgies obtain the idea with huge attraction for the sustainability-focused model, and he landed on Fabscrap, which in flip pointed him towards Drexel College.
The workforce helped kind an impartial examine course, the place Drexel college students had been tasked with designing a mannequin to upcycle Kyrgies utilizing deadstock (unused and/or from a earlier season) supplies and trim from Fabscrap. The successful design got here from Martin Queenan, whose striped design was put into manufacturing for a capsule assortment that debuted on Kyrgies’ web site in April, in honor of Earth Month. The slides characteristic Kyrgies’ signature felted wool with a denim accent on the higher portion of the foot.
“Martin’s design was simply so clearly the one as a result of it additionally repurposes denim, which is totally plentiful, horrible for the planet and there’s a unending provide,” Saul says. “He appeared like he was the one who actually understood the project.”
Although based and based mostly within the Richmond space, Kyrgies are produced in Kyrgyzstan, the place the corporate’s sustainability efforts prolong to their employees. The model works with Tumar, a woman-owned felting collective that predominantly employs girls and ensures a residing wage, to fabricate the vast majority of their merchandise. The employees observe the standard strategy of felting, an artwork kind in Central Asian communities for hundreds of years, in producing the model’s slippers, that are then shipped to Kyrgies’ Chesterfield facility.
Now, when slippers find yourself within the recycle pile, they’ve an opportunity at a second life, Saul explains. “We ship them to an atelier in New York Metropolis referred to as LW Pearl, run by a girl named Laura Weber. Laura and her workforce connect a denim stripe throughout the higher, which is the fashion that Martin got here up with out of those piles and piles of recycled denim that Fabscrap provides them,” he says. “It’s principally a brand new design on the previous shoe.”
The result’s a group that includes two types of sturdy slides with bolstered soles for indoor and outside use, launched in early April in a number of colours and sizes. The phases of this manufacturing cycle, and the partnerships they contain, are taking Kyrgies a step nearer to the round design Saul has envisioned.