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Past winners of FT Responsible Business Education awards, including academics and MBA alumni, have not rested on their laurels in seeking to progress their ideas and products
It might reasonably be argued that David Even, founder of sustainable footwear business Primal Soles, is making the world more sustainable, one step at a time. Even set up his Amsterdam-based company in 2021, with a mission to reduce landfill waste by at least 1mn pieces of footwear each year.
It says its pioneering product, made using natural Mediterranean cork, is the first 100 per cent recyclable insole on the market. By the time the Bocconi MBA alumnus won 2023’s Responsible Business Education student prize, his business had already travelled a long way. It had established a manufacturing operation in Portugal, using cork sheets, supplied by Amorim, the world’s largest cork producer.
But being at 2023’s World Economic Forum in Davos to receive his award enabled Even to accelerate his start-up’s growth. He used the opportunity to pitch himself to the investors, entrepreneurship advisers and senior executives who attend the annual leadership conference in the Swiss Alps.
“Once I knew I was going to Davos, I prepared the delivery of my presentation night and day,” he says, noting that he embraced the chance to “plug my firm”, as well as pleading for WEF attendees “to make a better world”.
Primal Soles’ advisory board now includes two people he met at that event: André Hoffmann, vice-chair of multinational healthcare group Roche, and Barbara Dubach, chief executive of Innovate 4 Nature, which acts as a matchmaker bringing conservation and sustainable businesses together with investors and customers.
Dubach encouraged Even to add another product line to his business: hotel slippers. “I take my insoles out of my shoe to demonstrate them to people,” Even says. “Barbara saw this and said, ‘Why don’t you do hotel slippers?’”
Primal Soles recently took its first order for slippers, supplying 60,000 pairs to Amsterdam’s Hotel Jakarta, which has made sustainability part of its brand. Even notes a symbolic element to the deal: Dutch traders in the days of the Netherlands’ colonisation of Indonesia went to Jakarta to extract natural resources; today, Primal Soles makes footwear that can be returned to the earth. “We are saying that, instead of guest slippers being a financial cost to a hotel because they are single use, they could be made to be a financial benefit because of the lower costs of recycling,” he says.
“Maximum comfort, minimum footprint.” The company’s next product launch, in the summer of 2025, will be recyclable sliders — slip-on shoes likened to flip-flops. For that, Even is preparing a $1mn seed funding round, with clothing retailer H&M’s venture group.
