Every component in a pair of Wayz sneakers, the vegetable-tanned leather, the recycled rubber outsoles, the latex insoles, the recycled cardboard box they arrive in, is sourced and produced within a seventy-kilometre radius of Porto. The leather comes from Curtumes Aveneda, a family tannery thirty kilometres south of the city; the outsoles from Bolflex; the insoles from Micos. It is a supply chain you could drive in an afternoon.

Pedro Maçana spent eighteen years at a retail multinational, managing operations across Spain, Portugal and France. At forty-two, he quit and enrolled in a footwear design course at the Lisbon School of Design. There he met Daniel Gonçalves, who was younger and had come from a different background but shared the same obsession: sneakers. They agreed early on that everything, design, sourcing, production, would stay inside northern Portugal. No outsourcing to Southeast Asia, no opaque middlemen. In May 2019, they put The Misfit, their first model, on Indiegogo and sold around two hundred pairs a month. By the end of the year, the online store was running. Three months later, they opened a shop in Bonfim, one of Porto's grittier neighbourhoods.

Wayz produces seven sneaker models, The Misfit, The Sonder, The Verve, The Spark, The Hedonist, The Wanderer and The Grit, all made by the Cunha Brothers, a family-run shoe factory near Porto. The uppers use full-grain vegetable-tanned leather from Curtumes Aveneda, certified by CTIC, tanned with oak and chestnut bark rather than chrome. The suede comes from Curtumes Dias Ruivo. Outsoles are seventy-percent recycled rubber, made by Bolflex, stitched rather than glued so they can be replaced when worn. Insoles are recycled latex from Micos. Every pair is designed to be repaired through Wayz's own 2nd Life programme, resoling, reinforcing, deep cleaning.

Wayz does what most sneaker brands claim but few follow through on: naming every supplier, keeping every production step within driving distance of headquarters, and designing shoes that can be resoled rather than discarded. The fact that two founders in their forties and thirties built this from a crowdfunding campaign in Porto makes the story worth telling.