Today I want to introduce you to my friend Eva from the Czech Republic. She has created a remarkable new footwear brand that combines vintage shoe mass production technology with modern styling and adds a new twist to the eco friendly sustainability movement.  
Her brand is called Kave. The shoes are awesome, the classic vulcanized styles are retro cool, and Eva’s marketing reveals her unique and creative shoemaking personality! Check out Kave Footwear! 

About Kave Footwear

KAVE is a new creative platform that aims to change the footwear industry from the inside out by using only existing materials, tools and machinery to create fabulously surprising, yet wearable designs that have a much smaller ecological footprint. 

Our world is filled with products that we don’t need
but nevertheless we are still producing more and more. This is causing problems in society and nature. The start of new production requires a lot of energy, material and time. Lots of items are transported from various parts of the world and ecological footprint is growing. There are fully equipped
factories all around the world so why create new equipment? 
Let’s use what we have in an innovative way.
It is time to start thinking about design differently.

Vulcanized Construction

Kave shoes are made in small runs 100 pairs of each design. Each run is unique, based on the materials available in the factory when Eva arrives. The upper designs and colors are created on the fly with extra materials that would have normally been sent to a landfill. Kave is putting useless material leftovers to work by making functional fashionable footwear!

Kave footwear is made using a direct attach vulcanizing process. The uppers are prepared on a sturdy metal last, bottom up.  The rubber sidewalls and bottom are laid on, then clamped in place with a three piece Metal mold. The mold is heated melting the rubber parts together. This is vulcanizing.  The extra rubber is then trimmed away.    

About Eva

Eva was born in Zlin in Czech Republic. Zlin is the town where the shoe making legend Tomas Bata built in those times the biggest shoe factory in Europe.

Eva’s grandparents worked in this factory their whole lives. She started studying design from tender age of 15. Out of all different sides of
design, she found passion in shoes. She learned about their production when she worked as an intern in one of the companies within the Bata factory.

Later when Eva started studying and traveling abroad, with her experience from production in mind she realized the stark contrast between the senseless global movement of goods and the forgotten local production possibilities.

She decided to change this. Today she combines unusual design and traditional technology to create great quality shoes which challenge the view on global shoe production.  Visit KaveFootwear.com