While rainboots are good for keeping your feet dry during wet weather, they can be rather heavy, don’t allow your feet to breathe properly, and don’t necessarily protect you from the cold. In an effort to provide a better alternative, serial entrepreneur Andrey Petrov has created the ‘VOYLOK’ shoes — a pair of sustainable woolen boots made with raw wool and hot water.
Using no chemicals, dyes, bleach, or glue, the shoes have sustainability weaved into their production process. Inspired by the traditional Russian footwear called ‘valenki’, the boots are reimagined in today’s context to work across all seasons and weather conditions.
Using only raw wool and hot water, the VOYLOKS is intended to showcase the impressive potential of minimal design. They feature no chemicals, require fewer manufacturing steps, are half the weight of rubber boots, and are essentially zero-waste.
On top of it all, because they’re made out of wool, the boots are also anti-bacterial and hygroscopic (they attract moisture effectively), so the wearer’s feet remain dry and odorless. “VOYLOK boots are as kind to our feet as they are to the environment,” says Petrov.
To allow for both indoor and outdoor use, the boots come with a removable waterproof overshoe, which the wearer can remove to enjoy a warm and comfortable pair of indoor slippers. Should you be interested, the boots are now the subject of a Kickstarter campaign to help them enter the market.
