Timberland introduced a “nutritional label” on shoeboxes in 2006. The label was designed to give footwear buyers information normally associated with food packaging, but applied to a product’s environmental and social footprint.
The initiative accompanied a redesigned one-piece shoebox made with 100% post-consumer recycled fiber and assembled without chemical glue. Its sections covered the energy required to make the shoe, the manufacturing location and factory, and community-related information such as employee volunteer activity.
The project was unusually ambitious for footwear packaging because it connected the product in the box with the wider effects of producing it. Timberland said the labels would appear across its footwear categories, covering roughly 30 million boxes annually. A common mix-up is to treat the label as a nutrition label in the literal dietary sense; it was a sustainability and corporate-responsibility disclosure.