Pip & Henry join The Chiswick Calendar Club Card scheme

Image above: Pip & Henry shoes for young children

Sustainably produced shoes for children

It is only when you have children of your own that you realise how quickly they grow. It’s not so bad if they’re wearing trousers half-way up their calves, or their T shirts are a bit tight, but shoes have to fit, and shoes are expensive.

Jeroo Doodhmal realised this when she had her daughter Vivaana, who is now six, and she also realised just how much stuff people acquire when they have a baby.

“I was surprised by how much stuff we had for a tiny baby – not just clothes and shoes but furniture and crockery,” she told The Chiswick Calendar.

She set up Pip & Henry, a sustainable brand of children’s footwear, which she has manufactured to her specifications and sells online. Pip & Henry has been three years in the planning and she launched the business last November. (Pip is short for ‘pipri’, which means ‘little ant’ in Bengali, her nickname for Vivaana).

Images above: Jeroo Doodhmal

“There was a great deal of innovation in adult footwear but nothing similar in children’s”

Jeroo, who worked in data analytics for companies such as Sainsbury’s and Barclays before she had her daughter, was already experimenting with sourcing sustainable household products online “as a side hustle”, she told us.

“I was looking for something else to do. I always had an itch to do stuff on my own.”

She became more interested in sustainable materials and started going to trade fairs. She found out that 80 million pairs of children’s shoes are bought each year in the UK alone and that most of these ended up in landfills, decomposing slowly and leaching harmful chemicals and toxins into the ground and water for thousands of years.

“There was a great deal of innovation in adult footwear but nothing similar in children’s, so I decided I wanted to do the same for the children’s footwear industry.”

Images above: Pip & Henry shoes for children

Three years of research and preparation to launch the company

All Pip & Henry’s materials are sustainable – organic cotton, Piñatex (from pineapple plant fibres), soles from recycled cork and rubber. The average young child needs new shoes every four months, so they offer all their customers £10 off the next order if they send back the pair their child has grown out of, and they recycle the materials.

Their prices are comparable with Clarks or Start-Rite, starting in the £30+ range and increasing to a £60+range.

The shoes are made in India, Portugal and Poland in factories that make shoes for bigger brands and sometimes they use offcuts of material that would otherwise go to waste. The aesthetic is influenced by Jeroo’s Indian heritage -“we use bright, vibrant, playful, colourful materials.”

Images above: Pip & Henry shoes for children

Shoes can have 50 different elements in the manufacture

Shoes can have between 20 and 50 different elements – glues, inner sole, outer sole, lining, cushioning, padding, involving laminating and stitching in various ways.

Jeroo has researched the whole process to make sure that the leather they use is sourced from tanneries certified as Gold by the LWG, the Leatherworkers Group, which does not release poisonous substances into the rivers.

Their prints are dyed to REACH standards, (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals), the European certification. Her organic cotton is GOTS certified (the Global Organic Textile Standard), which measures the manufacture by ecological and social criteria. The factories she uses also have ISO certification, which is a quality assurance standard.

She has talked to experts about the way children’s feet grow and visited the factories to check on the conditions of the workers.

A lot goes into these little shoes.

Images above: Pip & Henry shoes for children

Club Card offer

Pip & Henry sell shoes and boots, sandals and sneakers, as well as soft pre-walkers with flexible rubber soles for the stage between babies’ booties and proper shoes. There is a fitting guide on the website explaining how to measure you child’s feet.

Jeroo has also written a series of children’s books about a little girl, an environmental heroine and her dinosaur friend embarking on adventures to reduce the number of shoes ending up in landfill, learning about bugs, cleaning up dirty beaches and such environmental insights along the way.

They would like to offer Chiswick Calendar Club Card holders a 15% discount and a free book, the first in the series. Use the promotional code pipandhenry15 when you buy on their website.

pipandhenry.com

Images above: Pip & Henry shoes for children

Read more stories on The Chiswick Calendar