BEHIND THE SCENES: Out the door and onto the shop floor
During #FashionRevolutionWeek we’ve talked a lot about how we create our garments, but ethical considerations don’t end there. Everything from ensuring you’re receiving a high-quality garment, to managing waste is part of our commitment to creating clothing with a small ecological footprint.
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Quality Control
At the tail end of the design and manufacturing process, we get the finished product delivered to our warehouse. This happens about once a fortnight, and we’re always excited when it does!
Upon delivery from our makers, Laura and Sam check over the garments to ensure they are up to our production standards.
But before these pieces go out to stores, we need to ensure the final product is up to a standard we know our customers expect.
Because we take great pride in the quality of our garments, quality control is an important step between receiving the final product from the makers and sending it into stores. This is where the keen eyes of our production assistant Sam and our warehouse assistant Laura come in handy.
At this stage, all the information for the products online are also finessed, including garment measurements, photographs and product descriptions. We know you might not always be able to make it into our stores to try before you buy, so we put effort into ensuring you can make a confident choice with your chosen size and style – just a couple of things that extend the life of our clothing.
If you’ve ever wondered why some sizes and styles sell out quickly, here’s your answer: We intentionally keep our quantities small, meaning you get a limited edition product that is worth cherishing.
As you can imagine, our warehouse is a pretty colourful place to work! If you’ve ever ordered from us online, it’s likely your garment has been selected and carefully wrapped by Megan, Laura or Ali.
Packaging
Our jewellery now arrives both from our makers and from us when you order online without the inclusion of single-use plastic packaging.
If there’s one thing you get when you buy something online, it’s (often) an excess of packaging, right? Of course there is a functional element to packaging – noone wants their purchase to arrive at their doorstep damaged! But we also don’t want the efforts we go to when creating ethical clothing to be undone by poor attention to packaging our products
Packaging has been a focus at Obus for the last 12 months, with our team researching and designing packaging that can be used to post out online orders and be either recyclable, reusable, and/or not wholly made from plastic materials. As well, we have worked with our makers and producers to deliver product to us packaged in recyclable materials or in ways that reduces the amount of single-use plastic waste.
CAPTION: Our cardboard clothing swing tags are recyclable (and you can even bring them back to us for re-use!). Shoes arrive from our makers without superfluous plastic packaging. And if you choose to leave take your shoes out of the box before you leave one of our stores, rest assured that box will be put to good use in our production studio for housing bibs and bobs.
Fabric offcuts
Fabric offcuts are inevitable part of clothing production. While we strive to make the most of each piece of fabric (even tweaking the design of garments to ensure fabric wastage is reduced), there will always be small leftovers.
So what do we do with those offcuts? Quite simply, we make things from them like scarves, beeswax wraps and other accessories. Yes, by donning a humble Obus scrunchie, you’re doing something to save the planet from fabric waste! Thanks, scrunchies (*whispers* We’re so glad you’re back.)
