Today is North American Buy Nothing Day, and tomorrow is International Buy Nothing Day.  Yes, this also applies to shoes!  In fact, you couldn’t buy these shoes from Adbusters even if you wanted to, because their online store is closed for BND!  (You can, however, buy them in a few other places, but I’ll let you figure that out for yourselves )

Adbusters designed these shoes as part of their Black Spot campaign.  This ‘brandless brand’ is a pretty neat concept.  What I really like though is the role the shoe played in the campaign – Adbusters wanted to rebuff big shoe companies for their claims that it was economically unfeasible to stop using sweatshops.  The Blackspot sneaker kicks that bunk argument out the door.  This eco-friendly vegetarian shoe is made from hemp and recycled rubber in a unionized factory in Portugal.  And, it includes a little red dot on the toe, the “sweet spot for kicking corporate ass.” (I believe that sentiment was originally directed at Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike).

In terms of design, I personally prefer the scruffy “Unswoosher”, below, to the clean-looking Blackspot classic, above.