(For anyone else who might relate to being a first-time journalist, what kind of bittersweet horror is it to hear the playback recording of your own voice conducting an interview?!)
Monty, the resident dog and also a model for Elvis & Kresse collars joined the discussion as a rather solemn participant. Similarly, Elvis & Kresse invest time and attention in making the materials more valuable than they were at any point in their previous life.
Neither of us had any experience in the industry.
I thought it was terrible that Hong Kong is doing this, but if you look around the world In the UK, we have 200,000 incidents a year of when just raw sewage is put into our waterways because the system gets overloaded.
It would be more powerful to highlight the negative so companies couldnt greenwash. Scott:You had a lot of ideas before [and after] you landed on the fire hose. Elvis & Kresse, set up in 2005, has become known for rescuing Londons decommissioned fire hoses from the landfill. 
The five-year partnership will see Elvis & Kresse receiving a grant from the Burberry foundation and reusing a minimum of 120 tons of leather scraps Burberry products for accessories and homeware. Be sure tocatch up on previous articles. They dont think were radical leftist communists which is really good because this needs to become mainstream., Elvis & Kresse launched mens and womens bags and accessories in 2005, and with what was considered at the time to be a radical business model: transforming waste materials into luxury goods and then donating 50 percent of the profits to charities, it is now successfully and profitably subverting capitalism one landfill-bound scrap at a time. Even so, Kresse insists that machines wont take over their artisanal approach to business. Learn on the go with our new app. So we should be able to sort this out! Kresse is from Canada and had shared with a magazine reporter that her grandmother taught her to leave a campsite as though no one had been there. Circling back to the beginnings of the Elvis & Kresse startup, I reference an article by Bell Jacobs and asked Kresse about the first 5 phone calls she made in the beginning stages of incorporating leather waste into their luxury bag designs. The human beings I find the most confusing are the ones who have had the benefit of an amazing education, the benefit of travel and they still dont get it.
Instead of scrapping it, can you just give us a call when youre done with it and well come and get it? Thats what we did! The brand is guided by their three pillars: rescue, transform and donate.
I couldnt wait to learn more about the incredible people behind Elvis & Kresse.
While soaking in the picturesque English countryside, I encountered stacks of coiled red and yellow fire hoses, that in their first life probably put out fires and saved lives in London. As we go forward and get deeper into circular economy, I do think thats the future. As I got up to leave the inspiring chat that ensured that Id return for an encore, I wished Kresse and her team the very best for the event and bid farewell to this unique leather Legoland.
The cool thing about that its possible for intentional development and mindful shifts of language use toward accuracy, consideration, critical openness and hopeful attitudes. I had read on Elvis & Kresses Instagram about her idea that the hashtag #sustainableluxury could be changed to just: #luxury period making the sustainable nature of luxury simply redundant moving forward. What we want is companies to be incredibly wonderful citizens.
In the first 10 years Elvis & Kresse reclaimed 200 tons of material from fire-hoses and since partnering up with the Burberry Foundation in 2017, the company set out to recraft at least 120 tonnes of leather off-cuts into luxury Elvis & Kresse items over the first 5 years. linksynergy sustainable
Is E-commerce Ready for Sustainable Luxury?
All Rights Reserved. justmax Its worth asking, what does it take to completely transform waste material into a luxury product? Its been a very slow and gradual process. Where weve gotten into trouble I think the last stat I read on the US was that 99% of beef in America is feed lot beef. If we had a conventional design background, we would have never considered 25-year-old fire hose as a luxury raw material.. Could.
Could An Exotic Leather Alternative Be A Viable Option for Fashion Brands? While the doors at the Elvis & Kresse workshop are always open for drop-ins, the team hosts specials on an ongoing basis to help people cherish and appreciate raw materials. I think people who argue very binary terms tend to overlook the complexity.
