Imagine having a place on the map that allows you to be the direct clothes provider for a child in need. To be the witness of the entire process - from donating, through enriching the clothes, to seeing the smile on the child's face as the output of wearing the piece. A studio in town that gathers all the rejected local textile, upcycles it, puts it back into fashion flow and parallelly, as an educational component holds workshops to stimulate public involment in sustainable and circular fashion

Zagreb, Zagrebacka county

1) Ignorance of the young about how the entire fashion industry works and how much it contaminates our surroundings
2) Ignorance about how trend it is to wear 2nd hand clothes abroad
3) Ignorance about how the entire donating process goes by and what our region's necessities are regarding the textile-donation sector
4) Ignorace about how easy it is to upcycle clothes, to contribute, to be a part of the change
5) Mistrust of the young and brands towards institutions that now hold the processes of donating because of their unsufficient transparency
6) The lack of a "man in the middle" platform for reaching the masses, make them aware and give them the option to act

We are doing it for every link in the chain:
1) for all the children of not that equal social status that need taking care of(~200 in children's homes)
2) for mother nature; for all the local shops and manufacturies that on a daily basis have raw and repro textile materials piling up, and without revision being sent to landfills (~1200t in 2016.)
3) for the future; the public that need to be educated about the processes and for the university students that currently have nowhere to witness the processes and get to know the sustabinable design patterns and sustainable materials first hand

1) Expanding the current team with a legal person needed for further-on events like public dialogue and a project manager for job segmentation
2) The process of gathering all the important information regarding the textile waste sector, the donations sector and the upcycling methods currenty in practice in Croatia.
3) Analysis of the gathered information in orded to contact the key players for organizing a conversation with benefits for each side. (e.x. local ateliers <-> university student practice and internship with waste materials, the global public <-> children's homes campaign, etc.)
4) The conduct of the activities (continuous):
a) gathering, filtering and conversion of textile
b) holding upcycling workshops (practice) and making how-to videos for the public, schoolchildren, students
c) running the 1v1 clothes redesigning segment and redirecting clothes from public to children's homes
d) running the 1v1 model of clothes upcycling for the public
e) showcasing the entire work, organizing catwalks, promoting sustainability and slow fashion via social networks, providing dialogue, spreading the news
f) further enhancements to the proces (collaborations, equipment, processes, ...)

The people's mindless throwing away of the rejected (stained, outworn, outgrown, got bored off,..) textile will stop. The public mind will be accustomed to the new way of thinking what it can do with old textile, from upcycling it and finding a new purpose for it to donating it with confidence and transparency. This will have impact also on other brands so the sustainability component will be much more present in fashion. The municipality will get the much needed insight in how important this "man in the middle" between the public and the donation recipient is, and also between the universities and local shops, who will also have a place for their piles of waste materials. We will be one step closer to a zero-waste fashion.

Our project strengthens active citizenship in a way we keep the persona who comes to us as an associate for the process of upcycling or donating textile as much inside the process as possible. We teach him, we let him know. We make sure we leave a mark on him, so that next time our iniciative has an army of +1. The associate stays involved. Not only our side, but also he himself, as he witnessed the process - with all the transparency, promotes the process. His social and ecological awareness transfer to his social environment as well as the adjacent one, soon after, it turns into social and eco-engagement and the interes for the take action part rises. He now sees that we are the platform that provides practice to make the zero-waste avant-garde idea into reality. He joins the movement.

We are a multilateral local group of young designers that know what our future needs. We're familiar with the local textile waste situation and the prejudices about donating because we all live here for 24 years. We all have experience in the textile sector as we, by now have a collection of more than 50 pieces we ourselves upcycled for clients and have just seen how much potential the process has for the socially vulnerable. Two of our members went through the elite internship of the brand Varteks, so I don't need to accent we're familiar with the processes. Our graphic design duo has hands-on experience in the branch, as they held many social inclusion workshops and won many prizes for their work. We all share the passion towards upcycling and the product sustainability factor. We care.

office expenses 6000€
public relations and media (video) campaigns 4000€
showcase of work 2000€
personnel cost 20000€
travel 800€
educational materials 1200€
legal, accounting and project management help 1000€

We'd like to receive feedback on how you feel about a group of just graduated students conducting this project.
If you're interested to give us future collaboration feedback, please feel free to contact us on alavera@alavera.hr