Friends! We’ve made it to the first post about sustainable brands I want to highlight! My next few blog posts will highlight various brands I love and worked with. The first brand we’re going to crack into is Alder Apparel, one of my favourites. I found Alder Apparel through @Marielle.elizabeth on Instagram, be sure to check out her page it’s great!
Alder Apparel is a women-owned company that offers sizes 6XL to XS, they are based in Toronto. Alder Apparel was founded by two women, with the hopes of proving that outdoor recreation should be focused on fun, not exclusively performance. Alder Apparel wanted to take the lead when it comes to inclusive sizing and sustainable fashion practices and MEANT IT. The fabrics used in their garments are sustainably sourced like lenzing modal, recycled nylon, recycled polyester, tencel, and recycled polyamide. Most fast fashion brands will NOT tell you where their factories are located (usually because they’re unethically run); Alder Apparel gives customers full transparency of their factories, you can look at them here.
Right now, their open-air pants are my go-to when it comes to moving my body. I fit into the 2XL (usually being a 2XL or size 18). Their Open Air pants are made with Modal. Modal is a fiber made from a renewable source of beech wood. Alder sources this from Lenzing, a world-renowned, BLUESIGN-certified fabric fiber supplier. The term “BLUESIGN” comes from the name of a Swiss group called BLUESIGN® Technologies. This group monitors the complex journey of materials from factory to final product and oversees a robust system of factory auditing and certification. Lenzing sources beech cellulose (e.g. wood pulp!) from sustainable forests in Austria and neighboring countries.
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To create a modal, Lenzing uses a neat pulp-to-fiber process that recoups most of the process ingredients and causes very low air emissions. WE LOVE TO SEE IT. I cannot stress how much I love these pants, I’ve had these pants in three different colours over the years and even influenced my friend to get her own. Alder Apparel also sells tanks, sweats, overalls, shirts, raincoats, fleeces, and shorts! Although I will say styles and certain garments differ depending on the season and what fabric they have available to them.
Aesthetic-wise I think they’re very similar to lots of outdoor brands we’ve all seen like Lululemon, Patagonia, and Arc’teryx.
I know that pricing for Alder Apparel can be expensive, as most sustainable fashion companies are (we want them to be paying their workers a LIVING wage, which most fast fashion companies do not) Alder came up with their ReCreate Market, which allows Alder customers to resell their used garments to others. Garments in this section of their website are usually under $100 and as low as $35!
Shop the ReCreate Market here.
Lastly, I’ll finish off this review (OMG) with a message from the Alder Apparel Team and how they want their customers to feel in their clothes: “We believe that outdoor recreation = happiness. We’re grateful for the ability to go outside, have fun & get dirty, so we honor that every day. We do this by celebrating the joy and freedom we experience from getting outside, both in how we represent the outdoors in our imagery and also how we build our culture internally (Fridays = get outside days at Alder HQ).”
Kimiko
