KEEN LAUNCHES “WORLD’S CLEANEST SHOE” CAMPAIGN, INVESTS IN CONSCIOUSLY CREATED SHOEMAKING FOR 2024

by John Russel Jones Apr 01, 2024


Family-owned outdoor and workwear footwear brand Keen—more than 20 years after its founding and 10 years after starting to eliminate PFAS (per— and poly-fluoroalkyl substances)—is recommitting to its mission to make the “world’s cleanest shoes” by investing in new partnerships and processes. One such partnership is a multi-year partnership with environmental educator and filmmaker Max Romey (who also created the watercolor image above).

There are 8 billion people worldwide, and 24 billion pairs of shoes are made annually. That’s three pairs of shoes for every person on the planet yearly. Traditional shoemaking harms the planet and people yet has remained unchanged for decades. Keen believes that we are facing one of the most pressing challenges of our time and that the fate of our planet and the people who live on it is in our collective hands. As a shoemaker, Keen knows that the most meaningful thing it can do is reduce the impact of how it makes its product.

In 2023, Keen organized its efforts for the greatest impact around three Kore Value System Pillars: People, Planet, and Product. Keen’s 2023 Impact Report reflects how the brand leads with values. Key highlights include:

  • People: Besides fostering community among its employees, the brand celebrated its 20th anniversary by setting and beating a goal to increase employee volunteer hours by 20% from 2022 to 2023, resulting in over 2,337 hours in 2023. Keen also democratized a portion of its investment dollars to be managed directly by employees, resulting in donations to nonprofits such as Pie Ranch, the City Union Mission, Mazamas, and Warrior Expeditions.
  • Planet: In 2023, Keen rapidly advanced its climate journey through five critical steps: measuring its greenhouse gas footprint, setting a science-aligned goal to reduce its emissions, shifting to renewable energy, creating a Keen climate task force, and investing in climate-focused partners such as Protect Our Winters and The Conservation Alliance.
  • Product: At Keen, consciously creating means harvesting better materials, sourcing ethically, detoxing the planet, and making for life. Keen is now free of five of the six most harmful chemicals in manufacturing and is actively working to eliminate the sixth—solvents—through innovations such as Keen.FUSION, a direct inject construction method. In 2023, Keen celebrated six years of being PFAS Free, updated its PFAS Free Green Paper for other brands to follow suit, and published its second Green Paper, which outlines how to eliminate antimicrobials, another class of toxic chemicals.

Keen is also investing in partnerships, including sponsoring best-in-class advocates and changemakers—filmmaker Max Romey and Intersectional Environmentalist (IE), the team behind The Joy Report podcast—to educate about the climate crisis and engage communities in finding solutions.

  • Through its official partnership with Max Romey, Keen is making strides toward educating on critical climate topics, starting with the videos “What Is PFAS Free?” and “What Is Consciously Created?.” Keen, alongside Protect Our Winters, is also the title sponsor of Romey’s documentary Footprints on Katmai, which will premiere at the MountainFilm festival in Telluride, CO, in May 2024. Through this, the trio is raising awareness about ocean plastic pollution.
  • The company is also sponsoring the relaunch of The Joy Report podcast in April 2024 to share critical stories about climate topics such as conscious consumerism and PFAS—and inspire intersectionality and optimism among its listeners. Keen and IE will celebrate the relaunch with an Earth Sessions community event at Keen Headquarters in Portland, OR, on April 18th, featuring a panel discussion with IE co-founders Leah Thomas, Kiana Kazemi, and Diandra Marizet Esparza.
  • To round out these investments and to support its belief that sustainability is durability, the company has used innovations in manufacturing to solve a common shoe industry problem: delamination. Delamination is when the cement-based glue that adheres a shoe’s upper and rubber sole degrades, causing the sole to peel off the shoe. On April 4th, Keen is launching the Targhee IV hiking boot made with Keen.FUSION technology, which creates one of the industry’s first solvent-free mechanical bonds that fuses the upper and sole of the boot into one piece. This innovative construction tackles delamination head-on and is backed by Keen’s Lifetime Delamination-Free Guarantee so the Targhee IV is the last hiking boot a consumer will ever buy.