A building with a second life, the inspiration to our project

Nap Village, the place where our atelier is located, has an old closed Japanese school as a main building. That building is used nowadays to hand made The Superior Labor products, that way, that building is having a second life. A professor at Okayama University told me that our way of working applies to the SDGs. 

Our products are made using fine quality materials in order to make them very durable and be used for many years. That way we are reducing waste. But, thinking about what the professor said as an opportunity, I feel that our products should be made with even more consideration of the global environment. We want our customers to think and feel about SDGs, this is why we are looking for new ways to approach a sustainable society. 

Do you know how big is the fabric waste?

Globally, the textile industry would be still a growing industry. Even domestic production volume of fabric in Japan will reach approximately 1.8 billion m2 (according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry data). Japanese fabric has quite high quality based on strict criteria, however, on the other hand, there are also many substandard products. These substandard products could reach more than 9 million m2 even only in Japan. If a lane width were 45 cm, it would be equivalent to the semicircle of the Earth, which is approximately 20.000 km. This is equal to 1.92 million tons of CO2 emission, the annual absorption amount for 13.63 millions of cedar trees.

Leather industry also has a big amount of waste, sometimes because the leather does not fit the quality requirements or simple because there are so many scrap pieces of leather after being cut to make products. 

We wanted to do something about all of this, so we took action. This is our first step: Using reused, recycled and upcycled materials, we have created “kawaii” products with our craftmanship designs and techniques. There is so much we can do for our planet if we waste less and use upcycled fabrics.

This project is a test marketing to get to know your interests, thinking and impressions about materials, design, etc. of these products. Please support us with that.