IPATH: The Hemp Sneaker Brand That Was Right 15 Years Too Early

This is the first in a short series I have been meaning to write for years. Five sneaker brands from between 2000 and 2010 — the decade when I was learning this trade — that mattered enormously to the people who cared, and then largely fell out of the conversation. Some are gone. Some are still going and you have simply stopped hearing about them. All five did something worth stealing.

I am starting with IPATH, because IPATH was right about almost everything roughly fifteen years before the rest of the industry caught up.

A bit of context on where I am standing. I founded Luigi Sardo in Toronto in 2008, named it after my grandfather, and I have spent the years since doing the parts of this business nobody photographs: pulling lasts, arguing about outsole compounds, rejecting samples over a stitch line. So when I look back at a brand like this, I am not being nostalgic about a shoe I wore in high school. I am looking at the construction decisions and asking what they cost, what they bought, and why almost nobody else was making them.

The skate shoe was a marshmallow, and IPATH said no

To understand why IPATH landed, you have to remember what a skate shoe looked like in 2000.

It was enormous. The dominant silhouette of the late nineties and early 2000s was puffy, padded, layered in plastic overlays, frequently fitted with an air bag or a gel unit, and covered in branding. Osiris, éS, DC, Globe — the arms race was toward more shoe. More padding, more tech, more logo. I wrote about the Osiris D3 a while back, which is the purest expression of that era: a shoe so large it became a punchline and then, two decades later, a collector’s item.

IPATH was started by footwear veteran Brian Krauss with pro skateboarder Matt Field around 1999, and formally launched in 2000. It went in exactly the opposite direction. Hemp uppers. Organic cotton. Recycled materials. Vulcanized soles. Clean, low-profile shapes borrowed from workwear and hiking rather than from basketball. Some models even had a small stash pocket sewn into the tongue, which tells you a fair amount about the customer they had in mind.

They were making a sustainable, low-profile, vulcanized skate shoe in the year 2000. Every one of those words is a 2020s marketing bullet. IPATH was doing it when the rest of the category was busy gluing air units into a mid-sole.

What the shoe wall actually looked like in 2000

It is worth being concrete about the competitive set, because IPATH’s positioning only makes sense against it.

Walk into a skate shop in 2000 and the wall was a mass of volume. Osiris were building toward the D3, which arrived with a moulded shell, a visible air unit and enough material to make the shoe legible from across a car park. DC were deep into their padded, layered era. éS and Globe were running the same arms race in different colourways. Adio, Circa, Duffs, Vox — the entire category had agreed, more or less simultaneously, that the correct direction was more.

There were reasons for it. Skateboarding is genuinely destructive to footwear, and a shoe that survives longer is a shoe worth buying. Padding sells because impact hurts. Visible tech sells because it is visible. Every individual decision that produced those shoes was locally rational.

The trouble is that the aggregate result was a category where every shoe looked like every other shoe, only more so, and where the actual skateboarders whose approval drove sales were increasingly wearing plain vulcanized shoes from Vans because those had better board feel. The gap between what the industry was making and what its most credible customers were choosing had become embarrassing.

IPATH walked into that with a hemp Wallabee. In hindsight it looks obvious. At the time it looked like commercial suicide.

What hemp actually does, from someone who has specified fabrics

I want to take the material choice seriously, because it usually gets waved through as a lifestyle signal.

Hemp canvas is genuinely difficult to work with, and genuinely good once you do. The fibre is coarser and stiffer than cotton, which means it resists abrasion better — a real advantage on a shoe whose ollie area is being dragged across grip tape. It also breaks in rather than breaking down: a hemp upper softens along the flex lines and holds its shape everywhere else, so a well-worn pair develops a specific character instead of just going baggy.

The costs are real too. Hemp is harder on cutting dies. It takes dye unevenly compared with cotton, so colour consistency between production runs is a genuine headache. And in 2000, the supply chain for it was thin, which meant paying more per metre for a fabric most buyers had never heard of and could not immediately see the benefit of.

Pair that with vulcanized construction — where the upper and the rubber are bonded under heat rather than glued — and you have a shoe that costs more to make than its competitors and looks like it costs less. That is a brutal thing to sell. It is also, for my money, the correct way to build a canvas sneaker, and it is why our Low Cut is vulcanized too.

The three shoes that mattered

IPATH’s catalogue was wide, but its reputation rests on a handful of silhouettes. The relaunched brand has brought the important ones back, so you can actually look at them rather than trawl eBay.

The Cats

The Cats is the one people get evangelical about, and it is the strangest idea on this list: a skateable Clarks Wallabee. A moccasin-toe, two-eyelet, crepe-look silhouette that has no business being a skate shoe, built so that it was one.

It should not work. Wallabees are soft, round, unstructured — everything a skate shoe is not. But the moccasin construction wraps the foot in a way that gives genuinely good board feel, and the low, clean profile aged about a thousand times better than the marshmallows it was sold next to. Current pairs run US$109.95 in suede.

The Grasshopper

The Grasshopper was IPATH’s mid-top, and its shape is knowingly familiar — somewhere in the Air Jordan 1 / Dunk / Air Force 1 family, redrawn in hemp and suede with a vulcanized sole underneath. It is the closest IPATH came to a straightforwardly popular silhouette, and it is the one you saw most often outside skate parks.

