A piece of clothing touches many hands and travels across the globe (often multiple times) before making its way into a closet – from growing the fiber, to spinning the yarn, to milling the fabric, to dyeing the fabric, to sewing the piece. The environmental and social impact of clothing is driven by decisions at every one of these stages. While most brands are striving to integrate “sustainable” practices into their manufacturing, many only have visibility into certain supply chain stages and therefore can only address certain elements (e.g., paying fair wages to seamstresses yet having no visibility into the working conditions at the farm, using organic cotton yet having no control over the chemicals used when dyeing the fabric). Ultimately, this limits how “responsibly made” a piece of clothing can be and creates a lack of transparency around the true environmental and social impact of a purchase. 

To truly address this driver, we carefully select each of our supply chain partners so that we can control every decision along the way, like how all of our products are made from organic cotton and how we garment dye to reduce inventory waste. 

Focusing on How Clothing is Made is not enough. With today’s brands creating thousands of new styles per year, the impact from the Quantity of Clothing Made is often ignored. At the end of the day, every new piece of clothing consumes resources, even if it is more “responsibly made”. To make matters worse, new styles are often designed to be worn just a few times before being discarded into our ever-growing landfills.

To truly address this driver, we only release a few basics per year and spend nearly a year perfecting every detail of each one, in order to ensure they are worn day after day, for years to come.