SEAN EVANS – CLEARWATERS FOOTWEAR | INTERVIEW
From Stoke-on-Trent, now resident in Singapore, Sean Evans is the co-owner of Clearwaters Footwear, a new sustainable footwear brand that’s creating slippers out of recycled ocean plastics. Carl Marsh spoke to him via Zoom.
What made a boy out of Stoke-on-Trent – which is not exactly circled by the sea – become motivated to do all of this with ocean plastics?
I’ve wanted to make an idea into a business for a long time, but I’ve always thought it’s got to be something I really care about. I have to give credit to my girlfriend here, because she’s been educating me around sustainability for a long time – making me think about not using single-use plastics like coffee cups. I could pan my camera around here, and you could see my balcony where we’ve got some upcycled yoghurt pots with herbs growing out of them.
She took me to see a documentary a few years back called A Plastic Ocean, and if you’ve not seen that, I recommend your viewers, listeners or readers go and see it. It was equal parts eye-opening and heartbreaking to see the state of the oceans and what we’ve essentially done as the human race. We went and did beach cleans and it was staggering to see the state of some of the beaches. We border Indonesia, so a lot of the waste would – still does – come across in storms.
So it sparked something in me and the co-founder, wanting to do something different. And the question we’re always asking in Clearwaters is: what good is sustainability or sustainable products if they’re not affordable for everyone? That’s what we’re trying to address.
And using discarded plastic water bottles from the world’s oceans to create slippers is ingenious – but why slippers specifically?
I founded Clearwaters with one of my childhood friends, who’s been in footwear for over 10 years. I’ve been working in commercial roles at US technology companies; we’ve got a mix of background across sales, marketing and product. We both were speaking about sustainability for a while, and thinking about practical steps towards just living more consciously. I asked him why everything is so expensive, particularly sustainable items, as we were talking about footwear at the time, and he said he didn’t believe it had to be. So that sparked the idea.
Slippers themselves are a particular product – a market – that is underserved: there are almost no sustainable, high-quality and affordable slippers out there. When we were speaking to the factory about what’s possible at the design stage, my co-founder came up with the idea of building a slipper with a sustainable natural rubber sole. You might pop out of the house with slippers on and wipe the soles when you get back in. We’ve had a lot of good feedback around that, and I think it’s a far less competitive market than other sustainable products.
So are these slippers manufactured out in the Far East, where you live?
No, the factory’s in Spain. There are definitely lower-cost options in Asia to do that, but it’s also more challenging to have transparency of the supply chain. Sustainability, for one thing, is about materials – that’s important. Our slippers are made of recycled ocean plastic in the uppers of the slippers, and organic cotton inside the sole. But sustainability is also about the end-to-end supply chain, and you get visibility of that a lot more easily if you’re dealing with Europe. And then you’re thinking about fair working conditions, are people paid above minimum wage; these kinds of things are all taken into account.
If it’s a challenge to be both environmentally sound and cost-effective when creating these slippers, how do they compare price-wise?
In the past, recycled plastic was cheaper than virgin plastic – plastic that’s not been used before. But that’s shifted because there’s been an increased demand for recycled plastic. And that’s been compounded by the fact that the petrochemical market, which makes this virgin plastic, has been flooded. So there are challenges from a cost perspective.
Research by S&P Global analytics found that if you look at the amount of recycled plastic out there, it only covers about 8% of the demand for virgin plastic. In terms of processes and systems, there’s so much work to do to be able to collect that plastic in a practical way, and start to meet that supply and demand.
What do you think will be Clearwaters’ biggest challenge?
We’re still a very small business, so managing the supplier relationships is one of the biggest challenges. That could be anything from the cost of manufacture, cost of raw materials, etc. And as mentioned before, the transparency of the supply chain is also vital. That’s something we spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on, and something you’re always improving. And then there’s just the awareness that you’re always trying to build.
You hit your target with the Kickstarter campaign quite quickly, so it seems there are lots of people out there willing to back you financially in what you’re doing.
It’s been fantastic for us, and we appreciate every single backer. I think there’s an appetite out there for sustainable products and people trying to do more. I don’t think many people are aware it’s even possible you can take plastic out of the ocean and make a slipper, but a lot of people are aware there’s a problem – it’s well-publicised the oceans are in a pretty terrible state, and getting worse and worse. I believe there are eight million tonnes of plastic that enter the oceans every year. So it’s just a phenomenal scale.
words CARL MARSH
Info and preorders: www.clearwatersfootwear.com