Clove Named Best Nursing Shoes of the Year 2025

Joe Ammon, Founder and CEO of Clove (@goclove), is an entrepreneur from Philadelphia. Six years ago, he witnessed his wife struggle to find a shoe that met her specific needs as a healthcare worker while working as a dermatology nurse.

"She was buying shoe after shoe after shoe, and didn't like the fit of this one and blew out the other one, and this one got stained," Ammon remembers. "And that was like the aha moment of, 'Wait a second. Nurses are super shoe users, but nobody is really raising their hand in designing the perfect sneaker style shoe for you.'" 

So Ammon decided to take that task on himself, founding Clove Shoes in 2019, right before the pandemic. His footwear designed for nurses, by nurses, took off during the pandemic's need for reliable and functional footwear for healthcare workers. 

Nurse.org proudly recognizes Clove as the Nurse Shoe of the Year in our 2025 Best of Nursing Awards. Continue reading to discover how Clove got its start, what Ammon hopes to see next for the company, and why Clove is committed to giving back to healthcare workers worldwide.

The Best of Both Worlds

Ammon tells Nurse.org that the initial prototype of the Clove shoe focused on combining the best of a clog (a popular in healthcare because it’s easy-to-clean and protective) with the comfort, support, and style of a sneaker. 

Despite having no background whatsoever in footwear, Ammon decided to focus on what he wanted the shoe to do for healthcare professionals like his wife. 

"I knew from a brand standpoint, there was an opportunity to be more real and honest about the highs and the lows of being a healthcare professional," he explains, noting that he hoped to make a shoe that recognized and celebrated the importance of healthcare workers while being real about what it takes to support them.

 "Our main tagline—and it's still on every shoe to this day—is: 'You support them. We support you,'" he adds. "And that's always been our kind of brand ethos and how we operate every day."

Clove Cares

Ammon and his wife welcomed their first baby in February 2019 and launched Clove in November 2019. By the time the pandemic had hit, their mission to provide healthcare workers with a fully cleanable, protective sneaker couldn't have come at a better time. 

From the brand's inception pre-pandemic, Ammon listened to real nurses, who were adamant that the focus of the sneakers be on how easy they are to clean—and it was a strategy that paid off. Clove sneakers are fully sanitizable, making them especially appealing during a global pandemic. 

"You can use the Sani-Wipes (the ones with the purple tops)  in the hospital with no degradation to the product," Ammon explains. "People would literally Sani-Wipe them every single day. If you do that on a knit shoe or, like, a running sneaker, it just destroys it. And so it's just like our product promise was, was perfect at that moment, giving people a small incremental sense of protection amongst what was a crazy, crazy time."

Ammon shares that he still gets emails from healthcare workers who thank them for providing shoes that can be sanitized. "They say, 'Thank you so much, my shoes are the one thing that I was so nervous about,'" he describes. 

The brand inevitably grew during the pandemic, and Ammon focused on the mission of supporting healthcare workers in every way possible. "We as a brand really tried to show up and give, give back," he explains. Since the start of the pandemic, Clove has donated over $2 million in products, from shoes to compression socks, to frontline healthcare workers across the entire country. 

"The mission of the brand was to show up for healthcare and make them feel respected and taken care of," Ammon says. "So we had the opportunity to do the thing that we wanted to do in a really meaningful way."

The Clove Difference

Ammon tells Nurse.org that their materials are part of what makes Clove shoes different, in addition to the real-life input and testing they have done with frontline healthcare workers. 

For instance, the shoes are made from a special fabric that he explains has the same microstructure as genuine leather, with the benefit of protective and durable capabilities. While leather footwear is durable and comfortable, leather is porous, which isn't ideal for healthcare workers who want to keep bodily fluids and germs out of their shoes. 

While some healthcare shoes address this, they may also lack style and functionality. To address these issues, Ammon brought in famous New York shoe designer Stuart Weitzman of Stuart Weitzman shoes. 

Ammon’s next steps to success involved working with the Chief Innovation Officer at the UPenn hospital to conduct a trial with a group of nurses wearing the first Clove shoe prototype.

"The feedback that came back was like, 'Whoa, you have figured something out here," Ammon describes. The nurses described the protective features and comfort as unbelievable. But there was one tiny problem: they all reported the shoe was "really ugly," he adds with a laugh. 

Fortunately, Clove got the looks part of the shoe down very quickly and now offers incredibly stylish sneakers for both men and women. His wife, Tamara, who was heavily involved in all the early designs, especially loves the line's Forte sneaker. "That's like, her main squeeze shoe," Ammon says- as well as the trendy Superboot she often pairs with leggings.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Clove (@goclove)

What’s Next for Clove?

Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, Ammon shares that the Clove brand will focus on releasing fun and bright colors as well as their first “lifestyle shoe” so even non-healthcare workers can get their feet in a pair of Cloves (or nurses can slip into their Cloves outside of work too, of course). The brand is also going global this year and is looking to get into scrub retail stores so healthcare professionals and other workers can try on their shoes in person. 

Ammon adds that recognition for this award "means the world" to his team and helps cement the brand's goal of being known as "the number one healthcare nursing shoe, period, no questions asked."

"I didn't get into this because I wanted to make a cool shoe," Ammon says. "I was designing this shoe because I wanted to make my wife and the lives of everyone that she's ever worked with better. We're doing this for a group of people that we love and respect and admire—our partners, our moms or dads or uncles or aunts or cousins."

As for the nurses, Ammon leaves them with one parting message about Clove shoes he wants them to remember:

"We are a shoe that does it all—just like you."

🤔Nurses, would you rock a pair of clove shoes at work? Share your comments in the forum below!