California Apparel News

The Los Angeles-based brand Ambercycle is giving customers a new look into the lifecycle of their clothing. The new collection of Cycora by Ambercycle is designed to be an earth-friendly alternative to polyester, as less than one percent of this material is recycled every year. Cycora’s goal is to turn unwanted garments into something useful.

“Our raw materials are end-of-life textile clothing that we regenerate into new Cycora yarns and fabrics,” Ambercycle CEO Shay Sethi said. “A key concern in this process is the upfront identification and sorting the different types of fabrics to inform the best end-of-life solutions. A digital-care label is essential to embracing the broader vision for circularity, as it enables a more streamlined and scalable way for us to regenerate material.”

Ambercycle partnered with label-and-tag manufacturer Avery Dennison to launch the collection with each piece containing a unique, scannable QR code to tell the story of the garment. The QR code allows customers to find out how their garment was produced.

Avery Dennison’s digital-care label solution, which is linked to an app and data platform, tells the customer how the clothing was manufactured and reveals the materials it contains. It also allows brands to enhance their connections with customers.

“When the consumer no longer needs the item, they can scan the QR code to see what needs to happen to properly dispose of the garment,” Sarah Swenson, global senior sustainability manager, Avery Dennison RBIS said. “In this case, if they send the garment back to Ambercycle it will be recycled back into a new textile. Brands can benefit from access to a deeper level of data both in terms of shopper engagement and also understanding just how many items remain in the circular economy.”

The Cycora x MsLyon collection dropped on May 18 and was done with designer and sustainability advocate, Madeleine Lyon. Her goal was to “capture the natural elements around us and push them into a more simplistic, optimistic aesthetic to inspire consumers to have a peek into how interconnected our world is,” according to a press release.

“As we built the physical infrastructure to take in and reprocess material, we knew we had to think about the digital infrastructure to enable full circularity,” Sethi explained. “The digital care labels in collection one will help us track Cycora garments so that their path to be Ambercycled again at their end of life is seamless. Together with Avery Dennison, we believe this will be a transformative step forward into the inevitable circular future.”

The limited preorder of Cycora x MsLyon is now closed, but additional collections are planned for the future with a Cycora x Knarli coming soon.