Former Nike Chief Sustainability Officer Noel Kinder and former Adidas President Eric Liedtke have joined the management committee for a $125 million urban redevelopment project that aims to transform Portland, Oregon’s oldest neighborhood into a center for sustainable footwear design and manufacturing innovation.
The first phase of the renovation, which will cost $15 million, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024. A 110,000-square-foot Footwear and Apparel Manufacturing Innovation Center (FAMI) will be built, where footwear and apparel companies can test new materials and production methods that reduce environmental impacts and emissions. Finally, the Made in Old Town initiative will transform 323,000 square feet in nine run-down buildings in the city’s Chinatown. Housing will also be created.
The renovation is financed through public funds from the state and the city as well as through commercial financing.
One of the main tenants is Hilos, a startup that uses 3D printing to reduce the number of parts needed and the amount of glue used in shoe production. Hilos CEO Elias Stahl is part of the three-person trust board, along with Liedtke and Kinder, who joined in July. The initiative is funded by a perpetual purpose trust, like the one Patagonia uses for its philanthropic activities.
“It’s an incredible part of town, the architecture is really cool, it’s adjacent to downtown, but it’s always been challenging down there,” said Kinder, who grew up in the Portland area and spent more than two decades in sustainability and supply chain at Nike. “To be able to use the industry I spent so much time in as a catalyst for this transformation was really the icing on the cake.”
A center of gravity for shoe and fashion companies
Hundreds of footwear and outdoor clothing companies are in
“Incredible decisions are being made about what this city, all cities, will look like in the next century,” Stahl said.
COVID-19 has shown that “disposable downtowns don’t work,” Stahl said, referring to the city’s office vacancy rates that skyrocketed during the pandemic. The nine buildings being revitalized under the initiative will be outfitted with prototypes and testing equipment. They will be occupied by biomechanics engineers, startups working on sustainable textiles and other companies focused on rewriting the rules of apparel production, he said.
By more specifically concentrating resources in the region, the industry can “drive innovation along the value chain,” says Jordan Taylor Sloan, circular economy project manager at the consulting firm WSP, which is not involved in the project. Portland’s culture is thoughtful and progressive, with an emphasis on ecological design and protecting nature, says Sloan. “Innovative ideas can take root here, grow, gain traction and then spread to other areas.”
An industry that is hungry for new production approaches
China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam accounted for 75 percent of global footwear production in 2022. Production fell by 1.5 billion pairs to 22.4 billion in 2023—about the same number end up in landfills annually. Revenue from U.S. footwear manufacturing is relatively modest, estimated at about $1.9 billion in 2024. New Balance is a notable exception among major athletic shoe brands, producing about 4 million pairs of sneakers annually in the U.S.
The Made in Old Town team has received a “wave of curiosity” from fashion brands wanting to know how they can make their production methods more sustainable. “We’re very focused on brands and suppliers who are interested in making an impact,” said former Nike CSO Kinder, but declined to name any companies that might get involved.
The project will have many different Opportunities – from material substitutions to using circular economy processes, such as making shoes so they can be more easily repaired or reused. Sharing the costs and risks of testing these methods could be attractive to companies that are “hesitant” to compromise on margins in order to better finance their supply chains and prepare for new product methods, including onshoring, Sloan said.
“Shifting manufacturing innovations that focus on circularity has the potential to change these dynamics. Companies should therefore (a) consider setting an internal price on carbon and/or waste to fund innovative projects and (b) explore opportunities to co-locate symbiotic manufacturing and design operations,” she said.
