Rhi, reins’ mother, is a Welsh girl from the coast, the sea a forever fixture in her life she feels passionate about it’s preservation and protection. 

reins clothing was born from this love of the sea and a long-standing dream to build a fun and beautiful children’s brand that kids would choose for themselves. 

Hoping to bridge the gap between affordable clothes and beautiful designs reins clothing wants to be the go to brand for consumers that love wonderful, fun wares that won’t break the wallet or the world.

There’s a powerful pull to say reins is a sustainable children’s fashion label and in the main it is. We’re committed to reducing our carbon footprint, we’re crusaders for reusing what already exists and crazy about convincing our customers to recycle. 

Sustainability

Before we start, we have a confession to make… You will have noticed the italics and quotation marks in our opening paragraph before you clicked ‘read more’. Well we thought long and hard about what sustainable fashion meant to us and as a wider movement. We then did what everyone does and yes, we Googled it. 😬 We gave it serious thought, we read and re-worded but do you know what? Sometimes someone else has already said what you want to say and it’s okay to acknowledge that. Why was the wording so fitting? Because we do believe that reins clothing is part of a movement and process into fostering change in the fashion industry. Read our ‘Launch Blog’ and you will note we haven’t got it perfect yet. But we are on the road to ‘greater ecological integrity’ if you’ll let us explain how…

For us the most important aspect of being sustainable is about ‘closing the loop’. Reusing what already exists and turning what was waste into beautiful wares. Did you know the Mobius loop symbol was created by Gary Anderson in 1970 to represent the three stages of closing the loop. The three arrows stand for Collection of recyclable waste, manufacturing of said waste into new products and finally purchasing where, in our case, our reins customers, buy our clothing and reuse what was waste for new purpose. Honestly this is what excites us the most!

The first challenge of a company of our size is having the facilities and infrastructure to truly be sustainable. We will hold our hands up and say at this moment in time we can’t independently. So, we have done the next best thing – used UK & EU based suppliers and manufacturers who are. Take our t-shirts, jumpers and bags for example, we use water-based screen printing (sourced and printed in the UK) when printing these pieces. We only buy items made from sustainable material sourced from a Belgian company who’s processing methods use renewable energy and are truly sustainable (remember what we said about the need for having the infrastructure). Through using a sustainable basics company we are able to limit the amount of production that exists and use what essentially is cut and copy styles and make them our own. In doing so we reduce production, energy, waste and combine delivery, for us it’s a great way to reduce carbon footprint and is much more economical over all. Eventually we hope to build our own efficient systems but for now we will let a company we know is taking all the right steps and is able to do what we would like to do on a large scale so that we can provide our thing on a smaller platform. There’s no doubt in our minds that it means we can offer the very best in quality and that is very important to us.

That takes us to our coats and leggings. Our coats are the backbone of our collection, they’re the birth of our brand and the memento we need to springboard beyond one collection. We started with rPET (recycled plastic) polyester, currently only manufacturers in China and Turkey make this material so we found a factory in China where working standards and welfare of their staff is high. This material is GRS (Global Recycled Standard) certified. We digitally print, the most environmentally friendly form of printing, our fun designs onto the fabric then ship it to the UK where it is used to make our coats in our manufacturers based in Birmingham. Organic cotton fleece is the most sustainable form of fleece and natural for breathability and soft on littles skin. For zips we use YKK’s recycled plastic collection in the most vibey colours and finish off with recycled material labels. No expense has been spared to ensure we bring to you the most thought out jacket that is made entirely from sustainable fabric and will hopefully start it’s journey with your little legs and make it’s way through your family and friends and beyond. Watch this little space for a resale platform in the future…