And it would be great if we had a carbon tax. These are high-quality, unused, freshly tanned and dyed leathers, but they fall to the workshop floor as seemingly unusable pieces, and are later destroyed. On building (and re-claiming) a leather wall for a Nashville hotel and Universal movie set: The one that we got back was in a movie that came out last year. HEADLINES: Brands who deserve your dollars: Elvis & Kresse. (But, Im probably now going to read Frankenstein over the weekend and work out why) But at least everybody understands it! Scott: What is the experience you think people need to help them feel as motivated to see a problem [with waste] and want to take action? For frame of reference at the time, Im thinking of my friend from college who first brought environmental crisis and alternative sustainable practices to my attention in 2008 Brennan Bird, UC Davis and my later participation in a social media campaign called Plastic Free July, which initiated a personal lifestyle change to minimize/eliminate plastic waste from my lifestyle.
Social Enterprises have existed for a long time.
In 2017 it enhanced its production by teaming up with the Burberry Foundation, an independent charity set up by the Burberry Group plc, to use Burberrys leather off-cuts. We had to explain to people why using a rescued material made more sense than a new material. 
Preferring to work with independent boutiques rather than department stores, they have select stockists in the UK, Europe, Dubai and Australia. A lot of people would argue that Henry Ford was a social entrepreneur because he wanted the people who worked on his production line to be able to afford the products.
The brand offers lifelong repairs and never discounts its products. We also had some people that out and out rejected it.
I realized in that moment early on that her answers were going to be extraordinary no matter how (poorly) my questions came out.
All these images of cows running free thats 1% of the US cattle. We had to explain to people why rescued material made more sense than a new material. B-Corps are quite different, Kresse explained.
The earth just cant take it.
Since 92 when it was very clear.
Founded in 2005 by Canadian-born Kresse Wesling and Brit James Henrit (nickname Elvis), Elvis & Kresse rescue and reuse raw materials to manufacture luxury lifestyle products.
I have city friends who are vegan, and a couple told me they felt that [in order to live in integrity with their values regarding animal abuse across industries] they needed to avoid leather not buy it and not even own it anymore. Although I was nervous to interview Ms. Wesling at the time, her warmth and intelligence filled our time together with ease, invaluable insight and motivation I will treasure for life!
How did you grow a team of people?.
We work with all kinds of retailers, like the Turner Contemporary in Margate and independent boutiques, says Wesling. If you went to a landfill right now, you would find that its basically a monstrous situation because we put all of these incredibly beautiful materials together in the ground making them impossible to separate and their value is lost. Metals are perpetually recyclable. I didnt know!)
Could Lalaland be it? Reports suggest textile waste that gets thrown away has a value of 2 to 3 thousand dollars a tonne. Immediately, it was clear that she was the best person to ask all of my questions if I could only spit them out! I asked her about the pricing of the product, given the almost nil raw material cost. Its one of those situations where your eyes open up a bit wider, and then a bit wider, and a bit wider, (laughing) and then you just start to worry that youre gonna lose your mind. We actually need to focus on what is objectively true and go for that! Were in a very odd time where thats incredibly difficult.
Thats alright!
Elvis & Kresse's jigsaw puzzle technique using Burberry dead stock leather.
After that time a repair service is offered.
But it doesnt have coral or sharks because the water is so polluted that sharks cant hunt; they cant sense things.
As a consequence, a retired fire-hose will turn into waste. Kresse was indeed right that this process is an evolution that requires action a lot of action every day and your very first idea will rarely be the one that works. There are all kinds of ways that any company could do this, but in our case it was very slow and very organic. In an article by Wallpaper and MacAllan, I had read that Elvis & Kresses first business was a biodegradable packaging startup. B-Corp certified Social Enterprise successfully donating 50% of their profits to charity, including nearly 100,000 euros per year to the British Fire Fighters Charity, they have set the bar for every business on the planet to take an immediate, active role in solving extreme waste crises threatening global public health today. One thing I noticed about Kresse is that she speaks in tweets: a crisp, hard-hitting and honest point-of-view. 2022 Fairchild Publishing, LLC.
kresse Then, they utilize a refined method to piece together hides large enough to create limited edition collections like my favorite lipstick red Fire and Hide tote featured in the title image. But there are lots of businesses that become B-corps who never really thought this way and now theyre recognizing that, in order to succeed long term and in order to be able to sleep at night, this is something they need to be.
