Why we said 'Adiós' to synthetic dyes

You might have noticed that we switched from vibrant color palettes in 2017 to a more neutral denim based color-way in 2018. A friend recently asked us why we switched to only recycled denim and naturally dyed threads. Was it for aesthetics or about ethics?

Don't get us wrong, we LOVE color. Our Spring 2017 Red Jaspe will forever be one of our favorite fabric designs. But we decided to never use synthetic dyes again in our personal collections after our Fall 2017 collection.

In September of 2017, we were visiting a weavers house in a small town outside of Xela and we were talking about the production of our Fall line. As we were talking about timelines and consistency in the color, he made a joke that he knew when they were dyeing our burnt orange threads because the river turned orange for a couple of days.

We were stopped dead in our tracks...

It was a rude awakening that our small business (who's main purpose is to create good) could damage a small town's water supply. The next day we sat in a coffee shop and said never again. 

“Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after the agriculture industry.”

So starting with our Spring collection of 2018, we introduced our new palette of recycled denim threads. Our Fall line introduced it's first naturally dyed color (the light grey in the footloom stripe) and next Spring we're working on a new line of colors.

It’s not a pretty side of the industry that we usually don't want to talk about. After talking to our weaver and doing some research we found out that textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of clean water globally, after agriculture (check out this article).

Our goal is to always be transparent. In every decision we make we want to:
- Honor the maker
- Respect the environment
- Celebrate the customer

Thank you for going on this journey with us. We don't always make the perfect decisions but we're constantly striving to improve our practices and treat the environment with the upmost respect.

Shop our Fall Collection now!