Brook There is a Lingerie company; their target consumers are women. The brand promotes confidence and comfort; they consider comfort is the main thing. Brook who is the owner and designer of the company thinks that self-confidence comes from the comfort of clothing, and self-confidence is the foundation of every form of beauty. The lingerie they designed can make you feel free, without the extra binding. The designers feel that every piece of clothing worn on the body is used to provide warmth and support. Their products are undies, unpadded and wireless bras, tanks, tees, shorts, and leggings.

They mention that they use organic cotton and silk for environmental reasons, producing in the US and choose a low-impact work style.

Organic cotton fabrics:

– GOTS-certified yarn

– milled in South Carolina or California

– real silk trims, with a touch of spandex.

Dye:

– in Pennsylvania or California

– small selection by Brook in Maine

– fiber reactive dyes

Transport:

– Everything is cut and sewn in New England, with the bulk of production occurring in Fall River, Massachusetts. The majority of our fabric is produced in South Carolina. It is trucked to Pennsylvania for dyeing. And then it goes to Massachusetts for cut and sew, and that’s it, until it ships to customers.

– Making in the USA, no sweatshops and no child labor.

– Ship directly from the process house, packing them without plastic bag. Instead of using plastic, they use eco-enclose recycled poly bags and recycled tissue paper for most orders. (If you order a whole bunch of stuff, they use a cardboard box.)

Interviewing:

1. After reading your web and blog, I know that you are good at making garments, but why do you choose to create a lingerie brand instead of others?

• I actually started by making clothing using organic cotton and sustainable fabrics. It was by chance that I made a few pieces of underwear, and they sold really well.  After a couple of seasons, we decided to focus on underwear and lingerie because it was getting the best response from the market.

2. I think that dyeing is one of the big and important parts of sustainable development. There is mentioned in your webpage that you are using reactive-dye. But as far as I knew, the reactive-dyeing process would produce a lot of high concentration of dye run-off. What do you think of this? Reactive-dye doesn’t get good results in some colors. How would you solve these problems? Would you use natural dye?

• Yes, we use primarily fiber reactive dye (except for white and black, which are difficult to get with fiber reactive. Other than white and black, fiber reactive dyes can be used to achieve any color reliably, in my experience.) The other primary commercial alternative for natural fibers to fiber-reactive dye is called direct dye. The dye contractors that I have talked to feel that the waste by product is similar for both.  By natural dyes, I’m guessing you mean plant dyes. The reasons we don’t use these are: the achievable color range is less, they are less reliable with regards to permanence in light and washing, and, most importantly, I’ve never found a contractor who could dye fabric on the roll using plant dyes. If you encounter a contractor who does dye on-roll fabrics using plant dyes, I’d be interested in testing it out!
• For a while in the beginning, I did the dyeing myself, but at the scale of our business now it isn’t possible for me to continue dyeing fabric.
• We tested using garment dyeing -which means cutting and sewing undyed fabric using cotton thread. It was ok for clothing, but because of the multiple materials and shrink factors with underwear and elastic, we pulled back from garment dying. With roll-dyed fabric, we see 99%-100% of sewn items passing the QA step. With garment dyeing it was more like 70-80%.

3. The style of your products is keeping in simple and comfortable, but sometimes, customers have no other choices. In contrast, in some other lingerie brands, such as Victoria’s secret. They will produce products that fix with people of different ages and aesthetics. Consumers may also be biased towards such these brands. What do you think about this? Have you ever thought of innovating base on these foundations to attract more consumers and promote environmental protection?

• Typically, smaller companies serve a niche market first before expanding to a broader market. From my point of view, Victoria’s Secret offers a very limited product range 🙂 The reason we focused on sustainable, low-structure, and organic fabrics are precisely because it was hard to find those products in the market.

If you would like to see more Brook’s products or process, please check out https://www.brookthere.com/.