The woollen comfort!

Hyderabad born, and New Jersey settled, Taran Chhabra, IT professional, had a unique idea to make environment-friendly shoes, he along with his partner Amarpreet Singh started Neeman’s, a brand that makes shoes out of wool.

About the concept behind making these shoes, Taran, said, “The idea of creating shoes pumped in about two years ago because I do not have any knowledge about shoes as I am IT sector, I travelled to several shoe manufacturing stores around the world to acquire knowledge about them. And as I intended, I have learned how a shoe is made and what are the different components that go into it and why we need those materials.

When I learned all these, I observed that all they were made up of synthetic materials and leather that is not really great for the environment. As an environment-friendly person, I started thinking why people aren’t looking at doing something good for the environment and how shoes can be made without harming the environment and that’s when I started working on natural shoes in the year December 2016,” he said.

About choosing environment-friendly material for shoes he said, “I looked at several natural sources and that did not work out and then I started working with wool. It is been a year and a half since I started making these shoes out of wool. This start-up is based in India and the ideology is from India. The designers involved are from London and the concept is from the United States of America.”

Stressing on how different these shoes are from the regular shoes that are in the market he shared, “The biggest difference here is that we are focused on comfort. In terms of the features of the product, our shoe is made of natural fibre and it is soft from inside that it can actually be worn without socks.”

“We use wool of the merino sheep breed, which is found in the mountainous region of Australia. We take wool from family farmers of Australia, who sheer the wool of these sheep since generations. These family farms look after sheep as their own. No sheep are harmed in this process.” About the target customers, the Taran says, “We started focusing on men between 24 to 45 years. We drive our vision of comfort. Now everyone is our target customers and our audience are pretty wide in terms of age groups.”

Speaking about the shoes that are going to be launched for women soon he shares, “We started off with men’s right now and we have got a great response. A lot of women asked for this product as they wanted to experience the comfort of the shoe, we have already started designing and we would launch them by April next year. Our designs are unisex and the difference for the women’s shoe would be the colour patterns. We are also planning to make shoes for kids in near.”

Mentioning about where one can purchase these shoes he says, “You can purchase it only our website for now and slowly we are planning to open our flagship stores next year and this would be in India. We do have a focus on opening stores in a few Asian countries, but we are trying to figure out which one would suit the best for our stores.”