The Cricket

The Cricket is the low-top companion to the Grasshopper, in waxed hemp. If you want to understand the brand in one shoe, this is it: a clean low profile, an unglamorous technical fabric, a vulcanized sole, and almost no branding. It runs US$99.95.

Timberland bought them, and then they were gone

Here is where the story turns, and where it stops being about design.

IPATH sold to Timberland in 2007. On paper that is the good outcome — a small, principled brand gets the distribution and balance sheet of a major. In practice, Timberland was itself acquired by VF Corporation in 2011, and IPATH was discontinued in 2013.

I have watched this happen enough times to have a view on it. A brand like IPATH is not really a product line; it is a point of view held by a small number of people who are prepared to accept worse margins to keep it intact. When that gets absorbed into a portfolio, the point of view is the first thing to go, because it is the only part that does not show up in a spreadsheet. The hemp costs more. The vulcanization is slower. The refusal to put a big logo on the side loses you the impulse buyer. Every one of those is a line item somebody will eventually optimise.

The brand came back in 2024, with Brian Krauss involved again, and the original silhouettes — Cats, Grasshopper, Cricket — are in production. Whether a revival can rebuild what a fifteen-year absence cost is an open question, but the shoes are real and you can buy them.

What I took from IPATH

Three things, and I mean these literally — they are in our shoes.

Vulcanized or don’t bother. If you are making a canvas sneaker, the sole should be bonded under heat, not glued on. It flexes correctly, it does not delaminate, and it is the single biggest quality difference between a cheap pair and a good one. It costs more and no customer can see it on a product page. Do it anyway.

Low profile ages better than tech. Every shoe on that 2003 wall with an air bag in it looks like 2003. The Cats looks like nothing in particular, which is why it still looks fine. Timeless is not a style — it is the absence of a timestamp.

The material should do a job. IPATH used hemp because hemp is abrasion-resistant and breaks in well, and the environmental angle followed from that. That ordering matters. A material chosen for the story rather than the performance shows up in the wear.

How it compares to what we make

Not a fair fight in either direction — theirs is a skate shoe, ours is not — but the construction philosophy overlaps almost exactly, so the comparison is worth making.

We are about C$65 cheaper and we are not asking our shoe to survive grip tape. If you skate, buy the IPATH — the reinforcement and the outsole compound are doing work ours does not do. If you want the same construction philosophy for walking around a city, that is exactly what we built.

Buying a pair today

Practical notes, since the brand is back in production and you can actually act on this.

Sizing. The Cats runs on a moccasin-derived construction that wraps the foot closely and then relaxes; most people find it fits true but feels snug for the first week or two. Hemp uppers in particular need that break-in period — the fibre is stiff out of the box and softens along the flex lines with wear. Do not size up to escape the initial tightness or you will end up swimming in them by month two.

What to check. On any vulcanized shoe, look at the foxing tape — the rubber strip running around the join between upper and sole. It should be even, fully bonded, with no lifting at the toe or heel. That join is where a badly made vulcanized shoe fails first, and it is visible in product photography if you look.

Care. Hemp and waxed hemp do not want a washing machine. Brush off dry dirt, spot clean, air dry away from direct heat. Heat is what destroys vulcanized construction — the bond was made with heat and it can be unmade with it, which is also why you should never put any vulcanized sneaker in a tumble dryer.

What you are actually paying for. At around US$100 for the Cricket you are buying hemp, a vulcanized sole and a genuinely unusual silhouette from a small revived brand. You are not buying scale, so do not expect mass-market pricing. What you get for the premium is a shoe almost nobody else will be wearing.

Frequently asked questions

Is IPATH still in business?

Yes, again. The brand was discontinued in 2013 after passing through Timberland and VF Corporation, and relaunched in 2024 with original models back in production. You can buy directly at ipath.com.

What was IPATH best known for?

Hemp uppers and vulcanized soles at a time when skate footwear was going the opposite way — bigger, more padded, more branded. The Cats, a skateable take on the Clarks Wallabee, is the silhouette people remember.

Are hemp sneakers actually more durable?

For abrasion, generally yes — the fibre is coarser and tougher than cotton, which is why it was chosen for a shoe that gets dragged across grip tape. The trade-offs are stiffness out of the box and less consistent dyeing between production runs.

What is the difference between vulcanized and cupsole construction?

A vulcanized sole is bonded to the upper under heat so the two genuinely fuse; a cupsole is a pre-formed unit the upper is glued into. Vulcanized flexes better and resists delamination; cupsoles offer more impact protection and a chunkier stance.

Who owned IPATH before the relaunch?

Timberland acquired the brand in 2007. Timberland was itself bought by VF Corporation in 2011, and IPATH was discontinued in 2013 before returning in 2024.

What was the stash pocket about?

Several IPATH models carried a small hidden pocket in the tongue. It was a wink at the brand’s counterculture positioning, and a fair summary of the customer they were designing for.

Next in this series

IPATH is the easiest of these five to admire, because they were straightforwardly right and the industry took fifteen years to agree. The next one is more complicated: a brand that quietly invented an entire category, watched everybody copy it, and is still standing.

— Markus Lacaria, founder and designer, Luigi Sardo

Prices checked at the brand’s own store in August 2026 and converted at the rates then in effect; they move, so check before you buy. We have no commercial relationship with any brand in this series.