OOAK by Ev - What Inspired It?

This past year I have been reading a lot of articles on how bad clothing is for the environment, and I have been feeling a bit guilty working in a industry that is contributing to pollution on such a high level. Did you know that 10.5 million tons of textile waste goes into the landfill every year? Wow! And it can take up to 200 years for certain materials to breakdown in a landfill? Insane. We started noticing how many scraps of fabrics we throw out after our dresses are cut out, and instead of discarding them we started saving them for other uses. It all really started with using left over materials for our charitable program, The Abby Fund. We would save what we could and use them for dream dresses and capes for sick kids, and anything left we would also donate to other organizations that could use them. But, we felt like we still weren't doing enough and we were running out of room storing all this extra material in our tiny studio. So, when we heard of a zero waste store opening up at the local market, we jumped on the idea of creating one of a kind scarves to sell there.

This lead to us feeling inspired to make more one of a kind pieces again! We started using scraps from our discard piles to make one of a kind dresses. Though not all of our OOAK line dresses use scrap materials, majority of them do/will. This gives these fibers a chance to be used for something more than a place in our landfill.

Our OOAK line is completely one of a kind, which means if you purchase one of these dresses, you'll be the only one to own it! You won't have to worry about showing up to a party dressed the same as someone else. Nope, you wont have to participate in the "who wore it better game." Your're welcome.

We're always looking for more ways to be better and hope to use more environmentally friendly materials in the future. If you have any advice for us, please share!