Unoa + The Global Sustainability Revolution

At Unoa we are working hard to join forces with the millions of individuals around the planet who are driving the Global Sustainability Revolution. The Global Sustainability Revolution is a term I thought I’d coined myself until I searched it and gladly found other people on completely the same wavelength – got to love the collective consciousness! We have great aims for our brand and we wouldn’t want to look towards personal progress without plans in place to forge a new path in clothes sales and production that allows for a clean and happy conscience from producers to buyers to the individuals who end up wearing these beautifully made pieces.

We see the future of fashion with revolutionary eyes, and we are committed to taking the fashion industry by storm, along with many other producers and consumers, we want a Worldwide revolution in the way we are manufacturing and obtaining our clothes. Our throw away culture will soon be fading as awareness raising movements are catching the attention of consumers and forcing people to be more conscious about how their clothes are really made, while smaller ethical brands and product users put more pressure on bigger brands to be more transparent. 

This means a huge push towards a sustainable future throughout 2019. Together with other industry insiders and activists, we are contributing to events based around sustainability, the spreading of awareness and networking with so many like minded people, it’s giving us more and more energy to bring about the clean, green and ethical future so many of us dream about.

‘Fashion Revolution’ (fashionrevolution.org) is an amazing concerted effort to bring people together in the mission to change the face of fashion. Strengthening our ties with manufacturers and producers is paramount if we are working towards a clean production line. Just this month we have made exciting progress connecting with several others who are making movements in our field, our founder, Aamena, is giving talks at two events, on inclusivity and representation of female minorities in the fashion industry, one of these events happened this week, during the Fashion Revolution Week.

Check out Aamena here: "I made your clothes"

The United Nation’s commitment to Global Sustainable Development is a little bit impressive (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ ), and full power to all those individuals who are holding businesses and governments around the world to account in their work to see these goals fulfilled. We are right behind them. But I have been seriously impressed to see what is being created by the Global Startup Weekend Sustainable Revolution, being held later this Summer (https://global-sustainable-revolution.com/), with two weekends to boost entrepreneurship in the field, 14 – 16 June and 21 – 23 June, 2019 and we are so aligned with the challenges laid out by their international team.

The challenges that they have put forward are a strong incentive for us in terms of lifestyle and although not all of them directly apply to our lives, they do all indirectly affect us, and so we strive to keep up to date with logistical planning and the economic foresight set out by major World leaders and innovators and make sure we align with the most up to date ethics and ecologically viable procedures, slowly pushing for the most efficient delivery of our products while maintaining our high ethical and ecological aims.

While analysing possibilities for the future, we see that too many long journeys in our economic cycles, with current infrastructure, is what is directly contributing to the global warming crisis that we face, we are therefore researching into smarter technology and we are at the forefront of individuals pushing for more renewable, more energy efficient technology that reduces the impact of our product’s journey. We also take in to consideration CO2 emissions from our personal journeys and how our workload is dealt with between the team in order to minimise CO2 output as much as possible for all of Unoa’s business.

We wear our own clothes and take feedback from customers in order to ensure that the product durability allows for a reversal on the planned obsolescence which went into the careless, short sighted and ruthlessly profit driven manufacturing of goods throughout the last few decades and still, unfortunately exists today. Together with the Global Sustainability Revolution’s challenge based ethos, we are committed to working to publicly condemn the ideals of these forms of production and bring about a complete global revolution. We need to maintain standards that will allow our ecology to flourish in to future generations.

During discussions in our personal lives, we have often questioned the way customers are so often hoarded in to the ‘consumer’ figures of sales targets and analysis, while we do look at these in order to manage our business effectively, we are firm in our decision to see our customers as individuals sharing the same planet and working along side us to change our future, rather than objectified numbers. Human beings simply do not need to consume as much as they have been during the last few decades. We are supporting and attending other events, such as ‘clothes swaps’ in order to bring about the shift in consciousness required to eliminate unconscious, fast fashion from our lives. 

 We have recently added an exciting update to our website in the ‘Our Story’ section, which details the part we are playing and how we want to go on bringing consciousness to clothing through our inherent connections with Pakistan, where all our products are made. 

You can read more about the sustainability and fashion focused women who make up our team and how we individually and collectively add value to Unoa's mission and the slow fashion movement here.  

Written by Katherine Brewster 

References

Global Sustainable Revolution Startupweekend, in partnership with google. Tech Stars. [online] Available at: https://global-sustainable-revolution.com/

United Nations Development Programme, Sustainable Development Goals. [online] Available at: https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html