California Apparel News

Sustainability commands increasing interest from the business world. A novice in the field, Landon Nash vowed that his new apparel line, Tact & Stone, would serve as an engine to innovate in this burgeoning category.

“I thought that if you’re going to do this you’re going to have to be 100 percent committed to sustainability,” Nash said. He also wanted Tact & Stone to provide a fashion alternative. “I don’t have to sacrifice style to be sustainable,” he said.

Nash is finding places to test his ideas. In mid-November, Tact & Stone joined the merchandise mix at the Forum, a West Hollywood, Calif., bricks-and-mortar lifestyle boutique that focuses on developing bricks-and-mortar spaces for direct-to-consumer brands.

In April, Nash officially unveiled Tact & Stone. The headquarters for the sustainable label is located in downtown Los Angeles’ Arts District, but the brand is mostly sold on its direct-to-consumer site, tactandstone.com.

The inspiration for the brand started when Nash couldn’t find sustainable clothes that would look appropriate for business meetings and didn’t fit into the contemporary fashion category. Nash formerly worked as a residential-real-estate agent in San Francisco. He needed to wear office clothes or at least styles with a more contemporary look when he showed properties. He also wanted a sustainability factor in high-end basics and essentials clothing that he said he did not see on the market.

In seeking a contemporary fashion look, he wanted to be different from the dominant looks in the men’s sustainable category, which mostly reflect an outdoorsman or surfer look. Patagonia and Outerknown, two prominent brands that make men’s sustainable styles, focus on these types of looks, leading Nash to wear their pieces. They helped reflect his growing interest in the environment.

He also was alarmed by reports that ranked the fashion business as a major environmental offender, emitting carbon emissions into the air, chemical runoffs into the world’s rivers, as well as glutting landfills across the globe.

“I realized that I was a part of the problem,” he said of buying expensive suits and high-end jeans.” I had no idea that I was contributing to this. It made me rethink my consumption.”

Nash was becoming a sustainability nerd. He was paying his own way to travel to and participate in sustainability conferences such as the Textile Exchange Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2017. He also had built enough capital from his real-estate gig that he could finance his own venture. His goal was to build a small brand that would rank at the highest level of sustainability while giving people a fashion alternative.

“Large brands are needed to raise awareness,” he said of developing the market for sustainability. “But innovation will come from small brands.”

Nash hired freelance designers to shape the contemporary look of his brand. To help develop his sustainability program, Nash started working with Sustainable Source Studios, a Los Angeles–headquartered consultancy where Andrew Schulenburg serves as a managing partner.

“This was our first consumer-brand project,” Schulenburg said of his group’s work with Tact & Stone. “We had an opportunity to develop a brand with Landon from scratch almost—the company’s sustainability charter, materials strategy, product strategy, circular strategy, brand identity, marketing strategy, the complete package.”

S3 is part of a company that is prominent in sustainability circles. Its founder, Isaac Nichelson, was honored with the 2018 Global Change Award from The H&M Foundation, which is funded by the owners of retailer H&M. The award came from his work with S3’s sibling company, Circular Systems. Circular Systems was awarded for its Agraloop Bio-Refinery technology, which turns food-crop waste into a fiber that can be milled and spun into textiles.

Like almost every other company that places a stake in sustainability, Tact & Stone uses fabrics such as organic cotton. The brand also aims to extend sustainability to woven shirts, using a high composition of recycled cotton that is applicable to modern weaving technologies to fabricate lightweight Oxford shirts and “waterless” chambray shirts through a process that utilizes almost no water during production, Schulenburg said.

These woven shirts include up to 35 percent recycled-cotton content, which was certified by the Global Recycle Standard, which sets requirements for certification of recycled content in clothing. One reason why recycled cotton is harder to include in high-end shirts is that the fiber length of recycled cotton becomes shorter so it is more difficult to turn into a high-value product, Schulenburg said.

S3 had worked with factories in Portugal to transform what some would consider waste into fabrics that could be used to make sturdy shirts. Other fibers used in these shirts include organic cotton and recycled polyester.

The shirts feature a tailored fit and come in colorways of white, black and gray as well as patterns such as stripes and plaids. They retail from $100 to $125. The brand also offers a blazer that retails for $248, as well as hoodies. Also available are Pichu alpaca pullover sweaters, which retail for $245, and shorts and chinos, which retail for $145.

Tact & Stone’s T-shirts are made in Los Angeles. Price points range from $45 for a short-sleeve organic-cotton shirt to $75 for a long-sleeve hemp tee.

The price range is not expensive and it is not inexpensive, Nash said. It costs more because it was made using materials certified as being sustainable as well as being produced by factories in Portugal and Los Angeles that were certified according to fair labor practices.

“There’s a statistic that says six out of 10 garments will end up in landfills in one year. But everything [Tact & Stone] makes is built to last,” he said.