“When I design the clothes I don’t compromise on sustainability.”
Running a sustainable fashion brand comes with its challenges. When I design the clothes I don’t compromise on sustainability. For example, I have recently designed a jacket which I love so much but we couldn’t make the fabric without a percentage (no matter the size) of virgin polyester in the fabric base. So we simply can’t make it... until we’ve nailed the fabric! We use this way of working across all divisions of our business.
As fashion is already one of the largest polluting industries we were conscious about combining this with another huge polluting industry, transportation. So we made the decision as a brand early on not to ship overseas until we had a solution on how to minimize our carbon footprint when delivering
“we aren’t in a position to invent an electric plane anytime soon….”
However this is much easier to say than to actually do. Firstly we aren’t in a position to invent an electric plane anytime soon and I’m not sure Susie in Japan is going to wait 3 weeks for a ship to arrive to receive her jeans. And frankly speaking, not selling overseas was capping our income and halting our potential growth.
Logistics in a sustainable way is a minefield and we are still trying to make sense of it the best we can. Our initial decision to not deliver overseas we admit now was a little short sighted as this limits our brands reach, which limits our income, which therefore limits our positive impact we are trying to achieve.
So we needed to rethink our logistics! We did our research knowing how important it is to tackle this obstacle properly while keeping inline our ethos as a brand. Like with our way of thinking in how we create our clothes we are learning everyday how to be better and its key for us to work with a logistics partner that also have sustainable development at the heart of what they do.
“Hermes will have achieved their target of a 30% reduction in Co2 emissions by 2020”
We work with Hermes to deliver our UK orders so they were naturally one of our options. What’s great is Hermes will have achieved their target of a 30% reduction in Co2 emissions by 2020. This is a brilliant and hopeful start to really making more impactful changes in the years to come. We have attached Hermes sustainable goals for you to have a gander……https://www.hermesworld.com/int/about-us/responsibility/climate-environment/climate-friendly-logistics/
I am aware our decision to ship overseas will come with questions and possible negativity due to the environmental impact it will still have. However, I do want to stress that this decision doesn’t come easily and we do know what needs to be done to make our logistics better and we are working on them every day.
So, after lengthy chats with our partners at Hermes we have decided to press the button on worldwide shipping.
PEACE
Love Frankie xx
