Handcrafting a Sustainable Future
The story of Etisha Collective’s Turkish towels.
Etisha Collective, a start-up from Berlin, offers organic cotton towels ethically made by traditional weavers in Turkey.
Cotton is the most widely used textile fiber in the world with approximately 75 percent of the world’s clothing products containing at least some amount of cotton. However, pesticides and toxic chemicals associated with cotton production pollute the water and damage the health of agricultural workers. According to the United Nations, 10,000 litres of water are needed to produce enough cotton to make a single pair of jeans.
Etisha Pipada is trying to do her bit to solve this problem with her new project Etisha Collective. She and her team create towels that are sustainable and ethically-made, all while supporting traditional Turkish weavers.
Etisha has a fascinating background that led her to where she is now. She first started working as a graphic designer for luxury brands in Singapore. There, she also began writing about fashion and luxury, and got to know luxury consumers very well. Six and a half years later, she went to Milan and worked for Gucci on a project about Sustainable Practices in the Luxury Industry, interviewing many influential people at the forefront of this conversation.
Etisha recounts one conversation in particular:
“I spoke to Marina Spadafora from Fashion Revolution, which was also a turning point for me. I still remember she told me ‘Fashion isn’t just a style choice, it’s a political choice. We are choosing the world we want to live in by purchasing clothes from an ethical brand,’ and that really moved me.”
This experience led her to realize that she wanted to do something in this industry and have an impact.
That summer she travelled to Turkey and discovered the story of traditional cotton weaving.
“Hand-weaving was a beautiful dying art. It was also an art that led to less waste, to longevity, and to good products. I thought ‘this is it, I am going to design these towels’.”
One day she visited a village in Turkey that was home to some of the last weavers, those who knew the traditional Turkish weaving techniques. According to Etisha, Turkey attracted many tourists after hammam towels gained renown, Turkey industrialized, and factories started taking over traditional weavers’ houses.
Etisha continued to relay this story:
“Traditionally in Turkey, not many people know, but every house used to have a loom in the living room. It was a part of their culture. Women wove for the home and men wove for the palace or commercially.”
But the old weavers were giving up. They continued weaving because they were passionate about it, but their kids had no interest in pursuing it as a profession. So Etisha Collective has started a project to support the weavers. The aim is to create a community, all within the same village, where the old weavers would teach this 17th-century art to younger weavers who see the potential of the craft. This village would be approximately 250–500 acres and located in the middle of Anatolia. There would also be wooded areas, barns, and farm land, since the artisans also work with linen.
There are a thousand weavers working on this project at the moment, and it continues to grow. This includes the last remaining silk weaver from the royal palace, who continues to make silk towels. He raises his own worms and ethically extracts the silk himself. Sadly, traditional Turkish weaving is still on the brink of extinction. It was once a thriving industry, which has almost vanished in the last 40 years. Projects like this and businesses that support it, like Etisha Collective, are very important for the future of the textile industry and for artisans.
The Story of a Handwoven Towel
The life of Etisha Collective’s towels begins in Mardin, Turkey, where producers grow the organic cotton and dye the threads. They only use GOTS-certified organic cotton. GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) is one of the largest textile certification standards for organic fibres in the world.
The threads are then sent to the weavers in Denizli, in the west of Turkey, to craft the threads into towels. Later, they are shipped to Istanbul, where the finished towels are dispatched to Berlin, Germany.
Etisha aims to build a brand that creates meaningful products that are both timeless and have a positive impact on the world.
“We are trying to minimize and offset any damage that we are doing by creating our products. At the forefront of everything we do, we want to be an honest brand that does everything with the highest quality materials, one which is good for the environment and good for customers as well. We don’t want our clients to come in contact with any sort of harmful chemicals whatsoever.”
The Value of Transparency
One of the biggest challenges fashion brands face is a lack of education and incentives to encourage sustainable production, especially when their supply chains are often global and incredibly complex.
Brands that do act sustainably often have to compete with companies who make sweeping sustainability claims, which are difficult for customers to verify.
This leads to a great deal of greenwashing. Transparency and traceability are a clear solution to greenwashing, and the key issues that they conceal; such as human rights abuses and environmental damage in the supply chains.
The final hurdle for sustainable brands is trying to convince the consumer that their products are worth the price that comes with quality, fair wages, and environment protection.
The aim of implementing blockchain technology (and using the Threadcounts app), is that every consumer can understand Etisha Collective’s supply chain and view their Product Passport, which includes the story of their newly purchased sustainable towel.
By showing the Product Passport of each towel, Etisha hopes customers can also understand and trust its true value as a sustainable item, and not shy away from spending more on quality, rather than quantity.
“People don’t fully understand that every individual consumer has a lot to do and to give. We are all making a political choice and future decisions about the kind of world we want to live in. This needs to be coupled with policy changes or changes in brand ideologies. If our leaders and companies are speaking differently, then consumers will get the incentive to think differently.”
About the Project: Every step of Etisha Collective’s supply chain will be tracked with the Threadcounts app, built on Minespider’s blockchain, from the weaving process in Turkey to the moment they arrive in Berlin. This ensures Etisha Collective is not only one of the most sustainable and ethically made towel brands on the market, but also a very transparent and conscious company. A special thanks to Blockchers for funding this pilot.
Mara García de Juan is originally from Madrid, Spain, but her fascination for languages led her to live in France, Italy, and Germany. She is interested in fashion and its effects on the environment, which inspired her to pursue a career in sustainable fashion. She now works as a Project Researcher for Threadcounts and studies Sustainable Business Administration at Alanus Hochschule.
