In this extract from Ragtrader's 2023 Sustainability Report, Bassike co-founder Mary Lou Ryan reveals scaling plans for its excess waste diversion program with BlockTexx.
In 2022, Australian designer label Bassike diverted 6.2 tonnes of excess off-cuts to Australian textile recovery firm BlockTexx as part of a pilot program. All the off-cuts had come from the fashion brand’s cotton jersey manufacturing arm, which was then repurposed into raw materials.
From this, Bassike co-founder Mary Lou Ryan says the pilot program is now an ongoing operation, with plans to expand its diverting of off-cuts into other manufacturing arms once the jersey component is fully operational. As well as jersey, the fashion brand operates five other facilities including casual shirting, casual pants and tailoring.
Ryan says the initial connection between Bassike and BlockTexx came well before the textile recovery firm opened its first factory site in Logan, Queensland in 2022.
“It was a new innovation coming out of Australia,” Ryan says. “We obviously manufacture in Australia, and we deal with a lot of excess off-cuts in our manufacturing process - so, when we came across BlockTexx, it sounded like such a great fit in terms of what they were doing in textile recovery, and also an opportunity for us to reduce our textile waste in our supply chain.”
According to its 2022 Impact Report, 95% of Bassike’s manufacturing is done in Australia, with the remaining 5% being footwear made in Italy and knitwear made in China.
Moreover, 65% of its garments are manufactured with organic cotton. Expanding from the original organic cotton, Bassike transitioned ringspun yarn and other core fabrics outside the jersey line into organic cotton poplins and canvases.
Its organic cotton jersey arm represents 60% of its total units produced.
Alongside the diversion of excess waste, Ryan says the brand is also planning to halve its excess raw materials by 2025. The co-founder says the brand is currently scoping out and measuring its current production output to minimise excess waste.
“Everything starts from the range plan, and having a look at the collection size, and the assortment of what we're developing from a collection perspective,” Ryan explains. “Then this goes into purchasing and making sure that we're maximizing our fabric selections, and buying better - and that comes down to the way that we cut our orders, to the lineup of our markers.
“There are so many different steps that we take in terms of trying to ensure that we're reducing our material waste as much as possible.”
And that's just the purchasing side of it, according to Ryan. As well as partnering with BlockTexx, the brand is also in discussion with other textile recycling firms, including Upparel.
“Especially around textile waste, there's a lot of innovation,” Ryan says. “There's a lot of conversation that's certainly being had at the moment where, a couple of years ago, a lot of these problems were actually hidden. Now that they've all come to the surface, brands have a responsibility to really think about even just the term ‘waste’.
“We used to talk about ‘excess stock’ or ‘excess raw material’, but now, I just talk to that as waste. If it's not usable, it's basically wasted. Just call it out and talk to it in its true form, so we can actually deal with the issue and bring it to the forefront.”
Amid the tackling of excess off-cuts, Bassike is also tackling excess end-of-season rolls by donating them to Billy Blue College of Design at Torrens University or selling them via wholesale channels in Melbourne.
“There's always going to be excess, and what we're trying to do is reduce as much going to landfill as possible,” Ryan says. “So having different exit streams is really important for a business like us.
“Because we manufacture locally, we buy our fabric, we buy all our trim, and there's always going to be a certain amount of excess that comes with that. So we have to have different sorts of streams that account for that.”
The overall goal for Bassike in all of this is to move to 100% lower-impact materials by 2030. Ryan says this involves the farming and growing of different fibres, as well as driving towards 100% organic cotton.
“So really starting to transition our business into regenerative agriculture, connecting the farmers and the growers to our product, buying through more sustainable yarns,” Ryan says.
“Obviously, we have a huge component of our business that already uses sustainable yarns, but not all of our products are. And so we’re really just taking the business on a journey to 2030 and going, Okay, here we are, we know 69% of our products use lower impact materials, how can we take that to 100% and what's the journey to get there?
“Seven years seems like a long time, but when you think about it, we're already working on collections next year - so we've got six years, not seven years.
“We're going through this massive transition as an industry that we've never done before,” Ryan says. “We don't have all the answers just yet. But from a Bassike perspective, what we are trying to do as much as possible is look for opportunities and look for innovation, including at BlockTexx.
“We've been testing other fabrics with them to see if that can work. So, you know, it becomes a bit of a two-way partnership as well. There's lots of hard work to be done.”
Access more stories in Ragtrader's free 2023 Sustainability Report, including a detailed analysis of Australia's fast fashion industry via IBISWorld, alongside key new developments from Rip Curl, Outland Denim and JAG, and a circular design roundtable discussion between fashion designer Bianca Spender, RMIT professor Dr Alice Payne and WRAP executive director Claire Kneller.