Our vision of sustainability

 

Long time before sustainability became a trend a few things already made sense anyway. We developed the brand to transfer all-time classics into the NOWADAYS world. We never followed the last trend or the goal to set a new trend every day or every week. We think style goes beyond the season and any trend. There are wonderful styles in the world of fashion that make you look effortless cool. We found our approach to add this with the NOWADAYS stylistic. These styles are from our perspective not always the latest trend. We are talking about timeless pieces with a little twist to make them special. Number one fact to be sustainable is to wear your cloths beyond the season. To do so, the styles need to be designed to make you happy for long term. 

After this first statement we should talk about quality. Material and workmanship are key to a quality garment. Our vision of quality is based on deep product development know how. We think that cotton is a fantastic material to do our shirts and a wide range of our knitwear. From our perspective nothing goes over a 100% cotton shirt. Unfortunately, you “have to” iron it now and then. All non-iron or easy-care shirts use chemicals to be wrinkle free, for sure. The ironing takes care of the fabric and the yarn, pushes the fiber into the right natural direction. The most sustainable shirt might be the one surviving in your wardrobe season by season and being worn with style and attitude. 

Pure cotton as well as cotton blends with merino wool or silk are great yarns for our long-life knitwear styles. Sometimes it even makes sense to add some nylon. If the knitting is very open and loose nylon will keep it in shape and help to keep wearing it.  

Next step is to talk about organic cotton. Organic cotton gets better every season.  The long staples fibers are improving every year. We are using more and more organic yarns and implement this into our collection were ever it makes sense.

All these mentioned facts are a big part of being more and more sustainable. Good thing is that it is only possible with long term production partners as well as their long-term employees. This approach, these given facts make it fair. We know that our partners have fantastic employees and they treat them as their family. We do not change our factory partners for a better price, we develop solutions and processes to get to a fair price. Season by season, year by year.

Beyond these major facts there are many small things we are working on. When it comes to transport, we have totally stopped air shipments. The CO2 footprint of our company is one of our most looked at factors and air shipments are making it very hard for any garment to be sustainable anyhow. 

We are now working on the buttons in our shirts. We found out that our spare buttons are produced, seamed into the care label, transported to Europe and cut out by our customers, to be put into their little button box. No need to put out the calculator to assume how many buttons are produced and shipped for no reason. In future we will put a QR code into our care label and our customers can order a spare button if needed. 

We are also working on removing any plastic from the shirt packaging beside the poly bag. We are on a good way to get this done in 2022.

Good thing is that beside our style and quality approach we are safe that we never had any issues regarding the dying process of our cloth.  We monitor all dying and washing processes by our partner factories in order to use as less color and water as possible.

In 2022 we will introduce our first “GOTS” certificated Pullover. It is a fantastic style and a fantastic yarn from BROS we are using. The spinning mill is using a very high percentage of solar energy to spin that yarn. That makes it even more sustainable. 

We are sure that we are on a good way, some major things are put in place, but we know there is room for improvement and development. We are working on that. Step by step. Every day.