Reclaimed
Introducing Reclaimed
A selection of products made from fabric off cuts.
Lockdown has undoubtedly slowed many businesses down for the last 12 weeks. It’s definitely been tough for manufacturing in Australia with many of our makers forced to stay home, retailers forced to close, and limitations at nearly every stage of production causing delays.
What at first seemed like dead time has become invaluable time as we shifted our focus to our brand values, intentions and practices here at the JB studio. It’s been a surprisingly helpful reset to reflect and commit to new goals for the brand that are kinder on our planet.
In particular, we’ve taken a hard look at some of the invisible waste created in our design process - called “pre-consumer waste”. Pre-consumer waste is the waste that is generated in the production of finished yarns and textiles, including off-cuts, selvages, fabric flaws and faulty garments. This waste doesn’t often make it to the consumer and is commonly disposed of at the cutting stage: patterns are laid on a large cutting table and arranged like a jigsaw to use as much fabric as efficiently as possible, however depending on the style there is always some fabric left over. Most of this pre-consumer waste is sent to landfill in Australia - the customer (and often, designer!) never even sees it!
It is our commitment to align with responsible practices in all areas of business, and designing out waste is a huge factor when it comes to a vision for a circular economy in fashion. So, earlier this year, when we asked our cutter Landy (made in Aus link) to save our production off-cuts, we could not believe our eyes when we saw just how much leftover fabric there was from our small production run that would usually be sent to landfill without us knowing about it! This gave us a much better picture of our waste footprint in the production phase, and gave us plenty of ideas about how we could definitely repurpose this into useful products as part of our responsibility as producers.
What at first seemed like dead time has become invaluable time as we shifted our focus to our brand values, intentions and practices here at the JB studio. It’s been a surprisingly helpful reset to reflect and commit to new goals for the brand that are kinder on our planet.
In particular, we’ve taken a hard look at some of the invisible waste created in our design process - called “pre-consumer waste”. Pre-consumer waste is the waste that is generated in the production of finished yarns and textiles, including off-cuts, selvages, fabric flaws and faulty garments. This waste doesn’t often make it to the consumer and is commonly disposed of at the cutting stage: patterns are laid on a large cutting table and arranged like a jigsaw to use as much fabric as efficiently as possible, however depending on the style there is always some fabric left over. Most of this pre-consumer waste is sent to landfill in Australia - the customer (and often, designer!) never even sees it!
It is our commitment to align with responsible practices in all areas of business, and designing out waste is a huge factor when it comes to a vision for a circular economy in fashion. So, earlier this year, when we asked our cutter Landy (made in Aus link) to save our production off-cuts, we could not believe our eyes when we saw just how much leftover fabric there was from our small production run that would usually be sent to landfill without us knowing about it! This gave us a much better picture of our waste footprint in the production phase, and gave us plenty of ideas about how we could definitely repurpose this into useful products as part of our responsibility as producers.
Meet Reclaimed. A JB initiative that shines a light on our formerly invisible waste and upcycles our off-cuts into totes, scrunchies and drawstring bags. We have created a few different sized patterns that we apply to the various pieces of off-cuts we receive from our cutter to create a versatile range of products and use every last inch of scrap (our totes even got a pocket upgrade for your keys or phone to ensure we can use the smaller leftover squares of scrap!). Our totes and scrunchies are available for purchase, and our drawstring bags are a responsible packaging solution that we’ve implemented to help us meet our circularity goals.
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GOLDEN HOUR
