Sustainability

Winner of the 2019 'Best Ethical Brand' in the Good Web Guide Awards

These are the achievements we made to improve our sustainability as a
brand to far:

  • For each product purchased we are planting a tree on the behalf of our customers.

  • We are working with an external, independent carbon-emissions agency to audit our business and see what further improvements we can make towards becoming a 100% carbon-neutral company in the future.
  • All our dresses and sleepwear are now made in organic cotton. All our vintage coats and jackets are designed and made from upcycled antique textiles. We also use GOTS-certified organic cord.

  • All our fabrics, trims and yarns are of Indian origin to ensure we keep our carbon emissions as low as possible.

  • We then ship by sea from India to reduce our carbon footprint further.

  • All our bags and tickets in-store are created for us by hand in Jaipur, using the remnants from the fabric industry to make cotton paper - they are completely tree-free.

  • We remove all unnecessary plastic packaging when we post out orders.
    In 2020 we reduced our plastic consumption by approx. 90% - all items will be shipped to us from India in cloth bags, or wrapped in fabrics to remove as much plastic as possible from our supply chain.

  • All our dresses are delivered to you in a matching cotton print tote bag, with zero plastic packaging.

  • We reuse remnants from the production of our hand-block printed sleepwear and accessories to create journals, patchwork quilts and small cotton accessories to minimise the wastage we create in manufacture.

  • In store our aim is to go paper-free - our first step is to offer digital receipts with purchases and we have removed as much paper as possible with online orders.

     


Seasonless Style - wardrobe heroes you will wear forever

We are slow-fashion champions. Contemporary, trend-led design is pivotal to the Dilli Grey aesthetic but creating throw-away fashion is not our style. We are conditioned to think that ‘precision, exact replication, volume, speed’ are all the best ways to create fashion – that efficiency is king. Yet what happens when we slow that process down, who benefits? What can we learn? What beauty can be captured in the organic nature of truly handmade designs? These are questions we want to explore. We are constantly reviewing, refining and improving how we work in a sustainable and conscious way.We create a considered, capsule collection of designs each season; we would rather you invested in a few pieces a year that you love, rather than in vast volumes that will be tomorrow's landfill. We do not re-design, for re-designing sake. Once we feel we have perfect the dreamiest white maxi dress, or the comfiest pair of pyjamas bottoms, we will simply re-fresh it each season in a new colourway. It's all about getting off the 'fast fashion' treadmill of 'new, new, new' and think 'how can this be made beautifully, and last?'.

Zero-Waste Brand

As a 'zero waste' brand we ensure none of our end of season stock is sent to landfill, like so many of the fast-fashion brands - by producing in smaller collections it means we often sell-out, rather than having to heavily discount all our end of season surplus, which encourages the 'throwaway fashion mentality'.

We're not perfect but we are making these issues a priority - which is how progress can be made. Read about how we work fairly and ethically with our artisans, here

 

Man-Made, not Machine-Made

By the nature of how our designs are made, we are treading lightly and slowly on the planet, as everything from our pattern cutting to block-printing is done by hand in small batches. The small-scale, handmade production allows for centuries-old techniques to be viable and sustainable for our artisans, as we are not demanding they made 1000+ units to a short-lead time. A single product may take 6-8 months to develop and create, with only 50 pieces ever being made. It is this slow intention that we hope shines through in our conscious production.