More importantly, talking to our colleagues, friends and to industry experts, we realised that, at a time when making more conscious choices is more important than ever, the term sustainable is starting to wear out. People don’t trust sustainability claims as they used to (partly due to unabashed greenwashing from fast fashion companies), don’t understand how their purchases connect to a larger picture, and associate sustainable with boring and plain. We wanted to re-image sustainability, re-design it with our community and push it farther. A fresh reset. Our leading question was: can our clothes actually become a driver for environmental regeneration?

I think neither of us imagined themselves starting a fashion brand, but we saw a gap and an opportunity to show that there’s another way to do fashion, and another way to buy. Trace Collective makes timeless, comfortable pieces of menswear and womenswear that are versatile enough to take you from the office to that dinner with friends.

We went for style, comfort and high quality, producing to the highest sustainability standards and telling our customers every single detail about their clothes. Zero compromises. What that means is that not only you can get clothes that look good, but that with each of our pieces we save on average 2 years of drinking water, 2 years of bulb energy usage and 5kg of CO2. That’s 90% less water than an average item of cotton and 50% less energy.

We do all this through really careful and detailed supply chain management (from sourcing to production to transport) and you don’t have to take our word for it: we use blockchain technology and smart labels so our data sits on an incorruptible ledger that’s verified by a third party. So when you scan our labels, you see all the info in a fun and intuitive way, including a map telling you where our clothes come from, and who made them, and you can play around and reconnect with the incredible stories behind them.

We’re a really small team, formed by us two, the founders, and most recently our wonderful designer Clare Payne, and two interns without who we wouldn’t be here. The scope of work to bring this collection to live was incredibly vast. From design, to fabric sourcing, to finding the right suppliers, audit and blockchain partners, developing an online presence and communications plan, managing social media, working with press, shooting our lookbook and preparing our Kickstarter… those are a few of the things that we covered this past year, being 2 people most of the time.

We started Trace Collective with a lot of passion but almost no capital, so we haven’t able to outsource any of the main chunks of work, or to build the team to spread the workload. What this means is that every single day is different, and that we all do a bit of everything. In general, Antonia leads more on the branding and creative aspect of the brand, and I lead more on the business development side. But ultimately we take all decisions together and a lot of work is tightly interlinked.

Most days in the morning you’ll find me in front of my laptop, preparing presentations and excel sheets or writing articles or blogs, or answering emails. I try to use my mornings as focused time to do chunkier work that requires deep focus, and actually try not to check emails until I’ve squeezed in 2-3 hours of solid work. My afternoons are more flexible, it’s when I take all my meetings and telephone calls, so you can usually find me walking my dog while I call a supplier or having a coffee with usually pretty inspiring people.