No short-cuts
Compression and running garments that combine performance with sustainability and transparency are the first products to come to market from Pressio, a young company with an experienced head on its shoulders.
One of the founders of compression clothing brand 2XU, Jamie Hunt, has set up a new brand called Pressio. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, he was previously head of product at 2XU until two years ago.
He describes Pressio as a brand built upon the pillars of performance, sustainability and ethics; the yarn selection, knitting technique, dyeing and manufacturing approach it takes in making its products will be in keeping with these three pillars.
It launches with two ranges, run and compression, comprising singlets, shorts and long- and short-sleeved tops for the former and shorts, tights, sports bras, socks and calf-guards for the latter.
Pillars of wisdom
Explaining what was in his mind when pinpointing the three pillars, Jamie Hunt says that athletes, including himself (he is a former professional triathlete), want to buy the best products possible. They want to be sure that what they are wearing will not disadvantage them in any way and, if anything, will help them perform better. He has been creating textiles now for more than 20 years, he reveals, and thinks that with the recycled options available nowadays there is enough out there to make fabrics with a level of performance that is every bit as good as what is possible using virgin yarns.
“I almost got there,” he says of the launch collection from Pressio. “I almost managed to do it. Sometimes I had to reach out to the yarn producers and we worked on a few things. As it’s now ended up, anybody who wears the product will think the performance is amazing. Then, when they find out it’s sustainable, they’ll say ‘wow’. That’s the impact I wanted to have, to have the level of performance, but in as sustainable a way as possible.”
He explains that between 90% and 95% of the material he has used in the launch collection is sustainable; to have gone beyond that would have meant doubling the price of the products. A combination of two of his three pillars has been enough to allow the new brand to “walk into some amazing accounts”, including places that 2XU was unable to crack.
Good people
With regard to the third pillar, ethics, he says that, having been in the industry for a long time, he has had the advantage of visiting more than 100 factories in Asia and perhaps 30 or 40 in Europe. In addition, he has worked with hundreds of fabric mills over the years. All of this is an advantage, he explains, because he has had the chance to come to know these companies and form genuine partnerships with them. For Pressio, he has selected the mills and the factories he knew to be “the best of the best”, in terms of ethics as well as quality. Most start-ups have little choice but to work with whatever factories have the availability.
He has made many of the names public on the transparency section of the Pressio website, unworried about rivals finding out which partners he is working with, preferring to flag up what he calls “a common thread” of quality and good practice.
“I want to be held accountable,” he says. “If one of my dealers out there did something wrong, I’d want to be told. Our dyehouses are bluesign-approved. Our fabric factories have Oeko-Tex 100 certification and we’re working on other certifications. People can email me and I’ll send them all the auditors’ reports. If you are telling an ethics story, you have to be transparent, you have to tell the marketplace who your suppliers are. And if you do that and something does go wrong, it’s down on paper that I use them, so I have to know that they are regularly audited. I have to know that they are good people.”
Boots on the ground
He makes the point that, culturally, brands from New Zealand and Australia are on the ground at their supplier factories “all the time”. He has observed that those same suppliers hardly ever see their customers from Europe or North America, who seem more content to trust local agents and, perhaps, pay a visit themselves once a year for a day. “I’m always up there [in Asia],” he continues, “and I’m always speaking to the staff, so it’s not hard to find out if things are not right. You can have all the audits in the world, but you still have to be there, asking questions.”There have still been supply chain challenges for Pressio, though. One of the biggest was that, in developing new fabrics, new yarns and new technologies, it has been necessary for Mr Hunt to invest in what, for the new brand’s needs, are “massive amounts” of product. Ordinarily, he might have ordered a fabric in three colours at 1,000 metres per colour. With new ideas, though, his partners didn’t want to make only 3,000 metres. He is, therefore, carrying extra yarns and fabrics just to meet minimums and it is he who has had to take the risk on the technological breakthroughs for “quite a lot of extra money” and after intense negotiation with partners, although he insists it is paying off. A number of the launch products have ‘sold out’ stickers on them already on the brand’s website.
Dyeing to innovate
“The conventional dyeing process is one of the most impactful processes, environmentally,” Mr Hunt says. “Also, with compression fabric, when you go to dye it, it’s done at quite a heat and that heat, with the chemicals in the dye-batch, can affect the power of the elastomeric yarns. It can vary the amount of power you have from batch to batch. Eliminating batch-dyeing, we’re now finding that the power is exactly the same each time. We’ve increased the power because the compression fabric is not going through that destructive process. By taking the eco route, we have a better fabric.”
Some batch-dyeing is part of the process for producing the company’s running collection, but 90% of the fabrics it is using are dyed in other ways. Eco-Dye uses 80% less energy, 80% less chemical input, and lowers CO2 emissions by 75%. At the moment, black is the only colour option, but Mr Hunt believes this will soon expand, and if more brands start to use it, the extra options will become available faster.
After-life
Even when athletic clothing collections are as new as Pressio’s, end-of-life has to be a consideration for brands that take sustainability seriously, especially with questions in the air about the recyclability of recycled fibres.
Mr Hunt explains: “What we are looking to integrate is a trade-in programme. Customers will be able to send in their old Pressio garments and we will try to reuse them. But we are also working on biodegradable fabrics and, for a gym collection we intend to add, on running shorts that stretch so well they need no elastane. We’re looking to improve things in any way we can. I want this brand to be known as a sustainability leader in the sporting goods space. The best way to be sustainable is to buy well made, good-quality clothes that will last a long time. Good fabrics don’t cost that much more, if you know what you’re doing.”
He also expresses the hope that recycling programmes will expand and that plastic-based products we cannot recycle today will be recyclable in the future.
Trade-offs
He has brought with him from 2XU an insistence on carrying out denier-grading and filament-grading, grading the filaments on the back and on the front of the fabric. Do this well and you can have permanent, enhanced moisture management, for instance, without using chemicals, he says. If you use recycled yarns, though, the range of options reduces. “The demand hasn’t been there,” he says. “I’ve had to go out and track down other suppliers of recycled yarns so that I can have that level of moisture management. It’s really hard to do that. There is recycled elastane out there, which I would love to use and I am looking at using in some non-compression items next year. But the modulus and the power are just not at the level that you get from Lycra, for example. At least they now have it. Let’s hope the yarn suppliers can give us more selection.”
The best way to be sustainable is to buy well made, good quality clothes that will last a long time, the brand’s founder says.
All Credits: Pressio
