Sustainable Straps

Brooklyn//Manhattan

April 2017

As a collaboration with Nike, we designed, fabricated, and installed shoulder straps and fasteners for shoe boxes made of recycled plastic bottles.

We constantly ask the question "What is sustainability?" every time we hear the word.  A healthy dose of suspicion drives us to re-define the term for each project.

In this case, we chose renewably grown cotton as the material for the straps.  In an increasingly global culture that uses synthetic fibers more and more every day, we wanted our products to have a source and eventual end-of-life setting that would completely disappear into the background environment.

No synthetic microfibers will be clogging our waterways because of these straps.

The boxes themselves, designed by architect Arthur Huang, are already the second life for the material that they are made of.  Once bottles, they are now shoeboxes.  With the straps, the boxes have the potential to have a third life as a carried vessel.

With the boxes heavily engineered and mass produced, we designed our straps to be handmade, imperfect, and versatile.  There is no stitching in the straps, as they are only knotted, the cord can be untied and used again elsewhere.

Collaboration facilitated, and many photographs taken by Ché Morales.