INTERVIEW #2 RESIDUS
I had the amazing opportunity to meet the team and founder behind Residus to talk about their work, the change they want to create and what they think about the fashion industry! Read this! One of my absolute favourite brands.
Why did you start Residus?
I wanted to start my own brand after working in the fashion industry and seen how dirty it is. For a long time, I wanted to have a more sustainable brand so people could consume better. By having my own brand I could be a part of changing the fashion industry. I knew that there was plenty of textile waste in the production line when you produce clothes, called surplus fabric. I wanted to make something useful of those textiles that are otherwise just thrown away. I actually started the brand before I had the product. The rest of it we had to figure out along the way. I’m glad Eva-Lena joined the process with design and helped to launch the first collection. We’ve been on the market for two years now.
Why dresses?
When i worked in the fashion industry I met a lot of people that said there’s no good brand for dresses. It was a demand for something better. But the summer season in Sweden is short and not everyone like to wear dresses during the winter, so now we are launching new products. Sustainability is the key factor in our business model.
What ’s your sustainability work?
We have three legs: bases for your closet made out of sustainable produced materials, surplus fabric we use for our seasonal collections where we can design according to trends and the third leg is collaboration for change. Like the bags we just launched. We use leftover materials and design something new.
All of our newly produced materials are Eco-vero certified, those materials are traceable all the way to the plant where the fibre comes from. The fibre comes from a company called Lensing, the same one that developed Tencel. Ecovero is a new material, it is a viscose without strong chemicals, in this process the chemicals are being used all over again in a closed loop system. Eco-vero has 50% lower climate impact compared to a normal viscose. The wood fibre, that viscose is made of comes from sustainable recourses and we can trace it.
We would like to use 50-50 when it comes to Eco-vero and surplus fabric, but sometimes there’s not the surplus we want or need on the market. It needs to live up to our standards of high quality. Recycled fibre is also popular now in the fashion industry but if the quality is not good then we can’t produce clothes that will last. We want to produce clothes that last – we call it Years in the Wardrobe – YIW – and that number should be as high as possible.
We can also add that our way of producing clothes means that we’re mostly operating within Europe, actually in Portugal. We want full insight in the production for the new material. Surplus is harder, it can be hard to know the original source of textiles when you buy another company’s surplus.
We are also developing a new project with Trust-trace to find ways to communicate sustainability to our customers. We want to calculate carbon and water footprint on our production line so we can be transparent to the costumer. Everything should be transparent.
What has been and is the major challenges?
Honestly, it is to have enough costumers – more people are getting interested in sustainable fashion, we can see that a lot of people are visiting our website and so on, but it doesn’t lead to new consumers. More people should give up fast fashion and invest in better brands that take more responsibility and produce with higher quality. The challenge is to educate in a simple way the regular fashion consumer to change their behaviour towards a more sustainable one.
Another challenge is the sourcing, it is very time consuming to find better ways to produce clothes. Traditionally the process from design to production has developed a method everyone is following. To find new ways to lower your impact on the environment and be more socially responsible takes time. In the traditional way you will just send the order to different producers and compare prices, but we have other standards we want our producers to fulfil and the market for sustainable production is not very large. And this is just the clothing material, how do we find the best packaging material, environmentally friendly transportation and so on? The list goes on.
What has been/is the largest gains? (in any means financial, spiritual.. )
The largest gain is all the lessons we learned. I’ve been reflecting so much myself about how I consume, I think a lot about the future of my children. This is a gift regardless of how the business goes. And we know we are not perfect as a company – but we are trying to change the view of consumers and the retailers. We’re a small company but we can see that our demands are effecting the producers – when we ask for something, we make them think about it.
What do you think needs to change now in the fashion industry to make it more sustainable?
The fashion brands needs to have higher standards. It must be clear during production what is expected. The more we are that try to change the business from the inside the better. We also need to be more transparent towards the customers. They need to know what choices they are making.
What do you believe is “greenwashing” and what can producers and consumers do to avoid it?
E-mail the brand and ask! If you get a response or not, and what kind of response says something about the way the brand is handling such businesses.
(Jonna) I had an experience while working on Gina Tricot when the book Modeslavar (fashion slaves) was published, the whole company got an email from the boss saying that we are not allowed to comment on it to anyone. I read the book myself and I had so many questions and none of them were addressed. That is not taking the issues seriously.
Another idea is to see if the brand is using any kind of certification. You have to be a critical consumer that actually read about the brand before you buy any of their products. An example of greenwashing can be clothes made out of PET-plastic bottles but when you really read the label inside the shirt, you realise it’s only a few percentage – what about the rest?
You should aim for brands that actually has sustainability in their business model and you’ll avoid being misled. They’re not without faults or 100% sustainable all the time, but at least they’re open about it and doing their best. You can feel more comfortable when you buy from them.
What would you advice consumers to do who seeks to create a sustainable closet and lifestyle?
The best one can do is to really think through what you buy. Only buy from brands that has sustainability in their business model, even if the product might not be perfect. If you do that, at least you’re supporting a brand trying to change the business. Normally the clothes are also produced in Europe and you’ll avoid several issues in the production line. Only buy what will last in your closet. Take care of your clothes and buy clothes of high quality!