Mint Ceylon

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Our Responsibility

We drive responsibility in every step – from our design board to your doorstep –
with our compass always set on ways to reduce fashion’s environmental impact.

Together,
at every step

Reducing fashion’s impact takes steely determination and strong collaboration. We love that actions speak louder than words. We accept that we are a small start but through our collaborations with local artisans from rural communities we are striving to bring about bigger change by reducing fashion waste. Together, we are accelerating towards a circular fashion future.

Reducing fashion’s waste

We want to end fashion waste so we rescue, reuse and recycle fabrics from factories and smaller middle men that do not know what to do with their deadstock and off cut pieces. We have managed to be in the right place at the right time – with the right ‘can-do’ attitude – to rescue materials before they may otherwise teeter towards landfill, incineration or down cycling into low grade materials.

We carefully curate and assess our fabrics for durability, comfort and style and every textile that meets our high standards then gets our red carpet treatment to be redesigned into responsible products. We want to slow down the environmentally-polluting production of virgin textiles. And so by rescuing high calibre unwanted fabrics, we bypass virgin textile production altogether.

Deep Dive into our Products

Typically in a fast fashion brand production happens at a very fast pace. Because they are racing against trends that come and go they need to drop out collections every week. At factories they usually stack multiple pieces of fabric on top of each other and batch cut all of them at once by machine to produce 100’s & 1000’s of pieces at once and thus producing tons of waste that ends up in landfills. Because we work with discarded fabrics and we are a zero waste brand we cannot function like that. Every piece of clothing or product we put out has to be individually cut by hand one at a time and a lot of time goes into it. Every piece of fabric we get has a different design in different sizes so our designer carefully has to go through each piece of fabric and decide which part of the design should go where e.g. collar, belt, sleeves and so on. We aim to make the most out of each fabric we have so we turn remaining fabric into smaller products like our bestselling painter’s shirt, house slippers, pouches and so on.

In order to promote slow fashion and the "power of circularity” we reclaim end-of-roll fabrics and create everyday products that’s as wearable as it is ethical. Essentially, we make slow fashion from fast fashion's leftovers. Our compact collections revolve around a vibrant and charismatic aesthetic and are designed to be multi-functional and compatible within capsule wardrobes. We use off-cut fabric leftover from garment manufacturers and smaller shops around Sri Lanka. This unused fabric can be doomed for landfill due to excess manufacturing or miscalculated consumptions. This discovery sparked an idea; the idea to create a lifestyle brand that uses the left overs to create sustainable regenerative fashion.

Instead of adding new product to an immensely saturated fashion industry, we want to aim for a circular economy and make use of the wealth of resources that already exist. Using the left-overs is our little way of contributing to the fight to repair our damaged planet and avoid contributing to mass consumerism and perpetual waste!

Deadstock fabrics are the left over fabrics from other factories and other smaller shops who either overestimated their needs or found small faults in the fabric resulting in the whole fabric being tossed. We love using these fabrics as it’s another way to help reduce textile waste and divert these materials from the landfill and into your closet.

SLOW FASHION TO THE RESCUE

What Is Slow Fashion?

Put simply, slow fashion is the opposite of fast fashion. It encompasses an awareness and approach to fashion that considers the processes and resources required to make clothing. It advocates for buying better-quality garments that will last longer, and values fair treatment of people, animals, and the planet along the way.

Realistically, slow fashion and sustainable or ethical fashion have a lot of similarities. They are sister movements and follow the same general guidelines. The main difference with slow fashion is that it hones in on reducing consumption and production more specifically.

To understand what Slow Fashion is and why it matters so much, we must first look at the harsh reality of its opposite, the Fast Fashion world:

  • 92 million tons of fashion get thrown away each and every year
  • The fashion industry emits 10% of global greenhouse gases
  • It takes 2,700 liters of water to produce one non-organic cotton shirt
  • The average fashion worker in Bangladesh (the world’s second largest fashion producer) earns only 2-3 $ a day
  • Pesticides and chemicals used in fast fashion production pollute the earth for decades to come

Some characteristics of a slow fashion brand

  • Fair trade
  • Zero Waste
  • Made from upcycled or sustainable materials
  • Garments are more timeless than trendy
  • Often sold in smaller (local) stores rather than huge chain enterprises
  • Locally sourced, produced, and sold garments
  • Few, specific styles per collection, which are released only few times per year, or a permanent seasonless collection.
  • Often made-to-order to reduce unnecessary production

6 ways to reduce your textile foot print

01. Think

Make thoughtful, ethical, informed choices. Avoid purchasing from fast fashion brands that pump out new collections every week that are most likely made by overworked, underpaid workers is poor working conditions.

02. Adapt

What could you make from things you don’t wear anymore? We always take apart old clothing and turn them into something new that we can wear.

03. Take Care

Treat your clothes with love, fix them, patch them, wash less, wash cold, avoid using harsh chemicals to wash your clothing, avoid using harsh wash cycles that might damage your clothing or go old school and wash by hand and dry away from direct sunlight.

04. Source locally

Support local makers with good stories and fair trade. Do research into local brands that empower their local communities.


05. Donate

Donate everything that you haven’t worn in over three years. Why should clothing end up in a landfill when it can be donated to someone that can make use of it.

06. Ignore trends

Why the need to conform to trends that come and go. Buy pieces that you can wear for years to come. In many parts of the world people actually do not dress according to what is in “trend” at the moment.