New Brands We Discovered: 5 Sneaker Labels Worth Knowing
I spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at other people’s shoes. Not in shops — on the internet, late, going down whatever rabbit hole a link drops me into. It is a professional habit at this point. I have been designing and manufacturing footwear since founding Luigi Sardo in Toronto in 2008, and the fastest way to learn something is still to watch how somebody else solved a problem you also have.
These five came out of one of those sessions. All are trading today. All will ship you a pair this week. And what makes them worth writing up together is not that they look alike — they do not — but that each one has a distinct, deliberate answer to the same question.
The five — tap any pair to jump to that brand.
The question every small shoe brand has to answer
Here is the problem, and it is the reason most footwear brands you have liked are no longer trading.
Footwear has a punishing working-capital cycle. Before you sell a single pair you have paid for last development, tooling, samples, and then a full size run — every size, in every colourway, in quantities the factory will accept. That money leaves months before any comes back. If you guessed the size curve wrong, you are sitting on unsellable stock in sizes nobody wants and out of stock in the ones they do.
Every brand below has an answer to that. They are all different answers, and that is exactly what makes them interesting.
1. Collective Canvas — the closest thing to us I have found
New Zealand · collectivecanvas.com
I will declare an interest immediately: of every brand I have written about on this Journal, Collective Canvas is the one whose thinking most closely resembles my own, and reading their site was a slightly uncanny experience.
It was started by New Zealand designer Oscar Anselmi, who comes from the Overland Footwear family and spent time in Amsterdam becoming steadily more uncomfortable with how fast fashion footwear works. He went home and built the opposite. Their three stated principles are slow, simple and transparent.
The Baan is organic hemp canvas over a natural latex rubber sole — the latex tapped by hand from Hevea brasiliensis — with an Eco-Ortholite insole made from castor bean oil and natural cork. And they publish their pricing breakdown.
Their answer to the inventory problem is radical narrowness: a handful of silhouettes, made properly, sold slowly, no seasonal churn. That is our answer too. It is why I can say with some authority that it works and that it is much less fun than it sounds.
The shoe: the Baan in Black, NZ$139.90 (about C$115) — the closest price on this page to ours, and a genuinely similar object.
2. JAK — Lisbon, and the shoe that is not the Royal
Lisbon, Portugal · founded 2014 · fromjak.com
JAK was founded in Lisbon in 2014 by Isabel and José Maria, makes everything in Portugal, and sells direct. Their tagline is “Defy Simple.” They are best known for the Royal, a luxe minimal leather low-top that gets shorthanded as the affordable Common Projects alternative.
I want to point at a different shoe of theirs, because the Royal gets all the attention and the Atlas II is the more interesting piece of design. It is lower, softer, less obviously premium — closer to a court shoe than a dress sneaker — and it sits at €130 rather than the Royal’s €180. That is a meaningful gap, and it comes from a simpler construction rather than from cheaper leather.
JAK’s answer to the working-capital problem is proximity. Being in Lisbon, an hour or two from the factories in the north, is an enormous structural advantage. You can visit a production line the same day you spot a problem, run smaller batches, and reorder quickly instead of committing to a year of stock up front. Distance from your factory is a hidden tax that almost nobody outside the trade thinks about, and I pay it on every order I place.
The shoe: the Atlas II in White Nude, €130 (about C$210).
3. North 89 — Stockholm design, Porto hands, Italian parts
Stockholm, Sweden · founded 2016 · north-89.com
North 89 was founded in Stockholm in 2016 by Gustaf Secher, and it is the most expensive shoe on this page. It is also the one whose bill of materials I find most instructive.
The shoes are handmade in Porto, Portugal. The leathers are Italian. The soles are Margom — an Italian sole maker whose units sit under a great many shoes costing three or four times what North 89 charges. The current Arena uses perforated Italian Nappa, and the brand’s whole premise is Scandinavian weather: shoes built to be worn in rain and slush rather than photographed in a studio.
Their answer is buying the right components rather than making everything. A Margom sole is a known quantity — a small brand that specifies one is renting decades of tooling development instead of paying to develop its own. That is not a compromise, it is good sense, and it is available to anyone willing to accept that their sole is not proprietary. What you give up is distinctiveness underfoot. What you get is a component that works, immediately.
The shoe: the Arena in Black/White Breathable, €209.44 (about C$338).
4. Beckett Simonon — they do not make it until you buy it
Bogotá, Colombia · founded 2012 · beckettsimonon.com
This is the one that made me stop and think hardest, because it attacks the problem I described at the top of this piece directly rather than working around it.
Beckett Simonon was founded in 2012 by Nicholas Hurtado and Andrés Niño, childhood friends from Bogotá, drawing on Colombia’s leatherworking tradition. Their model is made to order. They hold no inventory. You place an order, they open a production run, and your shoes are built. You wait several weeks.
Understand what that eliminates. No size-curve guessing. No dead stock in the wrong sizes. No end-of-season discounting to clear inventory you should not have bought. No warehouse. The single largest source of financial risk in this industry — and the thing that killed most of the brands I wrote about in our other roundups — is simply removed.
