SUSTAINABILITY

What makes Pip & Pantalaimon sustainable?

 Making the Blue Jean bra in our Market Harborough, UK studio

Sustainability has become a real buzz word in fashion and it has recently come to light, over recent years, that some brands are not as sustainable as they claim.

We try to be as sustainable as possible, but what exactly does that mean? We thought we’d give you the facts and let you decide if you want to support our efforts to operate more sustainably within the lingerie industry.

  • Everything piece of Pip & Pantalaimon lingerie is made in the UK, so no shipping fabrics over to the far east to have finished garments shipped back

  • No Pip & Pantalaimon garment ever sees a clear plastic bag or pointless hanger

  • Surplus dead stock elastics and trims are used, being saved from landfill

  • We shop our fabrics from the overruns of Wacoal , Bravissimo and M&S, straight from the suppliers sample room. These materials are saved from landfill and go straight from their shelves into our studio, no plastic wrapping or extra packaging required

  • We mostly make to order and don’t produce any excess stock (which means no sales, sorry!)

  • Our machinery all use high efficiency motors which use less electricity

  • We wrap in biodegradable tissue paper

  • Empty fabric rolls and material off cuts are donated to local schools

  • We commute on foot and walk to the post office!

  • Biodegradable waste is composted at Philippa’s allotment

  • High quality and timeless designs mean you can wear your Pip & Pantalaimon pieces for much longer than fast fashion lingerie.

We buy all of our fabric in the UK, often buying up surplus end of rolls from big name brands, recycling excess materials that would otherwise go to landfill. We deliberately sew to order and make very small quantities of stock to avoid surplus and waste.

Unlike so many other lingerie brands, we design and make 100% of our lingerie in house in our studio in the UK. Compared to other brands, we carry a tiny amount of stock. When you place your order, there’s a chance we might have the whole order in stock, in which case we pack it up and post it usually the next working day. Sometimes, we won’t have any of your order in stock or, most often, we have half of an order in stock. In these most common situations, we get right to sewing your order and send out within two working days. So you shouldn’t really see a difference between wait times whether your order is in stock or not.

We realise this is an unusual business model but after nearly 7 years, it’s one that works very well for us. It means that we can listen to demand and only make stock of the most popular styles, that we know are going to sell. Therefore we are not over producing garments, unsure of whether they are going to be popular or not, ultimately adding to the global fast fashion problem and causing masses of unnecessary pollutants into the environment.

Producing in the UK also saves masses of carbon emissions which we would otherwise be used shipping all of our fabrics and trims to a factory in the far east, to have the garments made up and then shipped back to us in the UK, where they would then be sent back out all over the world.

 

Because we don’t over manufacture garments that might not sell, this means we don’t have seasonal sales as we have no excess stock to reduce and get rid of. 300,000 tons of clothes are wasted in the UK each year, and we’re proud not to contribute even a single garment to this.

While manufacturing, we are very careful to create as little waste as possible. What waste we do produce, we donate to a local creative scrap recycling centres who pass this onto organisations and schools to be used for craft projects within the local community.

Pip & Pantalaimon proudly support the Who Made My Clothes fashion revolution, a movement encouraging consumers to ask brands ‘who made my clothes?’ in order to achieve greater transparency within the fashion industry, and striving to improve living and working conditions all over the world.

You can hear Pippa talk more about sustainability with The Spitfire Sisters here

 

The Pip & Pantalaimon studio with the 'Lingerie Department' sign from the old Jacksons department store, in Reading, UK. Each character has been carefully cut out and glued onto mount board.