Ethos & Ethics
Looking good. Feeling good. Doing good. POSITIVE IMPACT & PERSONAL TOUCH
Sustainable
Re-Purposing Textiles
By choosing to shop with a brand like Swon, you’re making a sustainable fashion choice. Fashion is one of the most resource intensive industries and, thanks to over-production, contributes millions of tons of textile waste to landfills every year. Swon repurposes pre-loved, pre-worn, pre-used material to create your one-of-a-kind pieces, allowing the material to continue living, rather than dying in a landfill.
We re-use high quality materials like sari silk and up-cycled kantha to create your clothes in small batches, otherwise known as Slow Fashion: seasonless & sustainable. We use natural fabrics & dyes with the intention of creating your “forever” pieces.
Sustainable Practices & Packaging
There’s a reason we don’t use stickers to seal your purchases, we use scraps from the sari material. We avoid plastic and ship in eco-friendly packaging. Our off-cuts are used to make other items, like bags, Scrap Skirts, packaging, ensuring as little waste as possible.
Conscious
Each decision about your Swon garment is consciously made – where is the fabric best shown off? Does this need another button? Should this be longer/shorter/wider? We handpick each sari, source our own upcycled kantha, and create our patterns from scratch to minimize fabric waste – ensuring the most sustainable, comfortable, and fabulous, solution for each piece. We’re striving to be as conscious as possible – in our business and in our own lives! – and we encourage you to do the same
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Keep your promises. Make good choices. Be kind to yourself & the planet.
Community
Swon collaborates with several communities to create positive opportunities for fairly paid work.
Our kantha story is three-fold. First, women in smaller villages trade their worn-out blankets and winter saris for goods they need (pots, pans, utensils, appliances etc.). Then, the collected fabric is given to another group of women in another village, who sew three layers of the fabric together, by hand, to create the textile we use for our clothes. Finally, the kantha is delivered to our tailors in Pushkar. At each stage, we provide work for women to support their families. It’s cheaper and faster to use new kantha (the kind you’d likely find in a high street shop), but we don’t.
Our Didi Blankets are handmade by a local community of village women in Rajasthan, India. A percentage of sales from the blankets go back to the community to support living costs, school fees, clothing & supplies.
Tanu, our fabulous tailor, & his amazing team in Pushkar were chosen because their working conditions were amongst the best – a clean, family-oriented environment, transparency, & sustainable working hours. We know you value your work-life balance, & so do we.
We wanted to connect with people we can have fun with, offer a regular income, & grow relationships with year after year. We visit our team every year to work on new pieces & enjoy many chai's & meals together.
Confidence
We believe you should say yes to yourself and to life. And choose to invest in things that make you feel brighter, bolder, better. Your clothing is powerful, it has the capacity to change your mood, your posture, and your confidence. Adorning yourself with clothes that make you feel fabulous, joyous, carefree, fun, is an act of self-love. And it doesn’t have to harm the planet. When you’re wearing Swon, you can be confident in yourself, and in our ethical integrity.
Wear Swon in the morning, wear in the evening, wear to brunch, wear to dinner, wear for coffee, or for cocktails, wear inside, or on the beach, wear on the sofa, or to dance on tables, wear pre-shower, or post-bath, wear to buy groceries, or to celebrate birthdays, wear naked, wear layered, wear wherever you want, whenever you want. Swan around, live life, float freely.
Handmade & One of a Kind
You are one of a kind, your clothes should be too. We handpick all our fabric and then Tanu and his team handmake your clothes in Pushkar, India. We give upcycled textiles another lease of life, meaning that no two garments are ever the same. When you upcycle fabric, you can celebrate its unique quirks. Small imperfections are possible due to the nature of upcycling previously loved delicate material. This is part of the beauty of each piece being completely one off, the fabric has a story of its own, and each piece given a fresh lease of life when you re-wear & re-love it.
Perfectly imperfect. Completely unique. (Just like you).
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