Some things you can only learn through experience. When Tull Price founded his first company, Royal Elastics, in 1996, he couldn’t have anticipated the success he’d enjoy, taking the brand global before eventually selling it for a pretty penny. He also didn’t predict the disillusionment he’d feel trading quality for volume as the brand grew and the pressure to sell more and more mounted. These experiences inspired him to found FEIT, a footwear brand laser-focused on producing hand-crafted shoes from top-notch, all-natural materials. Founded in 2005, FEIT held their biggest public event yet last week during New York Fashion Week: Men’s: an installation at the New Museum, complete with a short film directed by Jack Riccobono and produced by Benjamin Millepied. Watch the film below and then read our conversation with Tull Price. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you walk us through the concept for the film?

It’s the story of how I’ve experienced the industry that I’m working in. When I was 20, I started a footwear company called Royal Elastics. We used to make laceless sneakers. Do you know it? You seem a bit young.

No, I know it. I’m 28.

Yeah, okay. I think we’re just getting to the point where people are like, “Oh, no, I’ve never heard of that.” Anyway, that was my first company. I think there were two things that drove me to [form it]. One, I was really interested in the idea of globalization at the time. It was the middle of the ‘90s and globalization wasn’t a new thing but it was really starting to move. I realized that you could start this one brand that could speak the same language to kids in Toronto, in Sydney, in Tokyo, in London, because we were all liking similar things and understanding similar cues. There was that, and then there was wanting to be able to travel and not have to pay for it.

I had this idea: a sneaker company that’s not a skateboard company, it’s not an athletic company, but you can wear it when you’re just hanging out. Then, I can run around the world and try to build it. Through that, I started to learn a lot about the athletic shoe business and industry. How you make the shoes, how you design the shoes, what materials you use. Spent a lot of time in Korea at the beginning because we were manufacturing there first, then moved over to China. As that business grew, I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I started to learn more and more about what globalization can also cause — this mass chase for people to grow these businesses, deliver quarterly profits, make money, sell more.

Once we sold the business — we sold to K Swiss in 2001 — I started seeing how this pursuit of growth negatively affected not just the product and the product design, but also what was going on with all of this synthetic stuff that was getting produced. Where was it going? It was all going to landfill because you couldn’t destroy it. I said, “Oh, wait a second, when I’m using this cheap leather that’s not really leather, that’s really mainly oil and plastic, how’s that getting made? And what’s going on at those factories?” As I got deeper and deeper into I started to see more of the issues of globalization versus the initial things that I thought were great about it. I also saw that I was losing the capability to make products that I thought were great, which was the initial intention.

I put all those things together and thought I should start looking backwards to try to look forwards, and start learning about traditional shoe making. I started spending a lot of time in Europe learning about traditional shoe making, learning about how they make vegetable tanned leathers, versus chrome leathers, versus synthetic leathers. That all fed into the idea behind FEIT, a company where we make everything by hand, from natural materials, in small numbers.

The film is about the difference between products which are mass-produced, pumped out in huge volume by big factories versus this pursuit of individuals trying to make something great.

The drive to be more sustainable and eco-friendly is gaining momentum. Do you feel like we’re really, as an industry, making any headway there, or is it just a lot of talk?

I don’t think we’re making any headway there at all at the moment. The only thing is that there is this return, by consumers, to products that have a high degree of craftsmanship, and a desire to touch and feel products that are made from beautiful, natural materials.

I think that the industry’s picking up on that trend, but it’s a little bit lost when it comes to the push towards low-impact or sustainability. Who’s the hero, at the moment, of sustainability, low-impact? It’s Stella McCartney, but I totally disagree with the entire methodology of what they put out there to make her the hero. All of her products are about, “we don’t want to use animals.” That’s not necessarily sustainable. It’s a different argument. It’s a different thing. They’re using all synthetics. If people really want to talk about low-impact, we need to be looking at the use of synthetic materials and over-consumption.

When I look at this issue, I see two separate problems. There’s one on the industry side that I’d like to talk about, but there’s also one on the consumer side where we now have a generation that have been conditioned into a certain sort of purchasing behavior. I think a lot about what my younger brother’s experience has been buying clothing. He’s 19 — he probably barely remembers a time before you could go to H&M and get a pair of jeans for 10 bucks. How do you think we can start to change that mindset? How do we make that understood and communicate the value?

To the people of that age?

To anybody, really. I’m just using that age group as an example because that’s all they’ve known.

FEIT’s market is from 30 to 50, and even a little bit older. They tend to be in the creative sphere. We sell our product to a lot of architects, a lot of people in the advertising industry. I think that wisdom comes with age. I almost think you need the years to be able to understand things in the manner that FEIT is looking for people to understand them. As people give weight to these ideas and change their habits, eventually that will trickle down. And kids grow up, they graduate to it.

