CALISTO: Creating Comfortable, Beautiful, Ethically produced High Heels

My mother is, and has always been, a fabulous woman. A fashionista to her core, she has always had a flair for the fantastic: this is especially true of shoes. That love (and her less than towering stature) was then passed onto me. With that, came the understanding that most shoes with the look we love, often lack a fit to match. In college, I found myself with a collection of shoes very similar to her own; amazing to look at but never worn. Every time I went to wear a pair, I found myself rushing to tear them off after 10 minutes.

So, when one of my professors gave us an assignment to make a fake company to develop the branding for, I saw the opportunity to solve our problem. As I looked into existing solutions, it became clear that bodily sustainability wasn’t the only issue that the shoe industry dealt with. It's no secret that fashion contributes to a huge amount of waste and greenhouse emissions. With millions of pairs of shoes being thrown away each year and hundreds of manufacturing steps to make each pair, shoes represent a huge portion of the fashion waste problem.

It is that lack of both bodily and environmental sustainability that has defined Calisto’s driving purpose: Create Comfortable, Beautiful, Ethically produced High Heels.