Veja: A brand built on integrity

Veja was founded in 2005 by Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion. At the time, they were aiming to create a brand that “mixes social projects, economic justice, and ecological materials”. The duo's mission to create such a brand was sparked by travels to China in 2003, where they witnessed the inhumane and ethically reprehensible living conditions of workers in the shoe industry.

What started as a project advocating responsibility in the sneaker market and counteracting the upsurge of an increasingly alienated value chain through the rise of e-commerce and digitalisation, soon turned into a pioneering ‘green’ sneaker brand. In the past decade, Veja has become a force to be reckoned with, competing with renowned streetwear brands dominating the sneaker market.

Veja’s mission was clear: creating sneakers that stand firmly on the ground, “one foot in design and the other in social responsibility”. Equally cherished by eco-conscious consumers as well as aesthetically-driven fashion lovers, the signature sneaker with minimal colour detailing and its characteristic ‘V’-Logo has long become a recognisable staple in the sneaker world. Since its founding, the brand has created 31 styles – a reasonable rate for a company that has been around for almost 20 years.

The brand is currently present at more than 3,000 retailers around the world. Besides its online shop, the brand manages five flagship stores, two of which are in Paris, one in New York, and one in Berlin.

A maverick reassembling the production chain

At Veja, things are done differently – Kopp and Morillion overhauled the conventional sneaker production chain, by adding value and positive impact to every single step of it. Starting with the raw materials, considering the producers' and farmers' living and working conditions, to transparent logistics and post-consumer solutions – Veja’s approach is all-encompassing.

A leitmotif that accompanies Vejas decisions is to focus “on reality instead of fiction”. Veja has chosen sneakers as their main product for a reason. Next to sneakers being an allegory of their generation – growing up in the nineties and watching the shoe evolve into a marketing phenomenon, it “is a product that crystallises the major issues of globalisation through its production, dissemination, and usage”.

Sneakers are a product with exceptionally high marketing costs – 70 percent of the retail price are used for advertising, whereas the raw material and production costs only make up 30 percent. Veja decided to relinquish this product calculation and cut out advertising costs.

Still, a Veja sneaker has the same price as most modern high street brands. The reason for this is the cost of sustainability. Instead of putting their resources into campaigns and PR, they invest in something of much more endurance: an ethical and ecological production process that goes way beyond the product.

“It means spending more time on the ground, rather than investing in smoke and mirrors”, is how Veja hits the nail on the head. By doing so, the brand indirectly accredits a ‘collective intelligence’ to its customers – and proves a point: in the end, it’s the consumers' choices that foster sustainability. “Describing reality is always more interesting than trying to make up stories about your own product”, is how they put it on their website.

Sustainable sourcing and social inclusion

Vejas sneakers are manufactured in Brazil. The body of the sneaker is made from Amazonian rubber, the laces and canvas are from Brazilian and Peruvian organic cotton. Veja works with farmer associations that act after fair trade principles. Veja signs one-year contracts with market-decorrelated prices and pre-finances the farmers' harvests. By paying more than the common market price and cutting out middlemen, the farmers scale up their earnings. Veja uses a similar model in sourcing the rubber – by buying directly from families of rubber tappers and paying more than the market price, they contribute to the maintenance of traditional techniques allowing rubber trees to regenerate naturally. Veja’s leathers come from Uruguayan tanners and are Gold certified by the Leather Working Group – one of the highest standards achievable in the leather industry. In 2019, Veja introduced a vegan alternative made from bio-based fabrics and they have been investigating alternative materials made from recycled plastics. Veja’s logistics are partly managed by Log’ins, a company that pays special attention to inclusion, creating job opportunities for vulnerable, disabled, and socially excluded people.

But Veja’s mission does not stop after the production process. Since 2020, the brand is testing solutions for post-consumer stages. They introduced cobbler shops to their own retail locations, enabling customers to prolong the lifespan of their sneakers.

A fresh take on transparency

Although it seems like things at Veja couldn’t be better, they are very transparent about where they are not meeting their standards yet. At Veja, it is believed that “it’s only interesting if you don’t hide anything, you show everything, including failures and limits.” In this sense, Veja comes along as the anti-christ of greenwashing – where other companies inflate their supposedly ‘green’ policies and agendas, Veja relativises theirs by giving an insight into where they can improve. By doing this, they leverage transparency to a new level and create space for honesty – a virtue that often falls short in the fashion industry.

As such, Veja informs the customer about how their metal eyelets are not sourced by themselves, and that their e-commerce site is working with banking partners who have active branches in tax havens. Veja is transparent about using unnatural dye, how their leather styles, which make up around 50 percent of their range, are not making use of vegetable tanning yet, a more conscious alternative to common tanning methods, and how some of their biomaterials are not fully traceable or recyclable yet.

Veja builds trust by making these improvement points visible to the customer. By doing this they reinforce something often overlooked in the sustainability debate – how it is not a matter of black and white but rather a grey zone that brands are still in the process of figuring out themselves.

Veja takes pride in being grounded in reality to an extent where they do not communicate their future endeavours. “We never talk about what we’re going to do, it would feel too much like greenwashing. Our company is not about empty promises and hot air. It is a hard rule we have at Veja: we only talk about what we’ve already accomplished and we only work on what we’re going to do next”, is how they explain their ethos to the consumer.