Every brand and his dog now seem to be offering a range of eco-friendly clothing. And it’s about time too. We value sustainability and ethics as much as we value styling and cut. Every company has a duty to take care of the environment and we’re proud to be part of the growing collective who already do.
It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs when the most popular and widely used methods of clothing manufacture rely heavily upon taking advantage of underprivileged people and utilise processes that are seriously detrimental to the world we live in. In terms of effort and money, it’s a whole lot easier to produce environmentally damaging T-shirts (or denims or whatever) but when did anybody ever get any satisfaction out of doing something easy?
It’s not easy finding like-minded staff who genuinely give a damn (about something other than whether their sky-plus has caught the latest episode of Heroes). It’s not easy finding wind powered factories in India that make T-shirts. It’s not easy getting approval from SKAL or the Soil Association for your products and the places they’re produced. But that’s what we did and that’s why we’re content when we kick off our slippers and curl up at night.
We’re also feeling pretty happy with ourselves because we’ve managed to do this without inflating our prices. In fact, we actually donate 10% of our gross profit (i.e. before we’ve paid our wages and topped up the biscuit tin) to charity and still maintain what we believe are highly competitive prices.
We know that there are millions of people out there doing harder jobs (or more for the environment) with little or no reward so we don’t expect any special recognition for the decisions we’ve made. We do however like it when we hear about other people trying to do the right thing so we thought you might too.