OUR SUPPLIERS
As you know, Nowhere was born after a trip to Southeast Asia where we saw firsthand the harshness of the textile industry. It is obvious that, after that experience, manufacturing is an indispensable part of this project.
For us it is essential to make sure that, in every part of the production chain, things are done well, that is, that workers' rights are not violated and that the factory aims to reduce its environmental impact.
This is not always easy to analyze because in a textile production many parts are involved, here is an example: obtaining raw materials, transformation into thread and then into fabric, cutting and sewing, dyeing and washing, embroidery and screen printing, ... Each garment is a world.
Very simple, we concentrate all the suppliers, except for the raw material (obvious since the cotton comes from Turkey), in one place, Barcelos, Portugal. This small Portuguese city is located only 90 km from our warehouses and only 264 km from our offices, this allows us to go there whenever we make a production and have a very close contact with them. So within a radius of 20km, we have the suppliers of yarn and fabric, manufacture of the garment, dyeing and printing.
What solution have we found to this problem?
The only part of the process that does not take place here is the extraction of the raw material, in our case organic cotton. At first, the origin was Indian, one of the main producers in the world. For the second collection, we have decided to change and use Turkish cotton, reducing the distance between the origin and the factory by 4500km. All the yarn in our garments is GOTS certified, guaranteeing that the seed is non-GMO, that no herbicides or pesticides are used and that the farmers are paid fair compensation for their work.
The factory we work with for cutting, sewing, washing, ironing and packaging is GBTX and IRIS, they belong to the same holding company and share a warehouse. The company was founded in 2016 and employs 50 people. Among the certificates they have are the SMETA, one of the strictest social and environmental audits in the market (file number: 2019PTZAA407861110), GOTS, OCS, GLOBAL RECYCLE STANDARD...
The factory also has a water treatment plant that reuses almost all the water used in the washing and treatment of fabrics, thus creating a closed circle of consumption and preventing it from being discharged directly into the environment. This is fundamental as we reduce by 72% the water consumed by an organic cotton garment.
All suppliers are verified by the BCOME consultancy, which helps us through data, to measure our impacts and provide us with information that allows us to make future decisions with the aim of reducing them. For example, thanks to them we have chosen packaging with a lower impact, we have reduced our carbon footprint by sourcing our cotton from a closer country and we have been aware of where in the supply chain we pollute the most.
For us this is coherence, working hand in hand with your suppliers to achieve a product that is of quality and has values behind it.