All articles
When we started Good Measure over 10 years ago we had a simple goal, to make the best heavyweight cotton sweatshirt in the UK. The history of our city is deeply rooted in the cotton trade and we wanted our garments to reflect this. We are immensely proud of the M-21 Sweatshirt we produce but over time we started to wonder if in 2020 we should challenge ourselves to move things to a more sustainable less environmentally impactful fabric. We are not an ’eco’ brand’ not fully paid up tree huggers, but we wanted to do our bit for the environment and began to explore other options for the yarn used to knit our fabrics.
The yarn has always been the only part of the process of making our garments we have had to import, largely because as you may know there is no cotton grown in the UK so that raw ingredient is picked and spun abroad. We challenged our suppliers to help us source a greener more sustainable option and believe we have succeeded. The new yarn we are working with is spun in Europe and created using 50% recycled cotton and 50% post consumer plastics. The yarn supplier shreds cotton garments saving them from landfill and painstakingly creates new yarns with blended recycled PET bottles. There are many benefits with this yarn over cotton as the process requires very little water, a traditional cotton t-shirt can take up to 2700 litres of water to produce. The way the new yarn is produced also means it’s fertiliser and pesticide free, it’s hard to beat in terms of its environmental credentials.
The quality, weight and ‘handle’ of our fabrics has always been a primary focus for us so the next challenge was to see if we could knit the yarn into a fabric to meet our criteria. We wanted to introduce the new yarn in a new fabric first to test the water and then introduce it into the other fabrics as we move forward, we settled on a new ‘French Terry’ knit construction knitted in a 330 gram weight, a slightly lighter weight fabric than our 480 gram ’Shirley Crabtree’ loopback. We’re really happy with the weight and feel and are launching it in our long sleeve M-5 Football Tee silhouette, in all honesty at 330G it’s closer to a light sweatshirt than a t-shirt perfect for lockdown home working or back garden pints.
During the development we’d been listening to early 90’s Happy Mondays and in particular the aptly named ‘Think About The Future’ Oakenfold remix of W.F.L. and it just seems right to name the fabric after this tune… give it a listen
The first drop is our Flying Saucer inspired drop. We revisited our retro sweet fixation and picked colours reminiscent of those sherbert filled rice paper sweets of our youth. This drop has been hand dyed whilst we’ve been in isolation or ‘dye-solation’ if you prefer. There are four colours to choose from, Lunar Lilac, Neptune Blue and Venus Yellow and Pluto White. We hope you like them.
