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How do you turn your born-sustainable dead stock brand into a living once you get traction? Can you escape compromising on your values as you grow?
Most brands are gazing toward becoming the next scale-up. Growing their business, increasing their sales, and maximizing their production. Benim Denim is doing the opposite.
In 2022 Renewcell, an award-winning textile-to-textile recycling company based in Sweden, teamed up with Swedish creatives Haisam Mohammed and Noah Bramme. Renewcell had salvaged 170-meter excess dead stock from a previous collection made with Circulose®, and the creative duo was asked if they were interested in creating something out of it.
“Since a young age, we’ve both dreamed of producing clothes and designing our own lines. But today, when the fashion industry alone stands for 8-10% of the global emissions, starting a brand with the intention of producing collection after collection didn’t sit right with us. So we asked ourselves how to make this lifelong dream come to life with as little environmental impact as possible”.
- Haisam Mohammed and Noah Bramme, Co-founders
As the name suggests, Benim Denim is a denim brand. But its business idea has a twisted logic. The ambition is to shut down the brand as soon as possible. Only allowing it to live as long as the 170-meter repurposed dead stock denim roll lets them.
Working through an analogy, Benim Denim subversively connects ’hype marketing’ tactics to the abstract but very real physical constraints of climate and environment. No Planet B — No Drop B. It’s a comment on a dilemma that this generation’s emerging creatives are struggling to solve.
The ambition is to spark ideas among fellow creatives to find new ways of turning their creative dreams and ventures into life in more sustainable ways.
The brand lookbook — shot by Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn — depicts the brand’s funeral service. Celebrating the shutdown of Benim Denim.
About Circulose®
www.circulo.se
instagram.com/circulose
Circulose® is a unique material for fashion that is 100 per cent recycled, recyclable, biodegradable, and of virgin-equivalent quality. Circulose® makes fashion circular.
It is a branded dissolving pulp made from 100 per cent textile waste, like worn-out clothes and production scraps. Fiber producers use it to make staple fiber or filament viscose, lyocell, modal, acetate or other types of man-made cellulosic fibers. Those fibers are then spun into yarns, woven or knitted into fabrics and finally made into new high-quality textile products.
Circulose® was included in TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Inventions 2020.
About Renewcell
Founded by innovators from Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2012, Renewcell is a multi-award-winning sustaintech company based in Sweden. The company’s vision is to make fashion circular.
Through its patented process, Renewcell is able to recycle cellulosic textile waste, such as worn-out cotton clothes and production scraps, transforming it into a pristine new material called Circulose®. Drapers Magazine recognized Circulose® at their 2022 Sustainable Fashion Awards. Fast Company named Renewcell one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies 2021.