Sustainability
Recycled Clothing
Our items are vintage and have been given a new life.
Zero Waste
Almost nothing from our store ends up in landfill.
Sustainably Shipped
Home compostable packaging via carbon neutral service.
+ more
All the specifics
100% Recycled Clothing
Almost everything sold in our store was made 20+ years ago, with the exception of a few items that are handmade by Mia. We buy all our clothes exclusively from second hand and sustainable stores and encourage you to do the same if you can.
Every item we sell has been given a second life. Otherwise they might have ended up in landfill or cut up for rags like many donated clothes. For more info, please see the report by Foreign Correspondent, called Dead White Man's Clothes.
We are passionate about choosing items that will last you a lifetime. This means quality pieces in timeless and iconic styles. If you don't need them quite that long, they'll maintain their quality and often increase in value so that you can re-home them rather than throwing them away.
Natural fibres are our favourite - although unfortunately many vintage surfwear gems were made with synthetics. Please be aware that washing these items not only ages them more quickly, but can release micro-plastics, especially from fleece. Please spot clean where possible, then choose to use a Microfiber Filter or bag such as a Guppyfriend, to help protect our waterways.
Our Packaging
We ship your items in home compostable mailers from Australian owned company Hero Packaging. Just chuck them in with your veggie peels and they'll decompose until they're worm dinner.
However, we are also committed to reusing all packaging we receive, which is often plastic. Like you, we do our best to refuse plastic but many of our items are sourced from private sellers who don't have sustainable packing options readily available. We hope this begins to change, with AusPost stocking their own home compostable mailers in some areas.
Our reused packaging is not always pretty, but we believe it is the most sustainable choice to reuse first. This is despite the collapse of Australia's soft plastics recycling program, Red Cycle.
Consider the benefit of reusing a plastic bag that already exists and has already been shipped to our location. It can be reused countless times before heading to landfill. The alternative option is discarding it immediately and opting for one of our home compostable bags. The home compostable option has its own inevitable environmental footprint in production and transportation, and will disintegrate after a handful of uses.
We have decided to take this initiative one step further and accept used mailers from our wider friends and family. If you have a growing collection of plastic mailers please contact the businesses you regularly make purchases from and request they make changes, but also contact us, as we might be able to put your bags back into rotation.
We hope you will be on board with the occasional ugly plastic mailer from us in the name of reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. We hope you also find ways to reuse these mailers yourselves, whether shipping items to friends or growing parcel bag pot plants.
What's Inside
We don't wrap our items in any fancy packaging like tissue paper, we just use a little string of raffia to keep your parcel looking neat - its a thin strip of palm leaf that is also compostable and sustainable.)
Any notes or stickers included in our parcel are made from recycled paper, FCS certified and can be recycled.
Carbon Neutral
As well as sending our parcels to you via a carbon neutral delivery service, we offset all our emissions. This includes everything from our vehicles, to electricity use, and international shipments. Greenfleet is an amazing not-for-profit environmental organisation which supports local reforestation projects in order to offset carbon emissions.
Anyone can do this and it's affordable - we reckon you should jump on there now and offset your car. We know that carbon offset isn't perfect, but we believe that every little bit helps.
Zero Waste
We don't want anything that we need to run our store, or anything that we send to you to end up in landfill or the ocean. While still not perfect, our store is s close to zero waste. We're always finding small ways to reduce - whether its reusable lint rollers rather than single use, or returning swing tags to the op shops that reuse them.
Just like you, we're also out here reusing wherever possible, composting, carefully sorting our recycling and seeing the areas where we still have work to do. When we do discover something creating waste, we can almost always find a local Aussie business with a solution. We're super proud to be supporting these innovators that we've mentioned here, plus many more.