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What’s not to love about furniture made from up-cycled footwear? Especially when it’s as pretty as the sculptural furniture designed by Irina Flore, of Studio Flore, in collaboration with Native Shoes.

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Native Shoes are known for being highly durable. They’re made from mono material design — EVA and rubber — and built tough, says co-founder Thomas Claypool. Kids will outgrow them, but adults generally wear them out after a long period, he says.

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Claypool says he’s received stories from people who have travelled the world with a single pair of Native Shoes and worn them every day. If you do this, they might wear out in about a year-and-a-half, Claypool jokes. For most people, it’s much longer.

When people do wear out their Native Shoes, they’d very much like them back, says Claypool. Sustainability is a significant driver in the company.

When Native Shoes started in 2009, the environmental and sustainable aspects of how the shoes were produced was considered, but not much time was spent thinking about the product’s end-of-life cycle, says Claypool.

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It wasn’t until 2016 — when Native Shoes had become an international success story — that it built a shredder to break down the shoe material using open-source design plans found online. At this point, the company started seriously considering up-cycling, says Claypool.

The design collaboration between Studio Flore and Native Shoes began late in 2020. Flore was looking for more sustainably-minded design projects to focus on and more sustainable materials to work with instead of the traditional materials she’s always used, like wood. A design colleague of Flore’s suggested Native Shoes.

Native had already created one basic furniture item from its recycled shoes — a cube to sit on in its retail store — which people had loved, says Claypool, so there was interest in exploring this concept.

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The resulting product is a gorgeous piece of furniture that might work well in an entranceway or hall as somewhere to put one’s keys, etc. It’s made from recycled Native Shoes encased in charming pink metal.

“It’s just a metal structure with the mixed material. It’s as simple as it gets,” says Flore.

This item, named the Remix Project, is on display this weekend at the Interior Design Show (IDS) Vancouver, in the Studio North section. Flore has exhibited at IDS in the past and was named winner of the Prototype exhibit for her tableware collection in 2019.

Flore and Claypool hope this piece of sculptural furniture highlights how cool recycling can be and how the lifecycle of an item like this can continue and be reimagined into different objects if the materials are recycled correctly.

Flore is used to designing products that are then made by craftspeople all around the world. And with shipping being what it is, including now a cardboard shortage, says Flore, making something in a particular city from materials found in that city and showing it in that city is the way of the future, she says:

“It’s made in Vancouver, so the locality of the materials and this piece of furniture are very important, and IDS is here, so it’s the perfect match.”