How Clove sneakers is winning over healthcare workers with wacky food collabs

At first glance, Clove’s collaboration strategy may seem a little wacky. Why, you might ask, is a startup that makes sneakers for healthcare workers partnering with Land O’Lakes butter, Levain cookies, and Olipop prebiotic sodas?

It’s a good question, but there’s method to the madness. Clove’s team members spend their days studying the lives of doctors and nurses, and they’ve discovered that food is a rare source of pleasure and joy in a very stressful workplace. “I watch nurses get ready with me videos as a form of ethnographic research,” says Jordyn Amoroso, Clove’s co-founder and chief brand officer. “You see nurses pack their lunches with a baked good, or a healthy soda, because it might be the only happy moment in a difficult shift.”

Clove’s partnerships offer a fascinating glimpse into the wild world of food collabs that have exploded over the last three years. They’ve ranged from blockbusters like Rhode makeup’s partnership with Krispy Kreme to the absurd, like Arby’s collaboration with Old Spice. Still, brands say that smart food collaborations are now an important tool to standing out in the increasingly competitive grocery aisle and becoming lifestyle brands.

Tapping into collaborations is a radical move for a company in healthcare—an industry that isn’t known for being fashion-forward or trendy—helping it stand out from more established players like Nurse Mates and Alegria. Earlier this year, Clove dropped a butter-yellow sneaker in partnership with Land O’Lakes in a collaboration that went viral in the healthcare community, with more than 100 million impressions and thousands of butter-colored sneaker sold. And today, Clove is dropping a new collab with Olipop for socks that are emblazoned with the soda’s iconic fruit symbols.

A Fashionable Healthcare Brand

Joe Ammon founded Clove as a love letter to his wife, a nurse who spent 12-hour shifts in the ugly, uncomfortable shoes.

Healthcare workers are required to wear special shoes that are slip-resistant and waterproof because they’re exposed to bodily fluids; many hospitals also have a dress code requiring them to be black or white. Ammon felt that nursing shoe companies weren’t putting much care into how shoes looked or felt. In 2019, he launched Clove with a line of shoes that met all the functional requirements, but also had a much cushier insole and also looked more like a cool sneaker. The concept was a hit: The brand has now sold more than a million pairs.

Amoroso believes that Clove’s success comes, in part, by tuning into the worlds of doctors and nurses. For instance, the brand’s name does not refer to the spice, but is rather a play on medical lingo: Doctors use a line over the letter “c” as a shorthand for the word “with” so the brand’s name means “with love.” Each pair of shoes comes with a pen that says “for borrowing only,” since people notoriously steal nurse’s pens.

As Amoroso has spent time with healthcare workers, she’s seen that they care just as much about fashion and trends as other people, but the industry doesn’t treat them like other consumers. On social media, she’s seen nurses and doctors get excited about say, Rhode’s partnership with Krispy Kreme donuts or Studs’ partnership with Van Leeuwan ice cream. “Food collabs are everywhere now, and some are really cool,” she says. “Why shouldn’t healthcare workers get things that are fun and trendy? The industry seems to assume they are content with boring products.”

Clove’s first big food collab launched in September, when it partnered with Land O’ Lakes butter to launch a butter themed sneaker. Earlier in the year, another butter brand, Kerrygold, had gone viral on TikTok after it had taken influencers to Ireland, where they created swoony-worthy content of landscapes and food.

Land O’ Lakes and Clove attempted to create an equally fun moment by delivering influencers enormous yellow boxes that looked like sticks of butter, filled with everything from butter hair clips and tote bags, to butter yellow sneakers and socks, and cooler bags filled with butter. In some cases, they sent a butter butler to nurse’s homes to deliver sneakers on a silver tray. The collab was a success, generating upwards of 100 million impressions, and selling thousands of butter yellow sneakers.

Another collab with Levain came out of an insight that cookies were often a go-to treat after a long shift. “In a 12-hour shift, a nurse has seen people be born and die,” says Paula Belatti, Clove’s co-founder and COO. “Sharing a cookie with a co-worker is a brief moment of self-care.” Clove partnered with Levain bakeries near hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia to give healthcare workers coffee, cookies, and compression socks when they left their shift.

And today, just in time for the holiday season, Clove is launching its next big food partnership with Olipop, a brand that is well known for its viral marketing, from creating immersive hotel rooms inspired by its flavors to collaborating with a swimwear brand Kulani Kinis on soda-inspired bikinis. Clove customers will be able to buy a set of three socks for $40 that feature fruit icons. “They’re very nostalgic,” says Amoroso. “They’re inspired by ‘day-of-the-week’ underwear and socks millennials had when we were growing up in the 90s.”

Why Are Food Brands Obsessed with Collabs

Over the past three years, food brands have gone all in on collabs. Some have made sense, like when olive oil brand Graza partnered with Areaware to launch a ‘drizzle and drip’ serving set, or when the buzzy food brands Fishwife and Fly By Jing created cans of spicy smoked salmon. Others created buzz and cute products, like when Studs created ice-cream inspired earring charms with Van Leeuwen.

Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s director of strategic partnerships, says that collaborations have been a feature of the fashion industry for more than 15 years, when brands realized they had a powerful opportunity to tap into each others’ audiences, especially as the cost of marketing on social media has gone up.

But over the past five years, as the food industry has been flooded with new players, brands have needed to get more creative. “It’s not enough to focus on the food itself,” Vigilante says. “We want to become a lifestyle brand. Collaborations allow us to partner with likeminded brands to create an emotional connection with customers, so they choose us over the competition.”

But as food collabs became commonplace, some brands have needed get more bizarre and extreme in order to get any media attention. There was the time when luxury brands like Balenciaga partnered with Lay’s on a clutch that looked like a bag of chips or Kate Spade partnered with Heinz on ketchup themed accessories. Crocs created a clog that looked like a KFC bucket that came with an accessory that smelled like fried chicken. Arby’s created an deodorant with Old Spice supposedly designed tackle the sweats diners get after a meat-heavy meal. E.l.f. cosmetics dropped an eyeshadow palette inspired by Chipotle ingredients.

“In some cases, the partnerships don’t seem to make any sense,” Vigilante says. “They’re just kind of a cash grab, and it might put off the customer.”

Brands appear to be pulling back from the more absurd collabs, and focusing instead on partnerships that are authentic and logical. Olipop for instance, positions itself as a better-for-you soda, with low sugar and prebiotics, and it has been working to make inroads with hospitals. “Hospital kitchens and cafeteria offer regular soda, which doctors actively dissuade patients from drinking,” says Vigilante. “We’re offering a healthier alternative.”

Land O’Lakes, for its part, tends to attract older customers who have been using the product for years, but the brand has been trying to win over younger consumers. The Clove partnership made sense because the brand skews younger, and butter-colored products were having a viral moment on social media. “This collab was an opportunity to put ourselves in front of a new generation, and tell a story about how we’re not just their grandmother’s butter,” says Catherine Fox, Land O’Lakes’ VP of central marketing.

Clove and Olipop both have a pipeline of other collabs in the works for 2026, and they believe partnerships are a valuable tool in the arsenal for building a modern brand. “Collaborations don’t need to be surprising or outlandish to work,” says Vigilante. “It’s about giving your customers something fun to look forward to and telling a story about what your brand stands for.”