The cost is the wait, and it is a real cost. Most customers want shoes now, and a brand asking for a month of patience gives up every impulse purchase it might have had. That is a genuine trade, honestly made. I have thought seriously about whether we could do it. The honest answer is that our price point makes the maths harder: at C$75 a pair, the margin does not stretch to the small-batch production runs that model requires.
The shoe: the Calder Sneakers, US$179 (about C$251).
5. Brambas — a 4 mm sole pretending to be a normal one
Spain, handmade in Portugal · brambas.com
Brambas make barefoot sneakers, and they have solved a problem I did not expect anyone to bother solving.
The barefoot category — minimal cushioning, thin flexible sole, wide toe box, no heel drop — has always had an aesthetic problem. Barefoot shoes look like barefoot shoes. Thin soles read as flimsy, wide toe boxes read as orthopaedic, and the result is footwear that announces a lifestyle choice before you have said anything.
Brambas’ answer is the NakedFeel® sole, and it is a genuinely clever bit of industrial design. The sole is 4 mm thick. It looks considerably thicker, because of a wraparound hollow construction that presents a conventional-looking sidewall while the actual ground-contact layer stays minimal. You get the proprioception of a barefoot shoe with the visual proportions of a normal sneaker.
As a piece of tooling that is not trivial. A hollow wraparound sidewall means a more complex mould, more difficulty getting a clean bond to the upper, and more ways to fail in production than a solid sole has. Somebody decided the look was worth that difficulty, and I respect the decision — most brands would have shipped the honest thin sole and told the customer to get used to it.
Handmade in Portugal.
The shoe: the Calabria in Flax, €149 (about C$240).
The five, side by side
| Brand | Based | Made in | The shoe | Price | ≈ CAD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collective Canvas | New Zealand | — | Baan | NZ$139.90 | C$115 |
| JAK | Lisbon | Portugal | Atlas II | €130 | C$210 |
| Brambas | Spain | Portugal | Calabria | €149 | C$240 |
| Beckett Simonon | Bogotá | Colombia | Calder | US$179 | C$251 |
| North 89 | Stockholm | Portugal | Arena | €209.44 | C$338 |
| Luigi Sardo | Toronto | China | Low Cut | C$75 | C$75 |
Converted at the rates in effect 31 July 2026 (US$1 = C$1.40, €1 = C$1.61, NZ$1 = C$0.82). Shipping and duties excluded — on an import into Canada that adds meaningfully to every row above ours.
What I actually took from this
Five brands, five answers to the same structural problem, and not one of them is the answer we chose.
Collective Canvas narrows the range until inventory risk is manageable. JAK sits next to its factories so it can reorder instead of over-ordering. North 89 buys proven components rather than developing its own. Beckett Simonon refuses to hold stock at all. Brambas invests in difficult tooling to make an awkward category look normal.
Ours is duller than any of those: two models, made the same way, at a price low enough that people buy them to wear rather than to keep. Volume through simplicity. It works, but I would not pretend it is the only route, and after a week of looking at these five I am less sure than I was that it is the best one.
The made-to-order model in particular is the one I keep turning over. If someone works out how to run it at a C$75 price point, it changes this industry considerably more than any material innovation will.
Frequently asked questions
Are these brands actually new?
New to us, not new companies — they range from 2012 to relatively recent. This is a “brands we discovered” list rather than a launch list. All five are trading and shipping today.
Which of these is closest to Luigi Sardo?
Collective Canvas, by a distance. Organic canvas upper, natural rubber sole, deliberately narrow range, published pricing. At about C$115 it is also the closest to us on price.
What is a made-to-order shoe and is it worth the wait?
The brand builds your pair after you order rather than holding stock, which removes inventory waste and lets them charge less for the same quality. You wait several weeks. If you are replacing a known pair rather than buying on impulse, it is a good trade.
What are barefoot sneakers?
Shoes with a thin, flexible sole, little or no heel-to-toe drop and a wider toe box, designed to let the foot move and sense the ground. Brambas’ 4 mm NakedFeel sole is a barefoot sole styled to look like a conventional one.
What is a Margom sole?
An Italian-made sole unit used by a great many premium sneaker brands. Specifying one lets a small brand use decades of proven tooling instead of developing its own — sensible economics, at the cost of having a sole nobody else has.
Where we sit
We are cheaper than all five, by between C$40 and C$263. Some of that is materials — several of these use leather that will patina in a way our poly leather never will. Some is manufacturing location, and Portuguese and Colombian wages are a real cost I am not going to spin as inefficiency. And some of it is simply that we make two shoes and they do not.
If any of the five above is the right shoe for you, buy it — they are all doing something worth supporting. If what you want is a plain, vulcanized, unbranded pair at a price that assumes you will scuff them, the Low Cut is C$75 and the Mid Cut is C$95. Check the size guide — the Low Cut fits snug, so size up a full size.
— Markus Lacaria, founder and designer, Luigi Sardo
Prices taken from each brand’s own store on 2 August 2026 and converted at the rates then in effect. Prices move and stock changes — check the source before you buy. We have no commercial relationship with any brand listed here.