reGENERATE: Colouring Our Company Green One Step At A Time

What a year 2022 has been for us! We have ended up making concrete efforts in our sustainability journey to highlight the importance of sustainable fashion. From our production to campaigns, we’ve rolled out initiatives after initiatives that may seem small at a glance but are bringing larger changes that is actually bringing us closer to a sustainable brand.

We’ve expanded ‘reGENERATE’ from a cluster of products to making it our sustainability pledge which will be introducing the best practices throughout our entire value chain ultimately increasing our transparency in hopes that the industry will follow suit. We realise the urgency of the matter and have vowed to take steps to minimise our impact on the environment.

Our efforts will include incorporating better design and pattern making practices to ensure minimum at source waste, utilising surplus fabrics left from cutting and trim at the factory for apparel and accessories, better water governance practices, smarter energy consumption, limiting plastic usage, and fair pay work practices.

With a digital community of over 2 million, we aim to use our platform to create awareness about slow fashion, what sustainability is in fashion, planned obsolescence of fast fashion and all that entails.

1- We have been laying down the foundation of research over the past year into sustainability and taking corrective measures where possible to align our path towards our final goal: Minimise our impact on the environment. For example, we are actively measuring out our waste so that we can introduce better policies throughout our value chain. We’ve laid down the framework to start calculating data for our carbon footprint to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

2- We’ve now implemented a ‘No Single Use Plastic’ policy in our production lines. Instead, we have introduced custom bags made out of parachute like material to ensure clothes are protected while in-transit from department to department during each process of production. We’ve also introduced crates for ease of movement from department to department.

3- We proudly expanded 'reGENERATE'. Years in the making, we test launched apparel and accessories made from surplus fabric at Daachi Mela under ‘reGENERATE’: A set of limited edition products that solidified our pledge to do more for the environment by using surplus fabric to make our main apparel lines zero waste.

4- We have started actively monitoring our waste, and have created a Sorting Centre, that assesses waste and sorts out threads & fabrics that can be used again. That fabric is used for sampling motifs, making apparel and accessories, and so much more. This has effectively reduced our sourcing and ultimately our waste also.

At GENERATION we revere craft. Our clothes are an amalgamation of modern design, generational craft, and timeless aesthetic so they can be worn and passed on by customers from generation to generation.

We are increasing our transparency in dealing with our workers, contractual workers, and craftspeople, to ensure they are receiving what they have rightfully earned. In dealing with cottage, we’ve taken out the middleman and have installed our own Cottage Supervisors in different regions of Pakistan who have been trained by us to ensure prompt qualitied work.

On the human side of sustainability, our workers safety and well-being will be taking priority. Although we have an existing framework for our employee’s well-being, we will be re-assessing our policies one by one to create a happy, safe, consistent environment for our factory workers: that includes humane working conditions, safe working environment, emergency protocols, old age benefits and much more.

Our pre-spring summer campaigns used fabric that was already sourced for our apparel and was cut in the lengths of our cutting table so that it can be used in a way that caused no wear and tear in the fabric! Once done, we sent it back to our production halls so that apparel can be made!

2- From existing surplus fabric we created Pojagis - a traditional Korean patchwork technique that uses small pieces of fabric! We used them in our previous campaign and later repurposed them as cute tote bags and fashion accessories.

If you’re a frequent GEN-shopper, you would have seen our window displays also reflect our sustainability campaigns. We’ve started repurposing materials that we already had by sanding, polishing, re-painting and so forth.

That’s a roundup of what we have been up to for the past few months. Stay tuned for more updates and our sustainability policies which will provide details on what are our problem areas and how we will tackle them!