Sustainability

Made-to-Order Systems Avoid Overproduction

A staggering part of fashion industry waste comes from overproduction, with analysts estimating that 30% of clothing produced is never sold².

At Proper Cloth, 95% of the clothing we make is made-to-order, after a customer has already purchased it. That means we almost never have to guess how many of each size and style to make in advance. Our made-to-order model practically eliminates the problem of overproduction.

High Quality Enables More Wears

Today’s market is flooded with the cheap and trendy clothes of “fast-fashion”. It’s been reported that 50% of all fast-fashion produced gets disposed of in under a year, often after just a few wears.

By contrast, we only want to make high quality clothing. Our products are designed to last for hundreds of wears, staying in your life and out of the landfill. Our goal is that a decade from now, you’ll still be enjoying your favorite Proper Cloth shirt, jacket, or pants.

Recycling Returned Garments

While most of our products are custom made to order, we still accept returns and provide complimentary remakes to help customers find their ideal custom size or style preferences. As a result, we see our fair share of returned garments.

We donate some of these returns to charities, but many are not a good fit for donation. So we work with organizations like Green Tree and Fabscrap to recycle the garments into building insulation and other useful materials. Unlike paper and plastics for the general public, recycling clothing is not free, so we pay to ensure our clothes don’t end up in a landfill. In 2022, we recycled 21,140 pounds of returned clothing.

Recycling Fabric Scraps

We also work with our factories to ensure that fabric scraps generated during the production of our products are properly recycled.

Most of our scraps are collected, resold, and repurposed for building insulation, carpeting, and towels. In 2022, we recycled 43,300 yds of fabric scraps from our shirt production in this way.

Premium packaging reflects the quality of the product, enhances the unboxing experience, and at a minimum, protects the garments in transit.

Unfortunately, premium packaging often ends up being excessive packaging, and along these lines, many of the materials we used early on were not optimal. Over time though, we’ve made improvements to our packaging sizes, configurations, and materials used, reducing plastic and other unsustainable materials along the way.

Environmentally Friendly Packaging

Our iterative approach continually reevaluates available materials and the science around recyclable, biodegradable, and compostable materials. For transparency and a real-time look into how we’re doing, we’re sharing the following chart of our most common packaging materials:

Minimal Packaging Option

We have high expectations for our packaging. And for frequent customers, we realized that even our latest, most optimized packaging can still be more than necessary.

When you select the Minimal Packaging Option, we use just what’s needed to deliver your purchase safely and efficiently, skipping things like tissue paper, printed receipts, and envelopes.