Rapanui: (L) Rob (R) Mart Drake-Knight

I recently found out about mens and womens eco-fashion brand Rapanui, but to simply call them that is an understatement. Brothers Mart and Rob Drake-Knight have created a company where every step of the production is as environmentally conscious as possible. Add to that a website to go with it that is a resource of green information while showing transparency in their process so this post is full of links back to rapanuiclothing.com.

These 2010 Sustainable Business Award winners in the Isle of Wight, UK can let you can literally track your garment online from textiles to shipping and find out what’s so green about it for yourself. I got the chance to rap a taste with Mart Drake-Knight of Rapanui and it went a little something like this…

Madam Toussaint: Tell us about the name of your brand and the relationship between the surfer lifestyle and your eco conscious business model.

Mart Drake-Knight: The brand name is the native name for Easter Island. I had planned to go surfing there and stumbled upon the name as a good name for an eco business whilst flicking through a copy of “Stormrider Guide“ a surfing book, whilst I was in my first year of uni. My brother and I were at the time considering starting a Renewable Energy Engineering consultancy firm, something we may do in the future.

(L) Malthus Tee (R) Earthbomb Tee

As surfers we stumbled upon the name but the story of Rapanui is more relevant to so much more than just surfing. It’s a great metaphor for the “bigger picture” challenges we are facing with overpopulation, resource depletion and carrying capacity/Malthusian collapse. These themes are carried into our designs with the names, designs and themes of products as well as in hidden messages, like the Malthus tee [1] (the top score is the earths population) or more blatant ones like the Earthbomb organic tee [2].

Our eco business model centres around the philosophy that it’s not that people don’t care (about sustainability) it’s just that they don’t know.

We believe that eco-bling/eco marketing will not bring about the kind of change needed, and that eco shouldn’t be a niche.

It’s about communication and informed choice.

We intend not to be eco, but to be quality, honest and do business the right way. Inform our customers, communicate effectively and allow them to make an informed choice to pass the responsibility on to the consumer and empowering them to bring about sustainable change through voting with their wallet and empowering them to do so in trust by being totally candid and transparent with our business at Rapanui traceability [3] is so thorough that you can see on interactive maps exactly where clothing comes from and how it is made, from the sewing of the seed to the garment on the shelf at prices that don’t cost the earth.

Only once designers and businesses simplify their marketing to honesty will consumers be able to bring about sustainable change with market forces.

It just might take some regulation to make this happen in the first place.

Fundamentally, we can’t wait around for our recommendations on market regulation (like traceability [3], or ecolabelling [4]) to happen, so we are trying to skip that bit by making eco-fashion cool. Fashion is like no other medium in that you literally drape your body in a brand. If that brand, Rapanui, inspires you to be cool by making wider lifestyle choices towards going green, then we will have done our job.

We continue our conversation in Part 2 where we discuss fashion’s carbon emissions, fashion’s compatibility with sustainability and who’s responsible for BP’s oil gusher.

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