Sourcing Sustainable Materials
Sourcing for alternative and sustainable materials can be overwhelming. In this blog post, Selina Ho shares tips on how to source sustainable materials and what factors you should consider when making your decision.
Do Sustainable Materials Exist?
Before we go over to searching and assessing our options, we must first ask ourselves if sustainable materials even exist in the first place. I know there’s a lot of pressure to choose the “best” and “most sustainable” material but let’s remove all that pressure because at the end of the day, in my opinion, there’s still no truly sustainable material. Everything will use some sort of energy and resources to be created — water, carbon emissions, etc. If you want to know more about this topic, you can go ahead and listen to Episode 114: Does Sustainability Even Exist? That being said, people will still buy, use, and wear clothes so materials will continue to be created.
How Do You Determine Which Materials To Use?
When choosing what kind of materials a brand should utilize, here are 2 important factors that we highly encourage our clients to consider:
Technical and Performance Attributes
There are several questions you should ask yourself before committing to a specific sustainable material.
What kind of materials will your garment need? — A super technical jacket that's going to be used for hiking will require a different material vs. an everyday cardigan.
What will your target market find the most breathable, comfortable, and beneficial? — I always tell my clients that they should always bring it back to the customers. The garment you're going to sell will touch their skin for hours and hours and hopefully, they'll be wearing it for years to come so you just want to put that in mind as well.
What will be the highest quality and long-lasting? — Choose a material that's long-lasting enough that it doesn't break for the customer but also balanced so that eventually, it will be able to break down in the landfill.
Sustainability Priorities
If you're a brand that doesn't have a huge budget or time because you're either just starting out or you're still a medium-sized business and everything is tight across the board, choose 1-2 sustainability priorities only. Before I share the high-level overview of items we work on with our sustainability consulting clients, I just want to say that although you’re picking 1-2 priorities, that does not mean you’re doing nothing in the other areas. For example, if you don’t choose ethical labour as one of your priorities, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be employing a child labour factory. It just means that you are focusing on other areas e.g. carbon emissions but you’re still doing the “bare minimum” to make you feel conscious and happy about your choice. Or if you don’t choose animal rights, it doesn’t mean you’re testing on animals but maybe, it means you’re not going to use vegan materials quite yet. If you want to go in-depth about the priorities and how to choose them, listen to Episode 116: Incorporating Sustainability With Limited Funds, Resources, and Time.
Based on these two factors, you can now choose the best material for your brand. It won’t be 100% perfect — it’s not black and white — but at least you have put thought and frameworks around this and arrived at this decision. I always emphasize progress, not perfection. The innovation and accessibility may not yet be there for your brand so it’s best to do what you can right now. Nicole Rawling, the co-founder and CEO of MII, talks about it in our interview in Episode 127.
How To Source Materials?
Once you’ve decided on a couple of materials that would work from a technical and performance perspective which also align with your sustainability priorities, it’s time to source!
Mills — Reach out to mills and ask for swatches of the fabric and then for your favourite ones, request more yardage/meters so you can make samples.
Deadstock fabric — If you're working with synthetic fabrics, or you want to be a vegan brand but want to introduce a silk piece, you could go this route and use already existing materials that would've otherwise gone to the landfill. A good resource is the Queen of Raw. We interviewed the Founder and CEO Stephanie on Episode 123 of our Recloseted Radio Podcast.
If you're starting from scratch and you want to find mills and deadstock fabric companies, Google is your friend. Search online and ask your network. Do your due diligence! You can also work with sourcing experts on our team to save yourself time, budget and resources.
Quality Control Tips
Quality control is extremely important before you settle on a material. You would want to test the fabric out. I once had a client who didn't properly test her fabric (this was before she started working with us) and then she ended up having to do a product recall because the pants that she sold kept on ripping when her customers wore them. It was a nightmare situation to fix and there was a lot of wasted money and materials involved. Swatch — stretch, pull, wash (hot and cold) — do all things necessary. Create samples with the material as well and do the same process. Be quite rough with it and do things a customer might do.
If you’re a slow fashion founder and you’d like help with your sustainability strategy, sustainability priorities, sourcing materials and manufacturers, reporting impacts, and communicating efforts to customers — we can work together through our Sustainability Consulting Services. Our team only works with a limited number of clients every year so if you’re interested in working together, you can request a complimentary consultation to see if it’s a fit to work together and create a tailored consulting package for your needs.
