Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/1434135
10 • Footwear Insight ~ November/December 2021 footwearinsight.com M itchell & Ness has relaunched the Hood Rubber Company footwear brand with seven heritage canvas and rubber sneaker styles, priced at $70-85. Hood was founded in 1896 in Watertown, MA and merged with B.F. Goodrich in 1929 before closing shop in 1969 aer years of developing and selling rubber-soled footwear. At its peak, Hood Rubber Co. produced 90,000 pairs of footwear a day, and its Watertown, MA, plant employed over 9,000 workers. Hood was one of the first brands to design and market footwear specifically for basketball with the debut of its first canvas upper high top as early as 1914. e newly launched line reflects the style and feel of the brand's original canvas low and high tops. n W ork boot brand Iron Age Footwear is featuring Richard Karn in a series of new videos. Karn has been working with the tools of the trade on TV for decades, first as Al Borland on ABC's Home Improvement and most recently on the History Channel's Assembly Required. In the clips, he heaps praise on Iron Age Work Boots with humor and straight talk. In one video, Karn educates on how to save a foot with metatarsal protective footwear from Iron Age. In another, he invites viewers to "just say no to (boot) crack" with Iron Age's industry-only crack-resistant leather. And Karn gives tough workers the okay to wear so toes for some jobs, profiling Iron Age's first-ever so toe offering, a boot not a slipper. — Cara Griffin Heritage Brand Hood Bounces Back Celeb Tool Guy Works It In Iron Age Clips RELAUNCH MARKETING THE FOOTWEAR EYE Richard Karn's Iron Age videos can be viewed on the brand's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube. com/channel/ UCfbho96HUSb- t8xzeu5h97A Hood 1967 Rocket High Cut Sneakers 90 C O S M Creation of Sustainable Materials ISA TanTec™ recently launched a new division called COSM, innovating and developing bio based materials. The first product launched is called: Hyphalite HP. www.liteleather.com • > 90% bio-based* • An alternative to petro-chemical based synthetics • Biodegradable *Results from test method ASTM D6866-21 • RSL Compliant