Baliston launched BALISTON BY STARCK, its debut collection of tech-augmented and 100% recyclable footwear created in collaboration with world-renowned creator Philippe Starck.
The shoes are made from just five biobased recyclable materials and designed to monitor the deterioration of their own cushioning allowing every shoe produced by the company to be collected at the end of its life and to be 100% recycled. The goal is to ensure that Baliston shoes will not be a part of the 25 billion pairs produced every year and scrapped somewhere polluting the planet.
The brand is taking sustainability to another level where the manufacturers become responsible for what they produce – mapping the future of tech-integrated fashion.
The BALISTON BY STARCK collection was created around the idea that being sustainable is the bare minimum; a reduction mindset is required from the design phase. Partnering with Philippe Starck was a meeting of like minds, and an exercise in minimum design. The result: a collection that is a unique and unisex model available in 5 colors with each shoe made of just five 100% recyclable bio-based materials, such as castor bean yarn, organic cotton, recycled plastic, sugarcane green EVA, and non-slip rubber.
“This is not a shoe for five months or one year, it is a shoe for life. When you design a shoe for life, you cannot be trendy, we cannot put all our life in the garbage every 6 months. The BALISTON BY STARCK shoes are the minimum of design for the maximum of technology,” explains Philippe Starck.
“We’re entering a new era of footwear. But we can’t talk about a ‘new era’ without being truly future-looking. There are more than 25 billion pairs of shoes sold each year, and most end as landfill waste.
“While some of the footwear manufacturing is admirably concentrated on reducing the carbon footprint of a shoe during the production process, we are taking the sustainability into another level by detecting the wear and tear, collecting every single pair that we produce and taking the responsibility to recycle it. Baliston shoes will not end its life polluting the planet for centuries.”
Each shoe will be sent by the user back to Baliston, which will take care of the entire process of recycling.
“We believe that a brand’s responsibility should be to take care of what they produce. Imagine if all the brands do that, we will have much less trash polluting the planet,” explains Karim Oumnia, Founder of Baliston.
