BE BETTER
We believe the promise of practicing sustainability by many brands is questionable and often misleading. Our mission is to make beautiful bags and accessories better and our BE BETTER programme is a road map for achieving this objective.
BE BETTER is our living, breathing programme which we practice and are very proud of. There will always be new aspects of our processes to change, but we are making pledges to guide our future actions in the right direction. We will provide yearly reports on this programme to track progress and hold ourselves accountable.
These are our current pledges.
No Sales or Discounts
We go against the current deluge of retail discounts, by not offering any. Why?
Most brands hype an endless cycle of newness and discounting to keep us over-consuming. Luxury fashion brands purporting to be sustainable is mostly a lie. How can they be with such a business model?
Of course we bring out new styles and colours, but we do it BETTER, our way (small batches, thoughtful materials, pieces worth investing in).
We don't play games with prices to generate demand. We set a fair price for you and us from the outset.
And anyway, who likes paying a full price to see someone else get it for 35% off two weeks' later?
Handmade and Honest
Our family-run partner factory in Ubrique, Spain has been with us since we started in 2013.
Ubrique artisan craftmanship is employed by the leading global brands in luxury and we are proud to be part of the town’s rich history and future.
All STOW styles are carefully crafted by hand, some taking over 10 hours to finish with up to 70 steps in the process.
Our factory is socially audited and considered a fantastic place to work by the local population.
It is only by working so closely with our partner that we are able to achieve the commitments we make in this programme. Collectively we are striving to add more pledges and make STOW even BETTER.
Better Materials
We are starting to differentiate between leather that is ORDERED by us and that which is REPURPOSED (where we are using leather that someone else has ordered and which is currently sitting idle).
Our goal is to use more REPURPOSED leather than ORDERED, a much BETTER sourcing practice rarely monitored by other brands.
Where we do order leather, our aim is to use more vegetable tanned leather than chrome tanned (the latter represents about 90% of the market). 'Veg tanned' leather is a BETTER, natural, more planet-friendly option as does not use chemicals and heavy metals in the tanning process.
The future is increasingly non-leather but must be sustainable. We are collaborating with Uncaged Innovations (a US group developing cutting-edge materials) in their bio material development. Their material has leather-like qualities but is made from non-animal, natural products with almost zero plastic and has an extremely low carbon footprint.
We clearly label the materials we use in each style.
Small Batches
Limiting stock is one reason we don’t need to discount.
It also means we can nimbly make use of batches of leather which have been ordered by someone else, and often ends up as waste materials.
This is BETTER because we are not adding new leather to the system (rather making use of what is already there) and we are able to have fun with limited edition capsules in a responsible way.
Road to Plastic Free
There is a lot of plastic in a typical luxury bag (a lot of it invisible in the form of reinforcement materials, many of which comprise plastic micro fibres).
Our goal by the end of 2024 is to reduce the plastics that go into our bags to trace levels only.
From April 2024, new production will no longer use any form of plastic reinforcement.
This is a huge step forward and has been possible through use of innovative, natural reinforcement materials and close collaboration with our factory partner.
