Waste Yarn Project: from waste to treasure
At the beginning of this year, in January, Angelica and Cherie met Siri Johansen and her project ‘Waste Yarn Project’ at Pitti Uomo in Florence.
Waste Yarn Project is a sustainable fashion brand born in 2020 from the collaboration between Siri Johansen, designer and Sebastien Maes, owner of Maestro Knitting, a knitting mill in China. The brand bases its entire production on the recycling of waste yarn, creating limited pieces that are sold worldwide.
In this interview we talk about how the collaboration between a knitwear manufacturer and a design project works, how it came about and what the creative results are.
Yours is a special case of a collaboration that can be an inspiration for many professionals in the sustainable fashion industry as it involves both the designer and the textile company turning waste into an opportunity. Can you tell us how did you start to work together?
The waste yarn from Sebastian’s factory, before the beginning of ‘Wast Yarn Project’ (WIP) had been sitting in the factory warehouse for 15 years without a proper using solution. After that, it was being sold to other companies engaged in transforming it into industrial products, such as upholstery, carpets or similar. Basically, all the noble characteristics of the yarn were lost during this process. When Siri started working at Burberry, Sebastien had just started his new company : “I went to visit him two or three times a year, and I suddenly started notice that, as the time was going by, the amount of boxes full of wasted yarn was growing faster than I could ever imagined. Before then, I had never had the chance to witness see the accumulation with my eyes’, remember Siri, ‘So the idea came to my mind: I decided to try solving this leftover’s issues on the biggest scale possible., I got the design, he got the material:, we were complementary.’
An innovative approach to the production-process, the recombination of different materials:
“The hardest thing is turning people’s heads when they are used to work in an easier and cheaper way. Although our solution is more sustainable and takes into account the environment, the workers and their time, it is clearly not the easiest way. We realized that in order to carry on our production, which was made up of recombinations of yarns decided on piece by piece, we could not ask the workers to decide. They had to be led but such a process would have taken even longer. Every time with our production is like starting from zero; having one person doing it would not have been sustainable in terms of effort and time.”
So the “wheel of fortune” came up: it is a machine programmed to process defined patterns as a result of random recombinations: for example, the fiber of cashmere and apache must be in a defined percentage % for the machine to work. After the input, the results of shape color and pattern, however unique and non-predictable, belong to repeated patterns variations.
“The biggest difference with industrial production is the labor time, which obviously affects even the price:, with our approach, we’re about like 4 times slower than industrial production.”
Do you think that your approach is replicabile by a company that wants to become more sustainable?
“I think that there are many ways to take inspiration from our method and be turn it into a more sustainable approach in terms of time. First of all if you allow your company to buy yarn even from other companies and from that same lot you make out of that as many pieces as possible. You can work the yarn in an industrial way, and this can lowering prices and timescales.” Our point is making every piece unique, we’re setting up an approach that can work only on Project Yarn, applying this mentality even to our employees and machines:, we’re working with an ancient spinning machine. that It’s different to just feeding the machine, Our bigger issues is that we need to decide every pieces: we’re working with leftovers, so we’ve a limited quantity of the same yarn, and we need to create solutions for the final result”.
About scaling up the project and integrating more companies and knitters:
“We like the boutique kind of thing, we’re not in a rush to get bigger, but we’ve opened in Bulgaria and Portugal, the project for the future will be to have a Project Yarn in every country where we have a stock of good quality and start a training, a workshop teaching people our method. It’s all about education and workshop because we don’t want that our workers or companies to cut out and go straight to the point of reproducing. We’re still in our little project so for now training new employees is easy, we can do that up face to face, but we’re thinking about a model of training taught in workshops. And at the same time education concerns the final consumer and the distributors:, in the end they are taking the risk of buying this unknown piece. It takes time, it’s slow and definitely we don’t need to expand because our ideals continue to be in opposition to those of industrial projects. We don’t want to have any stock.’
Part of the company ‘Waste Yarn Project’, one of Sebastien’s factories is settled in China, what one are the advantages and what the disadvantages ?
“I moved to China and started working there when I was 21. The beauty of China is that you still have a lot of people, workers who still have knowledge on how to knit with handlums in the ancient way and the quality level you can find for this reason is one of a kind. On the other hand, once you have used your stock and you need to find other suppliers it can be more difficult to find the same quality that you find in Europe. It’s more difficult for companies in China to sell their leftovers to another company”
Is there a tip learned from your experience that you would feel like sharing with those who decide to take the path of sustainable fashion?
“Our project is based on limits. We work with waste and a limited number of possibilities: that means making a design of the future. We won't always be able to have all the raw materials available., When you can make a design with all these limitations, I think it means making the best out of limitations.” “The key for me is to find the right partner, it is not just me and Sebastien, you have to find many other combinations, between product and buyer, factory and worker: this is the learning curve. And you need to take time if you want quality. It’s a lot of learning, and teaching people takes a lot of time., changing people’s mindset takes even more. We need to reshape the mindset of Fashion, we don’t need 2 productions of new collections going on every year.”
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