No fashion without fire
AMSTERDAM - One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This saying couldn’t be more appropriate for Kresse Wesling and James Henrit, the folks behind EaKo, a company that creates high-end fashion accessories from reclaimed materials, including old fire hoses.
Founded in the UK in 2007, EaKo is the latest in a line of businesses set up by serial greenpreneur Wesling. Following Bio-Supplies and Babaloo, which make environmentally friendly packaging and mother and baby products respectively, her most recent initiative takes landfill-bound, ‘redundant’ materials and transforms them into bags, belts, wallets, wash bags and other lifestyle products.
The main component of the products is decommissioned fire hoses – the hoses also lend their name to the line - which are gathered from fire brigades across the UK. But the company’s love of recycling doesn’t stop there. Scrap sail cloth and waste parachute silk find their way into the lining of bags and wallets, the stitching comes from old jute coffee sacks, while shoe boxes and fruit crates are repurposed for packaging.
The fire hose line has been available in the Benelux since May 2009 through a distribution company of the same name. Caspar Wijers, who founded and directs Firehose Benelux with Jasper Henderson, sells the products through a webshop and 10 high-street outlets in the Netherlands.
In addition to growing sales of existing products, the pair is already working on their own line of children’s belts and bags as well as a sofa and chair, all made from old Dutch fire hoses.
“We eventually want to be a distribution and production company for different kinds of materials,” says Wijers. “So we’re also talking to…a company that makes conveyor belts. They have a lot of left-over materials, ranging from rubber to really nice plastic stuff.”
Firehose is still in its start-up phase and the directors currently work on the venture part time, but say they hope to become part of a larger – and fashionable - sustainability movement. “I don’t think sustainability per se is interesting,” says Wijers. “It also has to be nice to look at.”
