Strichpunkt Sustain­ability Talk #4

Bianca, how did you as a designer come up to start a label for remade-fashion alongside your job?
My sister and me, we both love fashion. But everytime we bought something at Zara or at other fast-fashion chains, that purchase automatically came with a guilty conscience. Therefore, the idea really came naturally: To create nice clothing, which does not necessarily look typically eco-friendly, but which is exactly that. It further runs in our family: Our mother knits and crochets quite a lot and our grandmother was a tailor. We have named our top “Marianne” after her.

Could you explain the business idea behind meerblau.waldgrün briefly in three sentences?
We turn preowned clothing into chic tops, shirts or into scrunchies. And we do all that entirely sustainable in Munich and in Leipzig. Which means: no added chemicals, no lengthy distances for transport, and everything is handmade. In order to be a real alternative to products from Zara and the like, we try to offer our unique pieces for as little as possible, which we can do, because we do almost everything by ourselves.

Where does the clothing come from and how do you market them?
We get the used clothes from friends, family, acquaintances or colleagues. After the process of washing and sorting, we trim every piece and recombine them into new pieces. Shirts turn into tops, t-shirts into crop shirts. Each of our pieces is unique and we offer them on our website meerblau-waldgruen.de as well as in small shops.

They look very nice, but what good do they do for the environment?
Every German discards in average about 5kg of clothing. This amount of trash can be seen, for example, in Chile's Atacama Desert, where it has piled up into mountains over the years. As we at meerblau-waldgrün exclusively use preowned clothes and therefore already existing resources, we are able to play our part to relieve the pressure in production and disposal. You could thus say, that it is sustainable in more than one way.