Challenge

• In 2005, my partner at Better thinking ltd and I set ourselves a challenge: show how it’s possible to make products which are both commercial and sustainable, ie embrace the triple bottom line.

• We chose the humble t-shirt as an iconic symbol of modern consumer culture, an everyday product that is used and embraced around the world.

Solution

• We open-sourced the entire journey, creating a website where we shared our learning and progress in real-time, taking input from the community we built up around the project. We explored crops, materials and fabric samples, approached manufacturing partners, experimented with clay-based natural dyes, and published a 2,000 word report on the impact of dyeing “Dyeing for a change”.

• We built and audited the whole supply chain ourselves. Sourcing the cotton from Peru, the only place in the world where you can find extra-long staple, luxury organic cotton that is grown without using groundwater for irrigation. We flew to Peru to visit the cotton farms and the fair-trade factory where it’s woven into yarn (along with a photographer so we could share the story with customers and community). Finally, we chose John Smedley as our manufacturing partner, selecting their knitted cotton technique to create soft, long-lasting t-shirts. We wanted to create a sustainable product that people would actually want.

Learning & Impact

• There are always trade-offs, especially when you are considering every single factor. Our t-shirt was a luxury product, but it was organic, low-water, fair-trade, offset for CO2 with a ‘gold standard’ scheme, manufactured with green energy, by a company that cares for its employees, in recyclable packaging - even the garment label was made with recycled polyester.

• ‘Luxury Redefined’ (as we eventually called it) was a huge success. It launched in Selfridges London and several stores in Tokyo, along with John Smedley’s regular stockists. It was recognsed as a standard-bearer for sustainable commerce - it featured in a theatre production in Copenhagen, was part of an international sustainability exhibition by the London Science Museum, and was covered by The Guardian, BBC and many blogs.

• We were also written about in books, featured in university reading lists, and we presented our case-study to the UK Government working group on sustianable textiles. So we helped to inspire industry and the next generation of designers to challenge norms and find intelligent ways to balance the triple bottom line.

Team

• Myself and co-founder, Mark Holt, were hands-on in every stage and drove the entire project. Sustainability champions Cate Trotter and Clara Vuletich helped to shape the product, enage with the community and publish our “Dyeing for a change” report. Rikke conducted our natural dye experiments. Photography on location in Peru by Adam Laycock. PR and press liaison by Nina Rennie.