What Are Golf Shoes Made Of?

Mostly virgin synthetics. That's the honest industry answer, so let's start there.

A typical modern golf shoe is a stack of petroleum products: a microfiber or synthetic-leather upper, an EVA or TPU foam midsole, a thermoplastic outsole, all of it made from virgin material and none of it built to be anything else afterward. MIT researchers counted 65 discrete parts and more than 360 manufacturing steps in a typical athletic shoe — about 30 pounds of CO2 per pair, most of it from manufacturing. It performs fine. It also means the "leather look" on most golf shoes is plastic, and the whole shoe starts as new raw material and ends as landfill.

Here's the same teardown on a MACAW Golf, part by part.

The upper is actual leather — full-grain and suede from natural US hides, tanned at Bojos, a gold-rated tannery in the Dominican Republic. Real leather costs more than microfiber and it's worth it: it breaks in to your foot, breathes, and has natural water resistance.

The midsole and insole are recycled performance foam from Blumaka — up to 85% recycled content derived from factory foam scrap, rated for a thousand miles of cushion. The insole is Blumaka's $55 Max Cushion, the same one they sell on their own site.

The outsole is Vibram Ecostep, a spikeless rubber compound made with 30% recycled rubber, from the company that soles mountaineering boots.

The construction is a cupsole with the feel of a vulc — the same skate construction that means little to no break-in period. It's assembled by the crew at DMG International in Santiago, Dominican Republic. The hides come from the US and get tanned at Bojos, in the same city as the factory.

That's the full bill of materials. Nothing exotic, just better answers at every layer than the virgin-plastic defaults that have become industry standard.

MACAW Golf and Skate. Designed in Costa Mesa, California. Assembled in the Dominican Republic.