Our Why

When we started this company we had the intention of sourcing local goods and reworking them into unisex pieces that could easily be loved again. We had a couple of things we wanted to address with creating this line. 

The first was how wasteful the fashion industry is. Forbes states the fashion industry contributes to 4% of the world's waste boosting at 92 million tons and the highest percentage of toxic e-waste. The fashion and textile industry are just second to Oil in waste production, the majority of that coming from production and excess material scraps. The fashion industry also creates 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all the international flights and maritime shipping combined. 

The average consumer throws away about 70 lbs of clothing a year with only 14% of all clothing wastes getting recycled. This brings us to the next issue- the act of recycling our used garments. We all make those standard piles:

-Save

-Donate

-Trash (landfill)

When we donate we tend to choose local charity retailers such as Goodwill or Salvation Army. Both of these places contribute to community organizations and help people to find jobs and other resources. The problem with these facilities is that once we donate our clothing not everything is resold. The items that don't make it to a new home are then packaged up and shipped to other countries. Americans are literally packing up their waste and mailing it to other countries to sit in their land fills. I hope you can see the problem here. 

One of the growing trends within the fashion industry is the idea of recycled textiles. They create materials that are supposed to be more earth friendly. While the movement towards making fashion sustainable is trying , creating another industry that pollutes while producing more emissions is not it. 

DBD_Collections goal is to minimize our carbon footprint and provide cute, gender neutral, sustainable clothing. We source locally and encourage donations. We choose to operate as genderless because the fashion industry has controlled what each person looks like and how they are gendered. We personally believe that clothing does not have a gender and the person wearing the garment makes it, not the other way around. 

Here are three steps you can take to reduce your impact on the Earth when it comes to clothes:

1. Reduce clothing purchases and consider the larger waste trail behind the textiles we buy. Donating clothing is far better than landfilling, but it does not erase the impacts of the clothes we buy and discard.

2. When buying clothes, choose secondhand. You can find used clothing for sale in local thrift stores or online.

3. For new items, look for “recycled content” products to ensure we are creating demand for recycled textiles, which leads to more incentive for companies to close the loop and give new life to used textiles.