Our Story: Becoming EarthSoul
Who We Are
EarthSoul is a woman-owned, sustainable micro-business, committed to growing into a viable and scalable lifestyle brand.
It started with a dream of converting a massive scourge - textile waste, resulting from both the production and rapid cast-off culture of the fast fashion industry – into unique, well-designed, and well-made products that bear little resemblance to their origins. It broadened into repurposing beloved materials like deadstock garment district fabrics and environment punishers like denim, burlap, and leather, and then expanded to industrial items with a singular and limited traditional lifespan.
The dream dovetails into our love of unique, crafted, heirloom quality products; a feeling of farms, woods, and open spaces, of simpler times, and hard work. There’s also a healthy dose of boho, wabi-sabi, and other groovy lifestyle principles. And that’s what drives us to create products that will become treasured mainstays.
Our inspiration comes from something we call ‘modern homesteading’. Instead of the traditional concept of self-sustainability that’s realized on expanses of land, through farming and livestock husbandry, we recognize a modern version of the self-sustaining lifestyle, yielding similar results even without a farm - or a suburban backyard - of one’s own.
When you keep a pot of basil on your kitchen window sill instead of buying it in little plastic containers, that’s being sustainable. And if growing that pot of basil on your window sill makes you happy, that makes you an EarthSoul. If you support your local farmer’s market, wish that curbside green recycling was a national mandate, love living a low-waste lifestyle, have learned about canning your own produce from a YouTube video, and think patched jeans are the height of fashion, well then we must be kindred spirits.
Our Design Process
Our designs emerge after consideration of three main criteria:
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Is there a need for a completely unique, or at the very least, an improved end product?
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Can suitable materials be found from within a waste stream?
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Is there a market for the products we produce?
We don’t recycle unloved materials into other lame products just so we can say they’re upcycled, recycled, or whatever - that’s called ‘greenwashing’. We take every product’s purpose, and how well it can fulfill that purpose, very seriously. If it can’t do something great by being redesigned and realized in repurposed materials it gets scrapped.
We’re also leveraging modern techniques to produce our products for scalability, including creating our own designs, testing reusable patterns, employing industrial machinery, and committing to product consistency - all while valuing the artisans that produce everything we sell.
Where We’re Going From Here
To be honest, starting a brand from scratch is hard. It takes a lot of capital, and the ability to design, test, and produce those designs before a viable product emerges. It takes space and time. Then there’s stuff like fulfilling orders, mitigating supply chain issues, addressing machinery breakdowns, and oh lordy before you know it it’s time to crack a craft beer and catch your breath.
We’re still designing, and still testing, but are really proud to have a small handful of products in production and ready for both retail and wholesale markets.
If you’re a retailer, that’s good news for you. We’re hoping to bring you related options that will expand our line and give you unique, quality clothing and home goods products to stock.
If you’re a fan, we hope our small online collections carry something that strikes your fancy.
We’re really glad you stopped by, and if you’d like to stay in touch, we’ll keep you posted on product development and availability.
Thank you for listening and supporting our journey,
— Anji, Catherine, Roger, and Kota (the 4-legged workshop buddy)