by Lauren Kruchten | Jul 1, 2020 | July/August 2020, Stuff
Melissa Lowery’s gorgeous turquoise jewelry catches your eye and it can be hard to look away. A self-taught jewelry artist who founded SSD Jewelry in 2003, Lowery creates the bright hues from a homemade patina—or oxidation, a process involving natural ingredients such as salt, wood and vinegar that colors her metals to make them appear naturally aged.
Lowery says her jewelry is very much inspired by the ocean; she grew up in Sarasota, Florida but now lives in Zebulon. “Nature, color and landscapes have always been my muses,” Lowery says. Lowery’s love for nature melds with a desire to care for the environment and practice her craft sustainably; she aims to leave as little of an environmental footprint as possible in her jewelry-making process.
Lowery utilizes recycled materials, including reclaimed metals and organic materials such as repurposed leather, wood and natural fibers, to make her unique pieces along with eco-friendly packaging to transport them. These materials and processes mean Lowery’s pieces of jewelry are one-of-a-kind works of art—no two are ever the same.
“Being able to have the opportunity to create artwork that also serves as a meaningful keepsake for my customers is always the underlying purpose for what I do,” Lowery says. “Being able to pursue [my passion] in a career is so fulfilling.” ssdjewelry.com
by Lauren Kruchten | Mar 27, 2020 | April 2020, Stuff
Emily Neville gives new life to Sunbrella’s leftover fabric.
Most people would assume that leftover scraps of fabric belong in the trash, but Emily Neville, founder of Raleigh-based Reborn Clothing Co., sees their potential to become something new and exciting.
In her sophomore year at NC State, Neville started Reborn as a way to repurpose perfectly good pieces of clothing into pillow cases, blankets and other products that otherwise would be thrown away. Now, Neville is releasing a line of beach totes and zipper pouches in collaboration with the international fabric manufacturer Sunbrella, which specializes in patio furniture, awnings and more. Neville saw how much textile waste Sunbrella was generating at its headquarters in Burlington, NC—only an hour away from her Reborn HQ—and suggested a collaboration. “They didn’t have a consumer partner yet so we wanted to offer this product to their consumers who are already in love with their fabric,” Neville said. Sunbrella’s sustainability director saw how a partnership with Reborn would be a great solution, and so, for the past year, Neville and her team have been working on designs and putting together the final products.
Given Sunbrella fabric’s ability to endure sun damage, and the other potential harms to textiles that can naturally occur from being outdoors, beach totes readily came to mind for Neville as a logical product proposal. Her team selected six body colors that they then matched with the thousands of pounds of Sunbrella’s patterned textile waste, delivered to Reborn’s facility every week. Depending on the size of fabric scrap that comes in, it’s made into either a large beach bag or small zipper pouch, with each piece emerging as truly unique. The bright fabrics from Sunbrella’s colorful spring and summer collections are carried through to the bags and accessories to ensure that they’ll be fun and appeal to both the average Sunbrella and Reborn customer all season long. Neville sees the collection as approachable for all ages; the zipper pouches are great for younger girls while the beach tote is perfect for keeping all the essentials in one place on a family beach trip.
Part of Neville’s passion for the Sunbrella project came from wanting to honor the labor and energy that had gone into making the company’s fabric. “We didn’t want to see this perfectly usable, brand new condition fabric shredded or sold for pennies a pound,” Neville says. “What we want to see is the thousands of gallons of water and energy that went into making this fabric be continued into a new product.” Sunbrella, too, wanted to give its leftover fabric a new life.
“This partnership with Reborn Clothing Co. offers a unique way to revitalize and repurpose what would previously be considered ‘unusable’ fabrics into creative, exclusive tote bags, each individual in its design,” said David Dean, head of research and development for Glen Raven, Sunbrella’s parent company.
Neville hopes the partnership will help show other brands that the idea of repurposing what might seem like throw-away fabric is possible, and that collaborations like these are ideal. Through the collection, she’s shown that the idea is scalable from a manufacturing standpoint and produces a good quality product that consumers love.
Reborn launched a limited release of its Sunbrella products on its website on May 20, with additional limited releases to come throughout the spring and summer seasons.
Shop the launch at rebornclothing.co/product-category/partnerships/reborn-sunbrella.
by Cameron Walker | May 7, 2019 | Eat, May 2019
The Produce Project ensures that fresh, local produce goes to good use.
Several years ago, while browsing the local farmers’ market for dinner inspiration, Mike Shumake accidentally wandered into the wholesale building.
“I’m like a kid in a candy store. Sixty tomatoes were $10,” he says. “The problem is, when you get home with 60 tomatoes you realize you don’t need—nobody needs—60 tomatoes.”
Shumake began making regular runs to the farmers’ market, recruited some friends to split the costs and the bounty, and the casual collective grew into what is now The Produce Project.
The Produce Project is an all-volunteer nonprofit that aims to make fresh produce affordable for Raleigh residents. Customers can buy a single share for Wednesday or Thursday pickup as late as the afternoon before, or they can become subscribers to pick up a box each week. The price—$18—is constant, but the contents of the box, available in regular and keto-friendly, change by day and with the seasons.
This is how it works: Customers order online ahead of time or as part of an ongoing subscription. Then, Shumake picks up fruits and vegetables in bulk at the State Farmers’ Market and a small team of volunteers divides the haul into individual boxes for pickup. To collect their share, customers bring their own bags and boxes and enter at the side of the building at 1000 Brookside Drive (to the left of the tattoo shop) and walk up to the Dutch door, where they are handed a box loaded with produce. They take what they want and leave the rest, which becomes The Produce Project’s “profit.”
