It looked like END footwear was given a second chance at its sustainable life when LaCrosse Footwear bought the troubled brand for $500k last year, but now LaCrosse has announced that they plan to discontinue the brand. END had a booth setup in the corner of Outdoor Retailer, but they must have not made it back to LaCrosse’s HQ in Wisconsin with enough orders written to justify their existence. LaCrosse says that they’ll take what they’ve learned from the END brand in terms of low-impact manufacturing and sourcing sustainable materials and use that in their current lines of shoes.

First Nau and now END. All of these clever, three-letter, sustainable companies are having a hard time making it. Both made great products, and I suppose we could blame the current economic climate as a reason for their demise. Personally, I blame the hippies. If they made more money they’d be able to keep these guys in business.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Shoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.