Sustainability: Doing the Right Thing for the Product, the People and the Planet
For the past 25 years, building quality products that last has been our approach to sustainability. Choosing materials for durability as well as performance has earned
us a reputation for quality and an extremely low warranty rate. We are proud of our ability to quickly identify common failure points and design them out of each iteration of our products. Despite our growing business, we have fewer and fewer damaged/returned items to sell at our warehouse sale each year.
From an ecological perspective, however, this focus on making durable products is not enough to meet the growing environmental challenges we face today. We’ve looked at the ways in which our manufacturing processes impact the environment, and identified areas for improvement. Our goal is to make a meaningful change to our environmental impacts, without sacrificing the durability and high level of performance we demand from our products. This is a balancing act: how do we do the right thing for the product, the people, and the planet? A “Recycled” Label is Not Enough Including more recycled content in our products is among our goals, but it does not address the biggest environmental impacts of producing waterproof-breathable technical apparel. The energy used to power production facilities and the chemicals used in textile dyeing and production are often the cause of the most pollution in the manufacturing chain. The bluesign® system works to combat this by uniting the entire textile supply chain to jointly reduce its impact by eliminating substances posing risks to people and the environment from the beginning of the supply chain. We are already using bluesign® certified dyes on our new Clean Color apparel collection, and plan to expand that line with each factory build, eventually moving to bluesign® certified dyes for all our products. The factory that produces 80% of our garments is already bluesign® certified, as is our primary fabric mill and we are committed to helping our other factory partners achieve bluesign® certification over the coming years. 6