“When you buy a tomato, you’re paying for the tomato that you’re buying, plus the three or four tomatoes that are hiding in the back of the store…there is always waste,” Shumake says. As he buys only enough to fill the boxes that have been ordered, there is no waste in the traditional sense; however, the nonprofit donates produce that customers don’t have room to take home. Customers can also purchase a share for donation at a reduced price of $15, and subscribers can get a weekly share plus a donated share for a total of $30.
In the first three months of this year, the organization donated more than 9,000 pounds of produce to the Resource Exchange Commission, which helps wounded veterans; the Murphey School senior housing; and Love Wins Community Engagement Center, which serves those experiencing homelessness.
A recent box held a mini watermelon, two clementines, two onions, five cloves of garlic, three jalapenos, one poblano pepper, a green pepper, two avocados, two small mangoes, two peaches, three large carrots, a couple of yellow squash, a package of locally grown lettuce, a bundle of asparagus, a bunch of kale, a bouquet of cilantro and a 10-pound bag of potatoes.
“Going to the grocery store is like an errand, [but] I’ve heard from the parents that when they show up here on pickup day, it’s like an unboxing,” Shumake says. “They don’t know what they’re going to get. It’s like Christmas…I had someone say to me the other day that it’s like Iron Chef in their house. They get home with the kids and the ingredients are all there and they’re like, ‘What are we going to make next?’”
Shumake retired early after an award-winning career as a teacher and several lucrative years working as an education consultant. He is thrilled to see how the community has embraced The Produce Project, but he has even bigger plans for the nonprofit. Ultimately, he wants to apply the same model in local schools, building a business as an integrated program to teach entrepreneurship, math, logistics, nutrition science, teamwork, problem-solving, marketing and more, all while providing healthy food to those who may not otherwise have access to fresh produce.
“I believe that people measure success in this country with the wrong metric—we measure success by the amount of money that we pull in,” Shumake says. “There is a finite thing we can measure success by and that is the number of breaths we take. The question is, what do we do with them? For me, it’s helping others [and] helping the community.”
For more information or to purchase a subscription, visit produceproject.org.
by Jane Porter | Sep 8, 2017 | Polish, September 2017, Stuff
It’s a well-worn cliche but for Jenny Hwa, the Raleigh-based designer behind the newly re-launched sustainable women’s clothing company Loyale, quality really is more important than quantity.
Hwa’s two-style collection became available for purchase online this summer at loyalestudio.com. Hwa says instead of driving sales, she’s currently more focused on reaching her potential customers via social media, a monthly newsletter, and a journal chronicling the production process from start to finish. Hwa hopes her two silhouettes (a ballerina T-shirt and a boat-neck tunic, each available in black or in gray-and-white stripes) will sell well, of course, but her main goal is to build an audience that shares her company’s commitment to ethical, sustainable consumer practices. She wants her customers’ feedback to guide the future of the Loyale brand and not the other way around.
“It’s counter-intuitive; most companies want to sell a lot of garments,” Hwa says. “But we would prefer you shop less. There’s real pressure in society that you continuously update your wardrobe. That’s why we didn’t design elaborate pieces; ours are really classic. It’s important that what you’re buying from us matches stuff you already have.”
A native of the Bay area, Hwa moved east to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology after earning an undergraduate degree in business. While living in Manhattan and working full-time with companies such as Armani and Calypso St. Barth’s, Hwa launched what she refers to as Loyale 1.0, in 2005. For five years, Hwa enjoyed successful collections but, due to mounting overhead costs in New York, she decided to move to North Carolina where she thought she’d find a burgeoning textile industry.
It took Hwa a little longer than she anticipated to find her footing down south.
“Textile mills and cut-and-sew factories were actually on the decline,” Hwa says. “There was a lack of skilled workers who knew how to manage sewing machines and do finishes and trims. I was trying to find fabric manufacturers and the facilities to sew garments, and I went down a lot of different paths that led to nowhere, unfortunately.”
Through a mixture of serendipity and old-fashioned perseverance, Hwa eventually connected with Opportunity Threads, a worker-owned co-op based in Burke County in western North Carolina. Hwa says the nonprofit’s emphasis on its own community of skilled workers, as well as on environmentally-friendly production practices, made it the perfect partner for Loyale to align with. Hwa personally knows the two workers—Alfonso and Eulusia—who sew each of Loyale’s garments, and she takes a hands-on approach to production at the Appalachian facility, which she documents on Loyale’s Instagram page.
Additionally, Hwa learned, she needed to source fabrics from Japanese textile mills with state-of-the-art technology and high-integrity fibers to satisfy her standards for quality, drape, wearability and longevity of the designs.
“While we wanted to have a completely locally-sourced product, we’re not going to make something that’s going to disappoint people later on,” Hwa says. “I worked with these Japanese mills almost exclusively with Loyale 1.0, and the sustainable practices at these facilities are more on the up-and-up than those you’d find in the U.S.”
Hwa acknowledges that it takes a certain kind of customer to pay $90 or $134 for a single garment. But, she says, that customer appreciates the high quality of the workmanship, timeless design, superior fabric and seasonal versatility of her pieces. This customer also shares her company’s ideological commitment to ethical, environmentally sound production practices and appreciates Loyale’s emphasis on philanthropy; for every garment sold, for instance, the company donates $2 to a nonprofit partner.
That said, says Hwa, Loyale has been exceeding its sales goals sine the re-launch and, although it ships to customers all over the world, Hwa is pleased with the level of engagement from customers based in the Southeast.
As for what’s next for Loyale, Hwa says she’ll be spending some time interacting with customers who are buying her clothes, subscribing to Loyale’s electronic newsletter, and following the company’s social media pages.
“Nothing’s set in concrete; it’s about feeling like there is a dialogue happening,” Hwa says. “It’s about consumers questioning their choices and making incremental changes in their lives. That’s where we’ll see the kind of progress we’re most committed to making.”
