I really really love Converse! I remember as a kid thinking that they were the coolest trainers ever and I really wanted a pair but my parents couldn’t afford them which was heart breaking! I tried to persuade them that I didn’t need to eat for a couple of weeks but it didn’t stick.
Now I’m a proper grown up I can afford them and for the past decade or so I’ve been donning my connie kicks with pride and replacing them in an unending cycle of shoemanship!
More recently Converse have started offering the ability to customize your shoes by letting you design your own which is awesome! I designed the spinning bad boys below bringing a theme of my heritage but sadly I will never buy them.
This pains me greatly as I really really really want them – Look at them – they’re so full of awesome it’s silly but I just cant bring myself to buy trainers from them until they sort some stuff out.
You see Converse have a pretty bad ethical score card. The Ethical Consumer website only gives Converse a measly 6.5 out of 20 including 3 big counts against them involving abuse of workers rights. This is not cool!
So how do we live ethically but maintain our sense of super cool?
I did some research and found a few companies that sell canvas style trainers that are very similar to Converse but have a much better ethical rating and we settled on The Fair Corp. They have a really great selection and have a massive score of 17! Both my wife and I needed new trainers so we ordered a pair of black low tops for her and pa pair of green high tops for me!ad
When they arrived I tweeted about their arrival and got a nice tweet of appreciation in return (great customer service that):
Woop woop our trainers came from
@ETHLETICshoes http://ow.ly/i/Lp46#EthicalLiving
We were a little nervous about getting them as we didn’t quite know if they’d be as good because in the past ethical companies have had a rep of producing below par quality products but these have been amazing! We were initially very impressed and I’ve been continuously impressed with them since.
