Our Packaging
We do our best to ensure that the packaging we use for your order does as little damage as possible to the environment. It has always been our aim to eliminate single-use plastic from our business, to only use sustainably sourced or recycled packaging, and to recycle all waste.
Mailing Bags
Following customer feedback, in 2023, we investigated alternative materials for our mailing bags and decided to switch to paper bags, placing our order at the end of last year. We've now fully traded through our older Green™ PE bags, and all our orders are now sent in new recycled paper mailing bags!
We thought a lot about the details when creating our new mailing bags - they’re both recyclable and compostable, and they’re reusable. We’ve added an extra strip of adhesive tape to allow our customers to reseal the bags and use them again in an effort to promote circularity, and they’re printed using water-based inks, which are more environmentally friendly than chemical-based ones.
Our warehouse packing team tries to select the most appropriate size mailing bag for your parcel to keep packaging materials to a minimum and to ensure maximum efficiency in transport.
Tags & Labels
All our garment labels are now made from certified organic cotton rather than polyester, as it is a more sustainable material. Rather than create excess waste by discarding our old unused stock of polyester labels, we have chosen to use them up before fully transitioning to the organic cotton versions.
The tags attached to our clothes are made from certified recycled paper, which means the paper used to make the tags comes from either post-consumer or pre-consumer reclaimed materials. The recycled paper for our tags is sourced from sustainably managed forests. By using responsibly sourced recycled paper for our tags, we are not contributing to the demand for sources of virgin materials, and we are helping to protect the world’s forests.
Our order notes, bookmark parcel inserts, cardboard, and paper for despatch packaging are also all made from recycled paper.
Plastic
As a business, we are actively working towards eliminating virgin plastic, and where a sustainable alternative to non-recycled plastic exists and is attainable for us, we are committed to using it. For now, though, aspects of our garment production, for example zips, buttons, and trims, still rely on virgin plastic, as recycled versions are not yet readily available to us.
All our clear plastic polythene bags are now made from recycled materials, which can, in turn, be recycled again. The clear plastic poly bags that our clothes are packaged in are there to protect your order - they keep the clothes clean and in the best possible condition for you to receive them in.
All these bags are classed as low-density polyethylene (recycling code PE-LD 04 or LD-PE 04) and are fully recyclable, usually via your recycling bin. It's always best to check the code with your local authority: generally, you can recycle this plastic if your local authority mentions bread bags, frozen food bags, squeezable bottles (like hand cream tubes), bubble wrap and carrier bags that can be stretched.
On our journey to find the most suitable sustainable packaging, we investigated using both biodegradable and compostable bags. In both cases, the shelf life was either too short, resulting in extra labour to repackage the clothing, or the packaging needed very specific conditions to break down completely. To break down effectively, the bags would need to be composted on a compost heap, something that most of our customers may not have access to.