Sustainable shopping through Perigon technology

A project by Crocs, Perigon and London artist Tejumola Butler Adenuga

11. April 2022

The Corner Shop of Selfridges & Co on Oxford Street is one of London's most famous department stores. And it is here that a very special project will take place in April 2022. The motto: Let's change the way we shop! It's about sustainability, about questioning our consumer behaviour and changing people's thinking for a better future - and Perigon is part of this exciting project

Under the name “Project Earth”, Selfridges & Co aims to get people to rethink without compromising the shopping experience. As part of this project, SUPERMARKET has now opened. This is a four-week retail experiment. In “The Corner Shop” there are various pop-up stores for this period that show customers what shopping could look like in the future.

The focus is always on sustainability. For example, a robot arm over two metres tall uses 3D printing to make useful everyday items such as chic sunglasses from marine plastic.

Together with Crocs, Perigon is also involved

In the Crocs Store, sustainability is lived in the sense of print on demand. Only what is actually needed is produced. On the one hand, this reduces the creation of waste, and on the other hand, the shopping experience is all the greater for the customers, because they get products made individually for them within a few minutes and can also see them live.

The process is quite simple:

The customer buys white Crocs in the store.
He then chooses a design from various motifs created by London artist Tejumola Butler Adenuga especially for this project.
This design is then transferred to the shoes in a Perigon oven using the patented HDMF technology…done!

Afterwards, the shoes are ready to go – no song time, no wrong shoe sizes or designs you don’t like. It is produced according to the customer’s wishes, so there is no waste due to misproduction or overproduction.

Tejumola Butler Adenuga

The creative mind behind the designs printed on the Crocs is Tejumola Butler Adenuga. The Nigerian-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist and designer focuses on a subtle, minimalist approach to intentionally eliminate the information overload of today’s world. His art is particularly striking for its clarity of content and the purity of objects in their rawest form. He shows “how it is possible to dissect the physical personality without eliminating the elemental aspects of attraction that many contemporary people identify with,” according to his website https://butlerarchive.com/artist-statement.

The artist’s story about the designs

The story that Tejumola Butler Adenuga has developed around his designs is very special and perfectly reflected in the motifs:

194 million light-years away from earth, a distand planet called Ekun Otun lies an existence of an ancient Yoruba civilization consisting of 5 families, known as Sàki, Oke’ho, Iseyin, Iwawun and Eruwa. Each family controls each element of the planet’s nature: soil, hydration, heat, air, and space.

Alongside a royal crest each family has its custom footwear – with notable members inscribed as the families expand over generations. For the first time, the people of Ekun Otun are prepared to share this piece of their culture with Earth as part of an interstellar exchange.

Igi is a cultural artefact worshipped by all five families and has been cultivated over generations. It represents the interconnectedness of everything in the known universe and serves as the connection between all five families. It also serves as a reminder that amongst all family tribes, dependency is necessity to sustain life on the planet.

We have been authorised by five families to duplicate this cultivation process using ficus ginseng, a close relative to Igi. The advancement of 3D scanning and printing has also allowed us to replicate the traditional vessel they are planted in, as presented here.

Interview with Tejumola Butler Adenuga

1. How would you describe your art?
The artwork I produce mostly celebrates West African culture, tying in storytelling with a futuristic context. The generation of my artwork usually starts from photographic references that undergo an intentional removal of information excess through a subtle minimalist approach, this gets translated into two distinct styles, linework and dot work.

2. How did you come up with the idea of the designs for Crocs?
My approach to this was to add fiction to West African history and bring it forward to a scenario that could happen in the future, this ties in with the next stage of my practice which is world-building within artworks. A story of five fictional families with real names that control different elements that constitute the atomic makeup of the planet fits right within the aforementioned context.

3. What do you like most about this project?
I think that the merge between technology and art to create an end product has always been beautiful but this takes it to a different level with the sustainability element. The whole idea of bringing product production to the customer to prevent overstock and reduce carbon emissions puts myself and Crocs in the right direction for the future.