Properly British
A next-generation laundry concept is poised to make quite a splash in the UK, ready to bring denim washing, finishing and reprocessing back to the nation’s shores for the first time since 2002. Inside Denim chats to Salli Deighton, the English denim design and development specialist making it all happen.
After getting her start as a denim designer at Wrangler in Nottingham in 1989, which included time spent making garments at the brand’s since-closed Falkirk factory in Scotland, Salli Deighton’s rather indigo-hued career has championed British retailers such as Asos, Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Tesco (specifically, its F&F brand) in more recent years. When multiple major UK-based retailers picked up the phone to ask for her advice on how to reprocess their piles of unsold denim domestically around the time covid-19 first hit, the self-styled sustainability geek’s faith in the unique selling points of LaundRe, an idea which first began to sprout during her time at Asos, only intensified.
“We want to be a real factory workhorse,” Ms Deighton says of her plans for LaundRe. “I’ve worked for all these big retailers and I know what they need; they need a workhorse and we’re going to have to be really savvy to make it work for them.” The ebb and flow of covid tides around the world over the past couple of years unquestionably brought home the need for such an agile, localised approach to processing and holding denim stocks in the UK, she explains.
Piecing things together
Though without an official address as yet, LaundRe is intended as a smart nearshoring hub for the UK (“because we don’t have one,” as the designer-developer puts it succinctly). Making a digitally enabled base for some of the overseas “starships”, as she describes the technologically advanced machinery she is used to working with in Bangladesh and Turkey, for example, to land and work their washing, finishing and/or reprocessing alchemy on home shores is key. So too is providing space to hold blank stock produced in countries further afield to better enable UK retailers to phase their buys in response to sales and, by extension, mitigate potential risks such as the need to cancel orders further down the line. More still, LaundRe will act as a nexus for research and development, plus facilitate educational workshops between buyers and mills, especially, several of whom have already expressed an interest in taking part.
On the subject of UK buyers, Ms Deighton raises the important point that many assistant-level denim buyers, technicians and new trainees are no longer given the opportunity to step foot in a factory or laundry before they begin placing their first orders. “There are some that are really trying hard to learn,” she grants, “but until you’ve physically been and worked with this equipment and seen it, it’s really hard to fully understand it.” LaundRe workshops can help bridge this gap, she states. In a similar vein, the facility can also support an overall raising of buyers’ (genuine) sustainability consciousness. She explains: “I think everyone [in the industry] feels the UK is not really committed to sustainability. But I think that if we had a facility here, the buyers would want it, they would use it, they would learn.”
Her target audience mainly consists of the teams behind the larger British fast fashion retailers. Any steps towards improved understanding and practice on the part of these firms could really make a sizeable impact, she tells us.
In terms of scale, LaundRe will skew more towards microfactory size. Some machines will have capacity for 300-unit lots, whereas others will be able to efficiently accommodate 50 pieces. Ms Deighton envisions that much of the enterprise’s business will be “little bits and pieces” for brands of all sizes, so being able to work to these volumes is necessary. The team, which also includes fellow English denim developer Rowan Hunt, is in the process of considering around three to four brands of washing machines at present, so this aspect remains undecided, but “all” will ultimately incorporate ozone and nebulising technologies to optimise water efficiency. LaundRe’s chosen water tech “is not perfect for this kind of hub yet”, its founder allows, but she also notes that the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) programme has offered to consult on its treatment of wastewater. They are also in discussions with what Ms Deighton describes as two new recycling technology providers “who would very much like to be LaundRe’s guinea pigs”.
Signing off
“LaundRe is a service to the UK and UK retail,” the designer insists, while talking with Inside Denim as 2021 drew to a close. She is emphatic, too, that fashion is due what she spins as a denim rebirth. “I believe very much that people are going to start to shy away from buying jeans that are the same price as two cups of coffee,” she states, suggesting that between £40 (around $55) and £50 may be the sweet spot the UK industry is currently missing.
Ms Deighton is so convinced of the laundry’s eco credentials that her plans include the addition of live camera footage from the facility, as far as her brand and retailer partners will allow, of course. “Until the customers start to know how we do things, I don’t think we are ever going to really create an understanding of what sustainability is and how things are done and, most importantly, what people are paying for,” she maintains. Similarly, the team hopes to link up with Singapore-headquartered traceability technology provider FibreTrace to offer source-to-market visibility.
Covid and its repercussions may have put something of a spanner in the works for LaundRe in terms of fully reaching its funding target thus far, but Ms Deighton emphasises that discussions are ongoing. She adds that anyone interesting in journeying along with the smart hub can email her (salli@laundre.co.uk) to find out more.
Ms Deighton dates her passion for more eco-conscious denim to around 2006, when she visited a third-party laundry in China.
Photo: Tonello/Rudolf Hub 1922
