schuh partners with Waste Design Studio, Are You Mad

Leading fashion footwear destination schuh has partnered with Conscious Creative Unit and Waste Design Studio Are You Mad to transform its post-consumer waste materials – such as donated footwear, returns bags and pallet wrap – into usable and creative objects for schuh’s retail spaces. The objects created include unique donation bins for the retailers’ Sell Your Soles footwear takeback initiative, and one-of-a-kind shoe risers for product displays.

Greg Traill, Head of Brand Partnerships at schuh comments; “The footwear industry faces significant challenges when it comes to waste, but we’re committed to being transparent and proactive on our journey to becoming a more conscious retailer. We’re on a mission to inspire our customers to make more responsible choices, and this partnership with Are You Mad is a valuable opportunity for us to raise awareness of the importance of re-using. Our goal is to give as much footwear as possible a second life.”

London-based Are You Mad is a Waste Design Studio, Agency and Consultancy that specialises in transforming discarded materials into objects, furniture and shop fits. Experts in the field, their mission is to help bring about systematic change to the waste industry. Using culture as the catalyst for this change, Are You Mad partners with brands to help tackle global issues by creating hyper-local solutions.

At the heart of this project is a collective of makers, creatives and designers, curated by schuh and Are You Mad, each bringing a unique approach to transforming schuh’s waste into functional and beautiful objects, each of which showcasing ingenuity, skill and passion.

Meet the makers

The project began with Are You Mad’s in-house team of ‘Certified Wastemen’, who meticulously dissected and deconstructed over 600 pre-loved shoes by hand in their East London studio, preparing the materials for their next life.

Once deconstructed, the materials were handed over to pioneering British footwear designer Helen Kirkum, whose work is rooted in sustainability. Helen, who started her eponymous label HELEN KIRKUM STUDIO in 2019, has made it her mission to rescue odd sneakers from landfills and transform them into new creations. For this project, she skilfully stitched the deconstructed pre-loved shoes to create striking panels – each with unique combinations of colours, textures, and patterns – which were later used to craft each of the donation bins.

Next, Charlie Boyden, a British furniture artist and designer known for working with waste and creating beauty from the discarded, brought Helen’s panels to life. Charlie constructed each of the ten bins by hand, integrating the footwear panels made from recycled plastic components such as polystyrene.

For the shoe display risers, Are You Mad enlisted the expertise of Weez & Merl, a Brighton & Hove based studio specialising in creating one-off objects using waste LDPE (low-density polyethylene) plastic. Using 2.5kg of LDPE plastic derived from schuh’s pallet wraps and returns bags, the team melted, moulded and hand-crafted unique blocks to produce each riser. Each riser has its own distinct marbled pattern with no two risers being the same.

James Suckling, co-founder of Are You Mad comments; “When schuh approached us to help bring their Sell Your Soles initiative to life, what stood out was their honesty about the challenges of footwear recycling. It’s a complex process, but together, we’re creating a solution that gets people excited about recycling their old shoes, and rethinking the journey of their clothing, footwear, and waste. This is just the beginning of our partnership, and we’re excited to continue working with schuh in 2025 and beyond.”

schuh believes in preserving the environment for current and future generations. This means; conserving energy, minimising waste, sourcing sustainable goods and services wherever possible, and encouraging reuse and recycling. schuh’s Sell Your Soles initiative was launched in an effort to create a more circular economy, and this partnership with Are You Mad further cements schuh’s commitment to minimising waste and funding the future with charitable donations to fuel further change.

Sell your soles

Launched in October 2019, schuh’s Sell Your Soles scheme allows customers to donate their unwanted pairs of shoes to schuh stores, regardless of where they were initially purchased, in return for a £5/€5 off* voucher. The Sell Your Soles initiative is a partnership between schuh and textile reuse experts, Recyclatex. The scheme runs in all 124 schuh stores across the UK and Ireland and for every tonne of shoes collected, Recyclatex donate a sum of money to schuh. The money made from our partnership with Recyclatex is then donated to our sustainability charity of choice; World Land Trust.

Since its inception, schuh has donated 267 tonnes of end-of-life footwear to Recyclatex which in turn has allowed the World Land Trust to plant over 27,374 trees via their Plant a Tree programme.

schuh’s Sell Your Soles initiative was launched in an effort to create a more circular economy, and this partnership with Are You Mad further cements schuh’s commitment to minimising waste and funding the future with charitable donations to fuel further change.

The schuh x Are You Mad donations bins and risers can be found in the following schuh stores across the UK and Ireland: Oxford Circus, Stratford, Westfield White City, Bristol, Manchester Market Street, Metro, Belfast, Newcastle, LiverpoolONE and Glasgow Fort.