Braden is our Co-Founder and CEO of Casca. We sat down with him to chat about what wellness means to him, his personal wellness routine, as well as how Casca approaches wellness as a whole.


Introduce yourself!

Hello, my name is Braden Parker and I am the Co-Founder of Casca Footwear.

What have you learned across 5 years of building Casca?

It took us a long time to really intrinsically understand what customers cared about and things have changed a lot since we were first in the basement of Kitsilano. Something we realized after really listening and having these conversations with customers was that people cared about support, they cared about comfort, and they wanted the best shoes that could help them with their daily lives. The problem was that everyone's feet are different, and how everyone goes about their day is also super different. So we wanted to come up with a purpose that could really link those two things. And for us, it's Casca: Made for the Daily Pursuit of Wellness.

What does wellness mean to you?

To me, wellness is a little different than most people– wellness has to do with this idea of holistic living. It’s looking at your small habits from when you wake up, to where you're shopping, to the food you're getting, to the activities you do each day and living in unison with those values or those activities and all those things.

 

 

What are some of the small habits that make up your existing wellness routine?

  • I love to wake up before anyone else and just feel like I'm starting my day in this sort of like calm, cool and collected manner.

  • I try not to look at my phone when I first wake up. If I don't look at my phone, I feel way better than if I do.

  • And then I make my smoothie the night before (which most people probably find disgusting), chug my smoothie, and I immediately make coffee and I sit down, read the news, and kind of get ready for the day.

What is a proactive approach to wellness?

I think a proactive approach to wellness is continuing to look at how you're living your life. As we get older and as our bodies change, and as the world changes, we go from summer to winter and fall– how are you treating your body the right way and how are you treating your mind the right way?

How does Casca fit into a proactive approach to wellness?

So at Casca, we see shoes as a tool. Wearing shoes that support your body as you go out and do everything that you need to do in a day is the quickest, easiest, and most impactful thing you can do for your feet.

 

 

So do you think people think enough about their daily footwear choices?

So I think when it comes to daily footwear, most people are focused more on fashion and how it looks, but people aren't necessarily thinking about the function that you can actually derive out of a daily shoe. You look at soccer, you look at football, you get different sports, and most people are focused more on the function first and a little bit less on fashion. But when it comes to a shoe that you're going to wear every single day, combining that fashion function is something that's really important.

So Braden, what can consumers expect from the future of Casca?

So moving forward, all of our shoes are going to come with SmartFit™. We've moved our entire manufacturing line to Portugal and we'll be releasing some really cool, new, daily silhouettes. And last but not least, we're going to be discovering what the daily pursuit of wellness means for different types of people.

 

Which shoe from the range is your favourite?

So, so far, my daily shoe from our range is what I'm wearing right now, which is the Onda in White.

 

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