It’s 2019, and killing animals is no longer a source of enjoyment in mass-market products. We all eat meat, but no one enjoys the fact that an animal (be it a chicken, cow, pig, lamb, etc.) had to die for our diet - we just like the taste and texture of it. We prefer leather seats in cars, but no one requires that we allocate grain crops that could feed the world’s poor and hungry to raising a half-ton animal that farts out methane. Animal products are pretty nice things, but the animal cruelty, environmental impact, and ethical concerns that are associated with them aren’t part of the value-add for most people.

This is why lab-grown meat and plant-based meat substitutes (e.g. Impossible Foods) are growing so quickly. Companies realized that people didn’t need beef per se in their burger patties; they just wanted something with the taste, texture, and appearance of beef. All that was necessary was an alternative without compromise; a patty that didn’t taste like a dirty old tree branch.

Electric cars have a similar story. While the sound of a V8 is a rather beautiful one, your average commuter doesn’t really care about burning fossil fuels to get from A to B. Any method that does the job for cheap with high reliability and convenience is perfectly sufficient. Pre-Tesla EVs sacrificed convenience and aesthetics; Tesla came along and provided a superior product that compared favorably to traditional product offerings, without the normal compromises of being green.

My proposal is simple: dress shoes suck, and someone ought to do a better job here. The way I see it, the sole criterion by which dress shoes are currently designed is formality; it’s all about the aesthetics. They succeed along that dimension - but they also come with compromises that we’d never accept with other types of footwear. Dress shoes are uncomfortable, for one - I haven’t found a pair that I can withstand for longer than three hours. They’re also made from leather, which again - knowing that an animal died is not part of my footwear’s value proposition.

Here’s a pretty basic product idea that a company could execute on. Companies already make high-quality vegan leather for cars - Tesla’s seats, Mercedes’s MB-Tex, and BMW’s SensaTec are all non-leather seating materials. Companies like Allbirds already have figured out how to build comfortable shoes that are incredibly attractive to millennials and younger buyers (whom I believe this type of product would resonate more with). Build a shoe that (1) is comfortable to wear for long periods of time, (2) appears formal through the use of synthetic leather-like materials, and (3) is environmentally friendly.

If no one does this and gains traction, I will. The current formal footwear is failing.