The New Zealand-founded, US-based woollen shoe company Allbirds has created a plant-based "leather" it plans to commercialise throughout the fashion industry.
The company, which established a bricks-and-mortar presence in Auckland in mid-2019, has been at the helm of natural and environmentally-friendly material development over the past five years following its inception in 2014.
As well as using New Zealand merino wool in some of its footwear, it has created and patented shoe soles derived from sugar cane and silky fabrics made from eucalyptus trees. Its products are also made from recycled plastic bottles, cardboard, castor bean oil and wood fibre, among other sustainable materials.
Allbirds co-founder Joey Zwillinger told the Herald the San Francisco-based firm had been looking into the possibility of a sustainable and "scalable alternative" to leather that could be open-sourced throughout the footwear and fashion industries for years to come.
To make this possible, it has partnered with material innovation firm Natural Fibre Welding and invested US$2 million to support the firm's research and further development of its Mirum technology that creates "bio-based leather" from vegetable oil and natural rubber, which does not need synthetic coating, binding agents or animal hide.