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The story of This is Unfolded starts with a truly terrifying fact.
That’s billions of items a year, wasted! Just think of all the water, energy and human effort that goes into that. It's shocking.
items of clothing have been dumped since you started reading this page.
In 2021 we launched This is Unfolded - a brand new way to shop that removes waste from the production process and uses the savings to offer great prices to you for sustainable/ethical products, ensures higher wages for workers and funds positive impact in the world. Every order supports a child in education around our factories, helping secure a better future for the local community.
By designing with data, involving our community in every decision we make, only producing clothes after you order and by reviewing every part of the process to make it as efficient as possible, we're able to make clothes that aren’t just great looking but have a positive impact in the world - all from removing waste from the process!
At the heart of This is Unfolded is our community. You.
Everything we do is in collaboration with our customers. The design of each sustainable clothing collection is a collaborative process, where over 4,000 women take part, deciding what we will make next, including colours, prints, styles and whether our next eco-friendly dress should have pockets or not. We invite our customers to come on model shoot days, taking photos of the clothing collections, with professional hair, makeup and photography. We run community events and swapping days, bringing together sustainability focused shoppers from local areas to see our eco-conscious clothes up close. And we listen to all the feedback we get, from the hundreds of 5 star reviews on Trustpilot, to customer calls, emails and chat. This is Unfolded IS our community.
Back in 2014 we set up a company called Mallzee to change shopping for consumers and help major brands understand which products to avoid producing to try and tackle this huge problem - both for their businesses and for the planet.
We worked with a range of major brands, grew to 25 people and had big visions for the future. In reality, it turned out that many companies didn’t care about tackling this issue as much as we did.
For many, the waste created is just part of the cost of doing business…
And for some fast fashion brands, it’s kinda their whole business model!
When the pandemic hit, the world changed dramatically. With the UK entering lockdown in March 2020 everything stopped; our clients closed down stores and the data we had produced for the last 12 months quickly became almost worthless.
At this point we started to read stories about big fashion brands canceling orders of clothes from factories in some of the poorest parts of the world, without payment. The clothes were made, but the brands wouldn’t pay for the orders they had produced and cancelled, leaving factory owners and garment workers in a terrible situation. A line that particularly struck us was from a factory owner in Bangladesh (over 80% of Bangladeshi exports are clothes) to the BBC.
"If Coronavirus doesn't kill my workers, starvation will..."
Over the next 3 weeks a small group of us worked day and night to come up with some way to help. We decided to buy the clothes made by these factories directly and sell them to shoppers all around the world without the brands, and to use the money generated to help the garment workers facing such hardship.
We called this offering Lost Stock. Shoppers could buy a mystery box of clothes, that would be filled based on their size, age, gender and colour preferences, with clothes cancelled by big brands without payment. For every box bought we supported a garment worker and her family for a week. It had a lot of benefits - stopping new clothes going to landfill, helping factory workers at and people in the local community during a horrible time.
Our little team in Scotland aimed to sell 10,000 of these boxes.
Instead we sold 125,000… in 10 countries. In 7 months. A huge impact on the world in a really difficult time!
We supported over 113,000 people for a month each in Bangladesh through our partnership with the Sajida Foundation.
An incredible initiative, not without its challenges, but it proved that the world needed change - and that people were willing to shop differently.
So that’s our story so far, and how we got here. With everything we’ve learned from Mallzee and Lost Stock, and the fantastic response to our first collections from Unfolded, we’re ready for more. We launch new collections every few months, and we're expanding into new product lines and areas. We'd love to have you with us on the journey!
We are fixing a broken system, working with people just like you to make a big impact in the world, just by making a small change… shopping in a different way. Will you be a part of it with us?
Love, Team Unfolded x
Cally, Hilde, Jamie, Nicola, Louise, Shell, Will, Anisha, Geraldine, Mel, Bára and Amy - and a group of amazing partners and friends!
This is Unfolded isn’t just a brand - it’s a movement.
It’s about building a better world and it’s about changing lives in the process. Want to join us?