I think it would be fair to say the most abused demographic, in a way, are the youth. They’re very aggressively targeted and marketed to and in a sense taken advantage of when they don’t really have more than 10 bucks to spend on a pair of jeans.

That age group is a tricky one. I think it will take a long, long time, but I do think when you’re young, you’ll tie yourself to causes more strongly than when you’re old, in a way. Even though they’re stuck in the consumer end of the cycle, it may be that when they really start to see the issue that it’s creating, as they stakes get higher, the youth can shift faster.

My feeling generally is that the industry will only react when they people stop buying their stuff. There has to be a will to change, but it’s also like trying to turn around an oil tanker. It’s not easy. I don’t even know where you would start.

I think there’s two parts. I look at our business. We’re doing what we can to make products from natural materials by hand. That’s one part. Then you look at Nike. They’re doing what they can to try and make products with no human involvement because it’s cheapest and the fastest. If they could find a way to do that and substitute the synthetics they use for natural materials, that could be at the same price, I’m sure they would probably do that. I think it’s possible that the mass scale of the industry gets there that way, and we stay where we are this way. Maybe you do get to a good balance.

I totally agree. It’s really easy and it feels good to paint corporations as evil monoliths, but I don’t believe anyone at Nike actively wants to destroy the planet. That doesn’t excuse anything, but then the challenge is to be able to innovate in such a way that the best way is also the cheapest way.

That’s right, and I think as awareness increases and people put more weight on those things, they’ll pay 20 dollars more for this or that because they know it’s a better material, better for the planet, it’s not going to end up in landfill, and you didn’t need a ton of energy to create it. I think it’s just a process of education. It starts with a few people doing something and then the bigger companies pay attention as the consumers start to follow it. FEIT’s following’s been building really well. I’m sure big companies look at that and think, “Oh, they must be tapping into something that’s there.” Then it snowballs.

I think that the movement’s on, and the way that information travels nowadays speeds all of that up, because people are becoming a lot more aware a lot more quickly. I think we’re heading in the direction of buying less things. I don’t think that everyone wants to have a wardrobe full of huge amounts of product in the future. I really don’t believe that. I think that they’ll be happy to have a few great things. I don’t think they’re going to need to have 40 pairs of shoes.

Right. I do want to talk specifically about your brand. This event that you had in New Museum — have you ever staged an event like this before?

No, we haven’t had anything quite like that before. We started in 2005. We ran for three years, then we closed the business for a few years. We kept our store in Australia running, but we closed the rest of the business. Then we restarted in 2010. We had an exhibition once where we just showed our products. We have our hand sewers, from time to time, in our stores, but we’ve never did anything on that type of scale.

What did this installation mean for the brand? What made you decide this is the time to really showcase what we do?

I think it’s been a gradual process. I’ve been back in New York now for eight years. I spend my time half on FEIT and then half on a partnership with Rag & Bone. My partner, who I have two kids with, has been working more and more on the business as well. It’s been gathering steam and momentum and that’s why we opened the shop here. The timing just felt right.

Can you tell me a bit about the hand sewer who was working during the installation?

He’s our master hand sewer. He I have been working together now for 12 years. His name’s Rock. He’s been perfecting that technique for 20 or so years. We have a team of people together who do our hand sewing, and he runs it.

How big is your team?

It’s 30 people.

I read a recent interview where you said you had nine, so you’ve grown quite a bit.

Yeah, we’ve grown a lot because we opened two shops here. We have one shop in Australia, we have an online business, and a small wholesale business. It’s grown a lot — well, not a lot. It’s tripled, but it’s off a small base. It’s grown a lot, and people are gravitating to it and appreciating it. It’s funny to see the people are who do versus the people who don’t.

You mentioned you sell a lot of shoes to architects, and that makes sense to me based on the design of your retail stores. How involved are you in the design of the shops?

I’m very involved in the design. The design of our retail stores in America and the installation last night was a collaboration between myself and a woman called Jordana Maisie, a friend from Australia who was an installation and lighting artist originally who’s here doing her Master’s in Architecture. She’s very, very talented. We have a lot of architects coming in here and saying, “This is great.”

Yeah, it is great. It’s a really pleasant retail experience.

Thank you. Where’s the fun in it if we can’t try to do something great? The main reason I try to stay in these businesses is just this continued pursuit of quality. Try to do something great. Try to do something new. Try to do something different.

Q&A by Adam Wray, Curator of FashionREDEF. You can follow Adam on REDEF and Twitter (@FashionREDEF, @Terminal_avenue), or reach him at adam.wray@redefgroup.com