In the grand hierarchy of Paris fashion, it’s tricky for a brand to stand out. Especially one whose coup de maître is a goes-with-everything white sneaker. Yet 20 years after Veja first began selling sustainable footwear, it has become the ultimate affordable It brand for scooter-wielding mums, sustainably minded millennials and A-list bigwigs who want to wear their values on their ethical leather-clad feet.
Veja’s co-founder Sébastien Kopp says he doesn’t know if people buy his trainers because of how they are made or because of how they look. The company is fastidious about social and fairtrade practices, “but because we don’t do surveys, we don’t do marketing, we simply don’t know this information”, he says, speaking from Veja’s Paris headquarters.
It also doesn’t do freebies. When the actor Emma Watson wanted a pair, she did what no celebrity has ever done, “and she bought”. So did Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. “I received an email from the [palace] asking about them, but I thought it was fake so I didn’t reply.”
The actor Marion Cotillard once listedit as a favourite brand alongside Valentino and Alexander McQueen, and it’s been reported that the company even received a request from the maximalist costume department of Emily in Paris (on this, Veja prefers not to comment).
What Veja does know is that it has sold almost 15m pairs worldwide. Its success hinges on several factors. Like a Daunts tote bag, or even a Labubu, branded accessories have become material signals of taste or interest, a way of wearing your values.
“The Veja V tells the world this trainer is responsibly designed and produced, and that you care about that,” says Ima Shah, the director at the trend forecasting site Stylus. Fashion helped, too. Oversized clothing is popular right now, but inherently casual. “Big trousers and big shoes don’t work. A sharper shoe formalises that look – it smartens it,” she says.
Veja makes sports shoes, but the earlier models, which are most popular, are in effect trainers for people who don’t want to wear trainers.
Still, these are strange times for shoes. Of the 23bn shoes produced each year, about 60% are trainers. But according to Katy Lubin, the vice-president of brand and communications at the fashion marketplace Lyst, “demand for sneakers is currently down around 30% year on year”. The trend forecasting agency WGSN said sneakers were projected to decline next year, too. People wants boots and loafers, says Lubin.
It doesn’t help that right now, no sneaker style dominates. Earlier this year, the New York Times declared the end of the dad trainer, but according to Lyst, the paternally shaped New Balance 204L is one of the hottest trainers of the year.
Gen Z are wearing slimline shoes such as Puma Speedcats, whereas millennials, such as Chanel’s creative director, Matthieu Blazy, are still wearing Nikes (Blazy wore his for his debut Chanel bow).
On the catwalk you’ll see Asics at Cecilie Bahnsen, and Prada went so far as to design its own. And despite Rishi Sunak’s best efforts, even the Adidas Samba is back from the dead.
Yet the white sneaker prevails. The most popular Veja sneaker, according to Lyst, is the Campo. As spare and elegant as its noughties predecessor, the Stan Smith, much like the “quiet luxury” trend and no-makeup makeup, its blankness is also its appeal. The main difference is its customer.
“Stan Smiths are comparable, yes, but have always skewed younger,” says Shah. While Stan Smith had cultural cache – Jay-Z once rapped about them – “Veja’s values are more linked to responsible purchasing rather than trends.” It helps, too, that they’re French, which grants them a certain chicness.
Until 1980, Veja’s Paris headquarters were the French Communist party’s printing building. Updated with a poured concrete floor and a Bauhaus-esque staircase, it has a vegetarian canteen, although like some of its shoes, even that used to be vegan.
Veja began phasing out vegan sneakers because “the more we looked at leather, the more we realised natural materials have better traceability”, Kopp says. Vegan leather is often just polyester or plastic. “I know Stella McCartney is an icon [in the UK] but the vegan PVC shoes. For me? Non.” As for the canteen, it stopped being vegan because the staff supposedly missed cheese.
Kopp launched the brand with his childhood friend François-Ghislain Morillion – they both worked in finance – after noticing a lack of shoes that advocated ethical practice and traceability in their production process. The company now employs 500 people and has produced 14m pairs of sneakers, reaching the commerciality and ubiquity it once arguably resisted.
The sticking point with the ideal sustainability model – which advocates a “don’t make, don’t buy, don’t throw anything away approach” – is that there are also jobs at stake. For this reason, Kopp thinks the issue is consumer moments such as Black Friday. “It creates an economy and a mindset that is not good.” Veja does not participate. The company’s website discloses the contracts of its producers and wages of the factory workers.
Greenwashing is also a problem, says Kopp. “The word recycling has been co-opted,” he says. This is particularly true in footwear where a single pair of sneakers can contain up to 40 different materials.
“This is not just hard to recycle, it’s virtually impossible,” says Daniel Schmitt, Veja’s head of repair operations. For this reason, it now runs several cobblers, the idea being that one pair can be recycled – “or reborn”, says Schmitt – up to five times.
As the global capital of swank, recycling is not something you associate with Paris fashion. But nor is fast fashion and yet last month, Shein opened a shop in the French capital. “It’s not crazy at all,” Kopp says. There is Primark, there is Zara. Nobody can stop or is really trying to stop consumption.”
That its practices “show what’s fine with our supply chain and what’s wrong with the supply chains of others” is just how it goes. “We are the grandfathers of this industry, we are from another era,” Kopp says.