The rescue pillar encompasses the first step in the production process. So you see things like that and think, What a privilege to have grown up in Canada, but what are we gonna do about the fact that this is happening here?.
They believed it to be the truth and they believed that they were behaving patriotically. There was so much factory output that you couldnt see the sun.
That was what we set out to do.
Trying to tackle a gross 21st-century problem of stuff being shoved into the earth, Kresse says, Materials have a lot more to give before they are landfilled or incinerated. So theyre Franken goods. Then you go to a place where its devastation and you think, oh my goodness, whats happening here!. There was no such term as sustainable luxury or circular economy.. Well it was lots of things! Without the fertilization that comes from animals, you require other kinds of fertilization, which means youre shipping products in and it means youre using synthetic materials and/or overburdening sites. Since 2005, Elvis & Kresse had been donating 50% of their profits to the Firefighters Charity [in the UK what I dreamed of doing in California if such an excellent firefighters charity existed here.] The other half of the profit is reinvested to expand their work in reducing and reusing waste, protecting the environment and inspiring craftspeople. Everything that theyre spewing has been disproven. But positive steps in the right direction, recycling leather certainly warrants kudos from me.
Youre gonna be in the Unfair Trade, Exploitative aisle at the supermarket Good luck with that. Because people would be embarrassed to go down that aisle and those products would wither and die. As the adage quips, one mans rubbish may be another mans treasure, for Burberry and Elvis & Kresse, this statement rings true as they embark on a five-year partnership recycling leather waste from Burberry factories. Now, where to go from here? I wanted to clarify in my research. The same fate awaits composites such as tea and coffee sacks, printing blankets and parachute silk and leather off-cuts from the fashion industry.
Because its so messed up! fashionweek Breathing new life into Burberrys deadstock leather may be their biggest challenge yet.
Nov 7, 2017 So I think that its not ever one idea; its a continuum.
Its a creative solution for an environmental challenge, de Castro continues.
Guangdong Province was like going into a Dickens novel. You could of course go onto Kickstarter, get lots of people to back your product and launch it like that or you could get investors Thats incredibly hard for a fashion startup. The company initially started with turning discarded fire-hoses into hand bags, wallets, belts and the like. And donating 50% to firefighters! Together, they apply creative energy to maximise the potential of what is seen as throwaway waste.
Then we found a manufacturing partner. You could talk to anyone regarding waste and they would tell you the UN report is a low estimate because there are so many companies that do not report on their waste at all. Molshree Vaid takes a road trip to Elvis & Kresse's workshop to talk about their open-door policy, how they thrive on transparency and their 5-year partnership with the Burberry Foundation.
The team created shopping bags for Sainsburys using coffee-sac waste sourced from the coffee chain, Costa.
We prefer boutiques because they understand that we dont do seasons or collections thats not how our products are made and that's not the world we want to support., Working with large retailers doesnt interest Elvis & Kresse, a resolve which strengthened after a successful Harrods pop-up a few years ago. But yeah, we started very small.
There are some people who view the world in a very black and white way and thats ok, but when it comes to leather alternatives, theyre all polymers. Kresse said, When designers from Burberry visit the room, their experience is profound as the challenge and scale of the problem of waste becomes real to them.. In terms of retail, Elvis & Kresse sells 70% of products from its site. These landfill-bound materials find new lives as anything from the lining of their bags to their shipping packaging. I love it.
That it remains with the company. Another fabric that Elvis & Kresse have started to use is parachute silk, which is unusable after getting small tears.
