How Footwear is doing it Better

Anna Yona is the founder and managing director of Wildling Shoes. Their product: minimal shoes for everyone, handmade in Portugal from mainly organic materials and in compliance with ecological standards. Wildlings ensure that you feel the ground under your feet in a completely new way and literally encourage you to break new ground. The company with its now about 200 employees, aims to have a positive influence on all aspects of the supply chain and is actively committed to sustainable and fair raw material sourcing, maximally fair production, durability and recycling.

The product idea came to Anna when she returned to Germany with her husband, Ran, and their three children from abroad. After years of walking barefoot the children just couldn't get used to conventional shoes. And so, Anna, who actually studied literature, founded her own company together with Ran.

She has dealt a lot with regenerative economics and has started her own little utopia with Wildling, which focuses on people and the environment and is intended to become a platform for networking, inspiring one another, recognizing new perspectives, sharing knowledge and working together on social change.

Wildling Shoes has already won several prizes for its shoe design, new work and regeneration approach, most recently the German Founder's Prize in 2021 and the German Sustainability Prize in 2022.