Veja, the French sustainable sneaker and accessory brand made with organic cotton, wild rubber from the Amazon, vegetable tanned leather and recycled PET bottles, has just opened its new Veja General Store in Paris, at 11 Rue Marseille, in the 10th arrondissement.
For the first time, Veja is offering its customers a unique store experience on around 100 sq m in the Rue de Marseille in Paris.
The Veja General Store is not a conventional sneaker store – rather, this store has a shoemaker’s workshop, a clothing alteration workshop and a curated area with books, socks, stationery and care products. The entire concept is based on the motto of sustainability and the brands on offer have been selected accordingly: DSPTCH, Caran d’Ache, Anonymous Ism, Public Supply or Snow Peak. The electricity required is generated from renewable energies and supplied by Enercoop. The interior is a minimalist mix of wood, concrete, steel and glass.
The new 100-sq.-meter space, opened exactly where the brand’s founders had opened their first Centre Commercial store 13 years ago, hosts both this store and an own repair project, as a key concern of the brand strongly focused on circularity and on defining a new standard in consuming products that may last longer.
Veja had actually already been involved in a series of previous projects keen about encouraging more responsible behaviors.
In June 2020, it launched the “Clean, Repair and Collect” project by offering services like cleaning, fixing, or recycling its clients’ shoes by opening its first cobbler station at Darwin, in Bordeaux. There they launched their first cobbler station, where they had repaired sneakers from all brands for the first time.
In July 2021, they also set up a space to fix shoes and sneakers at Galeries Lafayette in Paris where their cobblers didn’t only repair Veja sneakers, but also fixed up to over 3,500 pairs from different brands.
In July 2022, also Berlin hosting the first Veja store to offer in-store shoe repairs. Later they also added a repair station to their Madrid store.
Simultaneously, they launched a repair station inside a movable container and partnered with Log’ins, a reinsertion company.
“When we started the Veja recycling project, we realized we were missing something: people were throwing away their shoes when they were damaged or simply worn out. By collecting thousands of old sneakers, we realized a lot of them were repairable and cleanable,” explained Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion, the two entrepreneurs who founded the brand in 2004.
Only in 2021, Veja’s founders found out that 22 billion shoes were made worldwide, but nobody repaired them anymore.
“In the 1950s, France had 50,000 shoe repair shops. By 2012, only 3,000 survived. The existing cobblers do not repair sneakers. They don’t think of it as a ‘noble’ product. And the cost of repairing was not worth the price of a new product,” they realized. That’s how they started repairing damaged sneakers and when their damage was minor they could fix them and resell them, too.
The new Veja General Store in Paris will initially host two cobblers who will work on repairing sneakers and shoes all day long. Along with them, a tailor will also be available to extend the lifespan of clothes, no matter the brand.
Beyond repair, the store is entirely dedicated to shoes as, along with sneakers, it also sells books, furniture, socks, shoe care products, laces, toolboxes, cleaning items, and stationery, among others. Furthermore, it also offers responsible brands like DSPTCH, Caran D’Ache, Anonymous Ism, Public Supply, Snow Peak, and more.
The store was designed by Veja teams together with a team of young French architects from Alors Studio. Together they created a minimalistic and warm interior by mixing wood, concrete, steel, and glass. Additionally, the space will be powered by Enercoop, a renewable energy supplier.
ADDRESS
Veja General Store
11 Rue De Marseiile
75010 Paris