The five year collaboration has the ambitious goal of transforming 120 tonnes of Burberry leather offcuts into new Elvis & Kresse products, with half the profits going to renewable energy organisations. Even with sewage Ill never forget I was at an event and met this Swedish scientist and he said, with respect to human waste, What god has separated, let no man bring together. If we keep the liquid fraction separate from the solid fraction, we have two valuable goods. kresse
It was called Bio Supplies and it was in direct response to what we saw happening in Hong Kong. Over the years Id realized that too many things Ive loved and bought in my lifetime are made of pollutant material; that the stretchy material typically used for swimwear is made out of plastic, that it cannot be recycled, nor can it biodegrade properly and that it pollutes our drinking water with microplastics that are not being filtered. Burberry said Elvis & Kresse is able to transform the fragments into components, which are then handwoven into a new kind of hide. The beauty of Elvis & Kresse is how they think about materials creatively and find a purpose for them that may be so different from their original purpose that it was never imagined before. I would talk to people about the idea and the importance of using waste. That is enough and more leather for Elvis & Kresse and similar businesses to tackle with. Then there are people whose lives are so hand to mouth so they dont necessarily have the opportunity for that. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Tomorrow you could go to the B-Lab website, put in your email address and go through the assessment.
Thats not a side gig of your business; that has to be why youre running the business. {"modules":["unloadOptimization","bandwidthDetection"],"unloadOptimization":{"browsers":{"Firefox":true,"Chrome":true}},"bandwidthDetection":{"url":"https://ir.ebaystatic.com/cr/v/c1/thirtysevens.jpg","maxViews":4,"imgSize":37,"expiry":300000,"timeout":250}}. Amid waste hunting, one material that caught Kresses fancy big-time was leather. We spent two years just trying to work out the best way to work together, explains Wesling. There isnt really that much money floating around in that space. There were single use goods everywhere. Finland, for example, is a country where being a teacher is this revered profession and theyre paid very well; they also have the highest levels of educational attainment. The food system is incredibly complicated. kresse Are You Ready To Raise Your Digital Game With A New. Even unwanted shoe boxes collected from shoe shops are flattened and used to make packaging and labels. kresse And this was all at a time when there was no such term as sustainable luxury or circular economy, so a lot of the work in the early days was just educational. If that means we need to stay with independent boutiques, where someone can really communicate the message behind what we do, then thats absolutely fine with me., I dont think we should allow big companies to tell us what luxury is.. People need to have an epiphany with nature.
Does it have to be beautiful and useful? For the first few seconds, it felt like I had travelled back in time where it was common for one to enter an atelier with warmly lit wooden interiors, dotted with second-hand machines. Although you couldnt certify as a B-Corp until you have at least 1 year of trading history, you can be something called a pending B-Corp, which means that youre in the process of becoming a B-Corp. elvisandkresse
She explained to me how her love for the natural world often brings her to that feeling of epiphanya moment of motivation or deeper awareness of what is going on with the earths natural systems around us how something like the hoot of an owl could set her off into tears for a moment.
By adding drinking water to them which is what we do in all Western societies with flushing toilets, we create an enormous problem. With a background in fashion retail, she is currently focussing on projects that propel the sustainability agenda into the mainstream. Its completely confidential and free to use.
That was a crazy project because they got in touch with us on a Thursday and they needed us to deliver the wall on a Monday or something! He said the company will lead the way in showing how creativity and craftsmanship can play a part in solving this issue..
There was so much factory output that you couldnt see the sun. If its a waste that I think Elvis & Kresse has a good shot at solving, we will go for it. But we think that instead, other coffee should have to be labelled Unfair trade. I could also go back in time and ensure that teachers were well-paid, that we attracted the best talent to that industry and had a more educated population. And everybody was happy with it! When I asked her about this, she dove into a witty anecdote about labeling environmental standards in the coffee aisle, I couldnt help but laugh with her story even though it was a very interesting idea and not funny at all!
Tackling the heavy-duty fire hose would not have been easy in terms of cleaning, repurposing and manufacturing but the founders persevered.
he brands process is flipped: While most designers start with an idea, Elvis & Kresse must start by identifying a problem. But instead of letting the fabric head to the landfill, the brand realized its potential as a, lining for their fire-hose bags and wallets.
So, it was great and I hope that it certainly sets a trend in that industry which is incredibly wasteful.
In these conscientious times, wearing fur is indeed outdated and its finally possible to banish the need for real fur styles. Their original products in the beginning, prior to integrating Burberry leather, had all been made exclusively from London decommissioned fire hose which is vegan material. Maybe I should read Frankenstein before I say that, cause I dont really know the story that well.
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