Ethics & Sustainability
We recognize that we are not yet a 100% circular company. We promise to continue integrating initiatives to help us strive toward being a more circular and eco-conscious company.
What we are currently doing
When the development of Armateq first began, we started by making a list and ordering our morals and ethics that we wanted to be reflected in the company. Over time, these became our company pillars, which will remain a blueprint.
One of the pillars is being conscious of our environment. For those who do not know, the fashion industry is one of the top polluting industries in the world. To do our part, we plan to eventually evolve into a circular company where we will oversee the begging-to-end life of all our products to prevent them from ending up in landfills. One step we have taken is our ARMATEQ - Clothing, Resale & More Facebook group, which we encourage all our customers from around the globe to join. This group allows people to buy and sell used Armateq clothing. By spreading awareness of this group, we hope our customers will consider other means of getting rid of garments rather than throwing them away.
Secondly, we laser-cut all of our pattern pieces! Thanks to technology, we can precisely communicate through a computer where we want our pattern pieces cut out on our fabric. This means that we can get each piece extremely close to one another, thus, producing fewer fabric scraps. The fabric scraps are then collected by our manufacturing factory and kept for a future project we have!
Another promise is that we always manufacture fabric with recycled materials. The Evelien Breech is a one-of-a-kind custom fabric made of waste, such as plastic water bottles. Unfortunately, this means our lead times are an added two months because of the processing time required for the recycled materials that make up our fabric. This is important to us, and of course, we will try our best to restock items, but once something is out of stock, there is a possible wait period to receive that item in particular.
The factory we work with is certified by Bluesign, which evaluates their woven and knit apparel to ensure they follow their sustainable criteria. They are also certified by Ecocert and meet the global recycled standard for their dyed and printed fabrics.
Ethics
In our developing stages, it was vital that we provide our customers with fair retail prices while also keeping our workers' ethics in mind. Therefore, we searched for over three months to find a suitable manufacturing factory that met all of our requirements and was able to produce high-quality garments. Our factory that we work with is certified by multiple organizations that supervise our factories in person to see if they meet all of their criteria to be an ethical company. A couple of them are Costco and Amfori, who audits our factory in person every year and evaluates their workplace environment, business practices, and fair remuneration.