With the retail industry’s focus on more, our planet and people are losing.

You’d be hard pressed to find a brand today that doesn’t market “sustainability”. While this increasing emphasis is crucial, we’ve found that the topic of "sustainability" is rarely addressed holistically. At Pareto, we’re committed to operating a business model that addresses both drivers of the industry’s negative impact on our planet and people…

1. How Clothing is Made

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 work directly with every hand that touches each piece and are transparent at every stage of our supply chain, like how all of our products are made from organic cotton (making them 100% vegan) and how our dye houses use water-minimizing processes and pretreat the wastewater to improve water quality. Think farm-to-table becomes farm-to-closet!

2. Quantity of Clothing Made

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 6-8 Wardrobe Additions 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.

As a brand, we believe it is our responsibility to not only do our part but also to help our Community do theirs. It’s a journey, but we’re all in this together! Follow along on social, email, or our blog, Our Musings, for resources that will help you become a more conscious consumer.