Make Cotton Sustainable

FEATURE/ SOURCE4STYLE

Making Sustainable Sourcing Easier

For an emerging designer, retail sourcing specialist or interior decorator, finding sustainable material can be a daunting task. There are some difficult questions to be answered. Where to purchase the eco-friendly textile from? How to find the right price? How to understand the certifications? A website called source4style.com, founded by Summer Rayne Oakes, an eco-model, answers these and similar questions. The website is co-founded by Benita Singh who is a fair trade entrepreneur and Adam Schwartz who is the director of supplier relations for the company.

A Guardian report had earlier quoted Oakes saying, "Designers spend 85% of their time sourcing and 15% marketing”. That leaves no time for the creative process. So we source and you can design." Also, producers need access to market, and source4style.com helps them promote their business by putting them directly in front of designers.

There are currently 30 different textiles to choose from on source4style.com, with nine exclusive designs. It has over 35 suppliers on its site spanning 1300 different products, which range from textiles, trims, buttons and zippers to finished goods. The aim of the website is to speed up the research process so that when someone wants to produce a sustainable piece of clothing, he or she does not end up getting frustrated while sourcing.

It is a business to business platform. So, one can look at, compare, examine samples, and order among more than 1,000 different produced by 30 companies: from organic cotton to lyocell, from hemp to salmon leather from discarded food, to wools dyed with vegetable colors.

On source4style.com, one can find two kinds of icons/symbols: Source4Style-related icons like 'organic, 'recycled' and 'Fair Trade' and symbols delineating third-party certifications or standards that are attributed to that product or service. If one sees an organic icon on product, Source4Style will denote what percent (%) of material is certified organic. A product that says it is Fair Trade is most often certified by the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), the International Federation for Alternative Trade.

Photo Courtesy: source4style.com