Our Sustainability Promise

We have always focused on what’s best for children and our vision is to help make the entire childrenswear market more sustainable – because the Earth is a hand-me-down, our clothes should be handed down too.

Since our origins in 1976, we have been committed to making high-quality clothes that last a long time; to be worn as many children as possible. Comfortable clothes that are durable and with features to make them last. So that you as a customer don’t need to buy more new garments than necessary, which conserves our planet’s dwindling resources.

This is also the reason for our goal “three children for each garment”. This means we would like our clothes to be worn by at least three children in succession. Today 55%* of PO.P outerwear is worn by three or more children. It’s our sincere hope that in the future all of our clothes will take this same journey.

Did you know that every person in Sweden buys almost 13kg of clothes per year and nearly half gets thrown in the bin? Together, we can help change this. It starts with your choice of clothes: opt for high quality, timeless design, and only buy garments you need and love. Then take the best possible care of them and don’t throw them away – repair or recycle them. We’re helping to extend the life of our clothes with advice on how to care for our garments.

We aim to always produce our clothes in the most sustainable way possible, while meeting the high-quality standards that we set. Our first organic cotton garments were introduced in1987 and from 2020 all the cotton we use will be organic. At least half of our cotton garments are also GOTS certified organic, which involves the strictest requirements on the production process.

But we want to go further! The clothing industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world and manufacturing poses the great challenge. Although it makes a big difference using recycled materials or GOTS-certified cotton, we at Polarn O. Pyret want to do even better than this.

Producing a garment requires a lot of resources, in the form of raw materials, energy and water, and planetary resources are limited. The most important thing WE can do – as part of the clothing industry – is to produce fewer garments. The trend in recent years within the garment industry, with a constant flow of new products, leads to overproduction and extensive discounting of out-of-season or surplus garments. Polarn O. Pyret also sells a lot of garments at a discount. This means that we are helping to encourage unhealthy consumption patterns that are not in line with our fundamental values. We want to change this!

So, to help address this, we are now drastically reducing the amount of clothing we produce each year. We have already reduced the number of garments we produced in 2019 by 26% and there will be a further 12% reduction in 2020. This means that there will be fewer new products per year and the products we launch will remain in store for a longer period of time. We already have many beloved classics in our range all year long and we are now increasing this proportion. We are doing this as a way of encouraging healthier consumption patterns and gradually decreasing clothing production. Our goal is to halve the number of clothes in our end-of-season sales as soon as the autumn of 2020 and we are hoping that others in the industry will follow our lead.

We want to be part of the solution and we hope you will join us!