Hi SustainableFashion community,
My wife and I started our little label A NEW SWEDEN three years ago.
Having worked for brands like Saint Laurent, Givenchy and Celine, my wife was tired of achieving a creative director’s vision at the expense of the environment.
We started A NEW SWEDEN to make beautiful, practical clothing without any compromises to sustainability.
Our first product was a sweatshirt.
We worked for over two years to make our own accountable supply chain for this sweatshirt.
This means we have the shortest supply chain possible; we do not use any plastics in the garment; we do not use any synthetic chemicals in processing our clothes; we work with the natural colours of the wool, using a blend of white and black wools to achieve a grey mélange; we visit and make visible our entire supply chain; we manufacture exclusively in Sweden (where the labour laws are very strict, and the salaries are high); our materials come exclusively from Sweden (where the animal protection laws are the best in the world) and we even don’t advertise on Facebook or Google because of the damage they are doing to the world.
To make a sweatshirt locally, in an entirely accountable way costs us about $175 per sweatshirt. Typically, a brand will multiply their cost price by three to get their retail price. We set our retail price at $375.
We understand it’s a lot of money to pay for a sweatshirt, but even with a bit over x2 markup, it’s hard for us to keep the lights on, and we’re definitely far away from drawing a salary from this.
On the plus side, the sweatshirt has been doing very well at the retailers that we’ve had the fortune to be stocked at, and they want more garments.
We’re currently running a Kickstarter to help fund the production to fulfil this retail demand, where you can get it for a 20% discount.
Oh, and it comes with a lifetime warranty.
We of course welcome your suggestions for how we can do better in the comments, and happy to answer any questions you might have about our practices.
P.s. we are trying to get listed on Good On You and have been trying for the last two years, but they take their time with small brands like ours :(
(TL;DR, my wife and I made a sweatshirt from 100% wool, from happy, Swedish sheep, that was sewn by well paid workers in Sweden, that is so natural, even the grey mélange is a result of blending black and white wool. We are running a Kickstarter to make the next production of it, where you can get 20% off the purchase price)
Submitted October 28, 2020 at 06:14PM by of_known_provenance https://ift.tt/35JgC6V
