Every once in a while I’ll find myself searching eBay to see if by some random chance someone has posted a listing for a pair of Zero Two shoes. I’ve been looking on and off for about 6 years now and I have yet to see a listing. When talking to longtime vegetarians or vegans I will bring up Zero Twos but it’s very rare that I’ll come across someone who knows what I’m talking about, so let me start off with a little bit of history.
From what I remember and the little bit of research that I’ve done, Zero Two was the first company to mass-produce all vegan shoes. The company was started in the early ’90s (’91 is the earliest reference I can find) and was an offshoot of TV Skateboards (funded by the much larger Vision Skateboard Company) and was formed by artist/skateboard pro Ed Templeton and fellow pro Mike Vallely, both longtime vegetarians. Along with Zero Two Shoes, they also started Salvage Clothing which would essentially sell thrift clothes that were rumored to have been bought from prisons and institutions. The shoes were made out of the fuzzy “loop” side of velcro 
with a plain rubber sole and vegan glue. They came with a “velcro ollie pad” which could be cut out and stuck anywhere on the shoe for added protection. The shoe was a takeoff of the classic chukka style. As an owner of multiple pairs of Zero Twos, the shoe itself was forgettable, but what was not forgettable was their marketing campaign.
The early Zero Two ads featured sponsored members of their team (Ed, Mike, Brian Lotti and Sean Sheffey) doing various tricks with the Zero Two logo which included a picture of a cow and the tagline “The All Vegetarian Skate Shoe.” Eventually that tagline was shortened to just “All Vegetarian Shoe” and accompanied with “Thank You For Not Killing Me.” The marketing continued to get more and more controversial with ads directly calling out larger shoe manufacturers for their cruel manufacturing process. One such ad featured a skater walking down the street leaving bloody footprint while wearing a pair of Airwalks with the line “There are no SOULS in our SOLES.” People were taking notice and they started getting better placement in the prominent skate magazines like Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding. One of the most memorable ads that I vividly remember to this day was a full color photo of a cow’s head, fully skinned, featured on the back inset to Thrasher. Unfortunately I have not been able to track down a copy of this ad. Needless to say, it was some of the most shocking pro-veg advertising I have ever seen in a national publication.
Zero Two was hugely influential. Not only did they have some of huge names in skateboarding sporting their shoes, their direct no-holds-barred marketing campaign and prominent ad placement had a huge influence on skateboarders around the world. In my circle of skateboarding friends growing up in South Dakota, eating meat was the exception and everyone jumped at the chance to buy Zero Twos. Street culture guru Bobby Hundreds of The Hundreds called Zero Twos one of the best sneakers of all time and the illustrated skateboarding shoe history book Made For Skate that just came out has 4 pages dedicated to cruelty free shoes with Zero Two being the most referenced.
The Vegan Collection owes a lot to Zero Two. The company shaped a lot of my early thinking about vegetarianism and eventually veganism and I can draw a direct line between what they were doing nearly 20 years ago and the plethora of vegan options I have today. So I just wanted to take a minute to give my gratitude to this small company that very few now remember.
Images for this post were taken from a wide variety of sources including:
Brainwashvictim
Made For Skate
Skhateboarding
And as an added bonus, check out Ed and Mike skating in their Zero Twos back in ‘92.
