Sustainability and Business

 It's no secret the global Apparel industry has a lot of work to do to become more accountable to labor and to the environment. We're proud that customers globally are continuing to demand that the clothing they purchase meets rising standards of environmental and occupational responsibility, and we're excited as a brand to grow and meet those demands transparently.

BONTEMPS is dedicated to manufacturing garments in a sustainable way, seeking out new methods as often as possible. In an effort to decrease our environmental impact and avoid waste we abide at the very least by the following basic principles:

1) We fit in re-claimed or deadstock materials only and do not produce surplus sample sets.

2) We do not produce fabric liability

3) We allocate re-claimed fabrics to 20%- 30% of our styles, more if designs permit

4) We opt for 100% fiber contents whenever possible (garments made from mixed fiber content fabrics are nearly impossible to recover recycled material from)

5) We only contract with dye houses that have demonstrably clean reputations and are certified non-pollutive. This is especially important to us since the dye houses we work with are all located locally in Los Angeles, often within residential communities close to us.

 

BONTEMPS also highly prioritizes ethical labor practices and occupational concerns. We want fundamentally to be a business that encourages fair collaboration and incentivizes other businesses to also respect the virtues of manual labor that are essential to creating fashion at any scale. In pursuit of this we abide by the following principles:

1) We try diligently to only contract with sewing and cutting services that pay a living wage to their employees. We define 'living wage' as that provided by the MIT Living Wage Calculator, publicly available at https://livingwage.mit.edu/. We do NOT contract with services that pay below State mandated minimum wage.

2) We don't contract with providers of services that we feel do not make a substantial effort to protect their workers from occupational hazards like toxic/ noxious chemicals, questionable machinery, or other types of dangerous inhalants sometimes present on factory and dye house floors.

We want to produce products that are the fruits of fair and responsible labor, and create truly unique pieces that have minimal waste and deliver maximum happiness.