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At Primal Gray, we believe that looking good should be as easy as doing good. What we wear and how we choose to express ourselves through style is a daily endeavour, but one with potentially disastrous consequences. Fashion is widely regarded as one of the most polluting and problematic industries. From the burden on natural resource inputs like water, land, and energy to child labour and unliveable working conditions and wages, fast fashion can create tremendous and lasting harm to people and the planet. While we acknowledge that no consumption can be 100% sustainable, we want to be part of the solution, educating and offering consumers a better choice of a lower-impact garment. Looking at each layer of impact that a garment can possibly have, we promote ethical transparency - honest, data-driven, inclusive solutions that prioritise people and planet, with absolutely no greenwashing.
By promoting ethical transparency and implementing better business practices across the board, we hope to educate and empower our consumers to make better, more informed choices. By setting a bold industry standard, we hope to help push other brands to do more and do better - to make change, we all need to take action, together, as #PrimalPeople.
Our approach to ethical transparency begins with our materials. Depending on the intended use of each piece, we prioritise safe, organic or renewed materials that have a significantly reduced carbon and natural resource footprint but still offer the same functionality and premium experience. Just like organic vegetables at a grocery store, organic fibres like cotton or linen are grown without the use of any synthetic chemical pesticides or genetic modification (GMOs), within a rotation system that builds soil fertility and protects biodiversity.
An organic system of agricultural production operates under established standards for environmental protection, animal welfare, and human safety, sustaining the health of ecosystems, soils, factory workers, and the end consumer (no harmful residues in the end product). Renewed fibres like rPET and recycled cotton, on the other hand, are manufactured f rom materials recovered f rom the waste stream. Instead of accumulating in a landfill where they would release planet-warming greenhouse gases, these would-be waste materials are diverted, recycled, and returned to the market. Recycling existing fibres into renewed ones decreases the overall demand for virgin fibre, easing the burden on the planet’s strained resources to produce them.
In line with leading international textile research and advocacy, we only use these preferred fibres in all Primal Gray garments. To maintain our commitment to ethical transparency and a high level of accountability in our supply chain, our fabrics are further certified by recognized global organisations like Textile Exchange and Global Organic Textile Standard. This form of independent third-party verification allows us to make sure the organic or recycled content labels on your clothing are accurate, and that established strict requirements for ecological and labour conditions are met through the supply chain. We also ensure every component of every piece is tested for harmful substances and meets the highest standards for human safety, certified by reputed organization OEKO-TEX.
A key element of our ethically transparent approach deals with the ethical treatment of workers that produces your clothes. Labourers who grow and help manufacture fast fashion clothing are often overworked and underpaid, many of them minors who are forced to work in dangerous conditions. Along with textile certifications, we look at certified Fair Trade suppliers that help provide farmers with better prices, access to advance credit, safeguards f rom dips in market price, and premiums over the selling price to invest in business or community projects of their choice. Fair Trade certification also ensures workers have decent working conditions and bans discrimination, forced labour and child labour.
Dyeing fabrics to produce finished clothing pieces is another critical aspect of bringing you ethically transparent Primal Gray garments. Conventional dyeing processes use a lot of water and energy and produce toxic wastewater discharge that contaminates and accumulates in f ragile ecosystems. To dye our garments, we use an innovative, energy-efficient dry dyeing process that uses reclaimed carbon dioxide instead of water in a closed-loop process. Without any water input or added chemicals to dissolve dyes, there is no wastage of dye and no waste water produced to bring you the most vibrant shades of clothing.
At Primal Gray, we implement a range of circular production practices to ensure the lowest levels of waste generation, along with assuring fair wages, gender equality and international compliance standards for waste disposal. When you shop on our website, we also offer you the option to check a box to make your order Carbon Neutral with EcoCart. By checking this box, EcoCart automatically calculates the exact cost of offsetting your order’s carbon emissions and adds it as a small fee to your order price. This fee then becomes a verified and transparent donation to fund a given sustainability project that works to remove carbon f rom our atmosphere.
Finally, we pack all Primal Gray pieces with the same principles of ethical transparency in mind. In order to minimize the amount of single-use plastic we generate, our garments are first packed in durable muslin pouches stitched by visually impaired individuals trained at the Blind Relief Association in New Delhi. We are proud to employ these individuals through the Association, to empower them with vocational skills, experience and income to enable them to make a living and develop valuable life skills. Our garments are further packaged in recycled corrugated cardboard boxes or recycled plastic shipping pouches that minimize the need for virgin packing materials and allow us to implement a more circular process right upto when your Primal Gray garment reaches you.
