Sustainable swimwear brand
We are passionate about doing the right thing and taking care of our valuable resources. As a fashion brand we acknowledge our responsibility in this matter and as a commercial operator we can never be fully perfect, but we are trying our best to minimise our impact daily. We are aiming to be as environmentally conscious and transparent as possible so that the next generations, too, can enjoy everything this gorgeous planet has to offer.
On this page, we’ll tell you more about our sustainability practices, ranging from introducing our fabrics and raw materials, the packaging materials we use, our logistic structure to warehousing and shipping and everything in between.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in contact – we are aiming to be completely transparent and are happy to answer any questions you may have. We love having conversations with you and are always open for feedback.
Completed sustainability steps
- We have moved our production to the European Union. The factory we have partnered up with is a family-run company located in Guimarães, Portugal.
- We have committed to using only recycled, regenerated, natural and sustainable fabrics and other materials in our entire collection.
- We have launched #liljapicking, our challenge to activate our customers in taking care of their local nature.
- We never discard returned items, photoshoot samples or faulty items. Returned items go through a careful manual check and are re-sold. Samples and 2nd quality items are sold at our store in Helsinki with a discount.
- We make scrunchies from leftover fabrics.
- We have left out all unnecessary packaging materials. We don’t send paper packing lists, return forms, discount cards. etc. with our packaging.
- We don’t pack items individually with inner packaging. Neither from our factory to us nor from us to our customers.
- Our paper hang tags are single-paged and only for product information, not for branding.
- We do not offer free returns. We see this as a sustainability step as free returns often lead to impulse purchasing and a higher rate of returns.
- We use a coworking space as our office and an external warehouse shared with other vendors for our warehousing and logistics. We don’t maintain all these different functions by ourselves and can share the environmental costs.
Fabrics we use
We are aware of the environmental impact of the clothing industry and our responsibility in this matter, and are are aiming to be as environmentally conscious and transparent as possible. We use only natural, recycled or sustainable fabrics. For utmost clarity and transparency, you can find the breakdown of each fabric used to manufacture a certain Lilja the Label product on the product page.
The main fabrics we have used are ECONYL® regenerated nylon, REPREVE® recycled plastic bottles and organic cotton.
Packaging and shipping
We ship our products to you in flat cardboard boxes. The entire shipping package is fully recyclable. If you need to return any items, we always encourage using the original package. If you don’t need to reuse the package, we ask you to recycle it.
The inside packaging has been turned into a #liljapicking bag. This brown paper bag doubles as a trash-picking bag, and we invite our customers to join us in saving their local nature by removing a bag full of trash from the nature.
You will also find a little A5 thank-you card from us in your package. We don’t add a separate return form as our return form can be found digitally here.
We use an external logistics provider for all our warehousing, packing and shipments. This way we don’t need to maintain our own warehouse and can save a lot on the environmental impact. Our partner provides the same service to multiple vendors and therefore the environmental costs are divided by many more packages than we’d be able to.
Sustainability roadmap
We are in no way perfect, however we are tirelessly working to become more circular and overall a more sustainable swimwear brand. We have built a roadmap for the next three years to track our progress and to stay accountable.
2022 has already brought us notable improvements. Read more about our trash-picking challenge #liljapicking.
We are publishing a sustainability report on out website for year 2022 in the beginning of 2023.
Final Words
Our system isn't perfect and probably no commercial system ever can, but what matters the most is making informed decisions and transparency. We are striving to constantly improve and are more than happy to receive any feedback, ideas or questions about our practices.
You can get in contact by email or via our social media channels, we'd love to have a chat. Let's stay in touch!
