Where Does It Come From?

Ethical and Sustainable Clothing & Textiles

Where Does It Come From?

Where Does It Come From? is an award winning social enterprise that creates clothing and textiles that are kind – to our planet, to garment makers and to you too. What’s more, everything we make is fully traceable using a code printed on the label, so you can discover exactly how and where yours were made, all the way back to the cotton growing in the field.

You can visit our shop to explore our range of beautiful clothes for all the family, or find out how work with businesses to create sustainable, traceable clothing and textile for your brand and your customers.

About Where Does It Come From?

More and more people are asking questions about the products they buy. How were they made? What impact have they had on our planet? Who made them and were they treated fairly? At Where Does It Come From? we create clothing and textiles that are kind – to the planet, the makers and to you too. You can have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you are helping others and our planet through your buying choices. After all, it’s cool to care!

Kind Clothes for You and Your Family…

You can choose clothes for all the family as well as gifts and vouchers – just visit our Shop to browse and order.

Kind Clothes for Your Business

If you are a business or organization, please check out our page for Businesses. You never know, we could create something beautiful together…..

Campaigning and Activism

We’re passionate about change! We’re just part of a vibrant community working for change in the clothing industry. We also founded the community Ethical Brands for Fashion Revolution – running events and conferences inspire and educate.

The Where Does It Come From? podcast explores the impacts of ‘stuff’ on our people and planet, hosting discussions with amazing individuals who dedicate their lives to making positive change.

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Where Does It Come From? is working across many of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, with specific focus on goal 12 ‘Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’, goal 1 ‘No poverty’, goal 8 ‘Decent work and economic growth and goal 13 ‘Climate action’.

Where Did Where Does it Come From? Come From?

Hi, I’m Jo Salter, and I founded Where Does It Come From? in 2013. Just like you, I was concerned that the clothes I was buying for myself and my family were not being created ethically, and that I may indirectly be helping to sustain cruel labour practices and contributing to the world’s pollution problems.I wanted answers to my questions and these were hard to come by, so I had the idea of putting a code on the garment to unlock its creation story.

Since then we’ve grown our product range and now offer solutions for business too. We’ve also won some awards and featured in some wonderful publications! Thank you for all of your support – together we can be the change we want to see.

Our Policies

Fibre Sourcing Policy

Our core ethos is traceability. We work hard to know where all of our materials come from and how they are used to make the final product.

Since cotton is our primary raw material, we apply the following principles for sourcing cotton.

-We source our cotton fibre from farms geographically close to where it will be spun and woven into cloth. Often these rural co-operatives are co-located with cotton farms.

We trace our cotton fibres right back to the geographical farming area where the crop grew.

Our organic cotton is sourced from organisations that have organic certification from independent organisations such as GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard).

-We only source cotton via organisations supporting Fair Trade principles such as the Fairtrade Foundation, the Khadi Villages Industry Commission (KVIC) and WFTO (World Fair Trade Organisation)

-We do not source our cotton from locations where there is suspicion or knowledge of forced labour or child labour (such as Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan – for more information see The Cotton Campaign).

-As well as organic cotton, we look at other benefits such as seed varieties that are native to the region. These crops will be fed by the rain and require virtually no pesticides.

– Other fibres we source include bamboo, peace silk and hemp as part of business to business projects. We also explore the full provenance of fibres to ensure our transparency, fair trade and environment friendly requirements are met.

Sustainable Production

Beautiful and quality garments do not have to cost the Earth. And they can be created using eco-friendly processes.

Since many of these practices are traditional, we are helping sustain crafts such as hand weaving and block printing and provide livelihoods for people who learned such skills from their parents and grandparents.

Where possible, we use fibres grown close to our production. This supports the local farmers and community as well as reducing carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases by cutting travel.

We work with natural fibres and most often certified organic cotton, to ensure minimal use of pesticides and sustainable production methods. However, our top cotton preference is cotton varieties native to the growing area. Such indigenous versions are naturally pest-resistant and survive with just rainwater.

Many of our Indian Khadi fabrics are dyed by hand in large water vats. This technique uses approximately one-fifth of the water used in more standard dyeing processes. The dyes used are a mix of azo-free and natural dyes to ensure non-toxicity and colour fastness while washing. We also use dry dying processes somethings – they use even less water!

Our African print items are digitally printed using organic dyes.

One fabric we love working with is called Khadi, a cotton fabric that has been handwoven and handspun at co-operatives in India. The equipment is powered by people (through the use of pedals or handles) and in, some cases, solar power. This production is virtually carbon-free.

Our clothes are always created from plastic free fabrics. We also use non-plastic accessories such as buttons wherever we can. Some of our early children’s clothing designs do have plastic buttons but we have learned since then and no longer use these!

We do not mix our cotton fabrics with polyester or coat them with any plastic substances. Shirt buttons are either wooden or made from shells.

All of our production partners share our sustainability values and ensure minimum fabric wastage during production.

Zero-waste design also plays a key part – for example, our scarves are sized so that the fabric roll is equally split into 30 scarves. Fabric cutting is done in a way to make maximum use of the fabric and any leftover bits are used to make accessories such as hair scrunchies. Following our African project all scraps were donated to a period poverty project to create sanitary protection for local girls to ensure they can attend school when they have their period.

Green Business Practices

Going Plastic Free

As part of our mission to run as a sustainable and ethical business, we are aiming to be as plastic free as possible. This is a challenging task and an ongoing journey but the benefits for ourselves and the planet will be enormous.

Our production methods are 100% plastic-free. Our cotton is spun and woven by hand using traditional skills and equipment and then printed and dyed using wooden blocks or screens. Other fibres we work with are also processed.

We now aim for totally plastic free products – using 100% natural fabrics and now switched across tp plastic free accessories as well, such as buttons made from wood or shell.

We are working with our suppliers, who are also very eco-driven, to reduce and remove unnecessary packaging when stock is transported internationally to us. Often boxes can sit in transit points for periods of time and so plastic has to be used to prevent damp from causing damage to the clothing. We are exploring alternatives. Currently, our shirts arrive in a plastic sleeve for protection during storage.
Re-used and recycled stationary and packaging

We mainly use emails for correspondence and recycle our office paper. Our leaflets and cards are printed on recycled paper. Our double thickness postage envelopes and shirt boxes are recyclable or recycled and we wrap in recycled tissue rather than plastic. We re-use wherever possible – string, delivery boxes and paper. We have recently used biodegradable plastic for our face mask packaging.

Offcuts

We worked with milliner Madge Hatter to utilise the resulting offcuts from our children’s denim clothing range to create a range of brooches and hair accessories. We have also used offcuts from our African range to create hair scrunchies and pocket squares.

Pre-loved Shop

Our children’s clothing range, with button elastic, adjustable poppers and roll up trouser legs, is designed to last. We encourage our customers to pass on their outgrown children’s clothing to friends and family. Else, they can send it back to us to be listed in our pre-loved section so that the garments live to play another day.
Green energy and hosting

Our office is powered by electricity from Good energy – using renewable energy sources.

Our website is carbon-free. It is hosted by Green Hosting, which runs on a wind-powered server farm.

Our Fair Trade Policy

The principles of Fair-Trade guide our business. It is of the utmost importance to us that the people who are involved in producing our clothes are treated with justice and respect. We share information about our makers with our customers as we believe in building people to people connection – it is much harder to turn a blind eye if you know the people involved. We are working with other ethical brands to change the clothing industry, with the ultimate goal that customers will only buy from brands where they know people are treated as they should be.