Uma Nomad:
A Sustainable Fashion Brand

ethical fashion for a more sustainable future

Eco-fashion with purpose

We love to create, and we love coming up with ways in which we can keep on creating fantastic clothing for beautiful people like you, while making sure we leave our planet a little bit more beautiful than we found her. 

At this crucial moment in the Earth’s changing balance, we believe it’s incredibly important to make choices that supports the beautiful planet that is our home.

We believe transparency is important, so we did our best to show you how we create our eco-friendly clothing, and the processes behind our sustainable clothing brand.

one man's trash is

another woman's treasure

All our clothing is made from beautiful forgotten fabrics, fantastic fibres that due to small imperfections didn't serve their original purpose anymore. 

Recycled & repurposed fabrics

We breathe new life into vintage fabrics, waste material, second hand, broken, rejected and leftover fabrics and pretty much anything we can imagine being a beautiful dress or jacket one day. This is our passion, and we love our work.

A big part of our work is finding fantastic discarded materials which due to small imperfections, stains or tears cannot be used for their original purpose anymore.

We find these in the most unexpected places and select them ourselves by hand, we clean them, rid them of imperfections, and then use all the of the beautiful material that’s left for our sustainable clothing lines.

A big plus is that because of this process we can make clothing from very high quality fabric, which normally would be incredibly expensive. In this way we can help repurpose these beautiful fabrics, and by doing so help clean up our planet, whilst keeping our prices low for you, our customers. - win-win-win!

Absolutely

No waste

This is another aspect of our production process that excites us: leaving no waste!

We do this in different ways:

Zero Waste pattern making

For this we use a computer program and a lot of creativity. We take the separate pieces that make up a garment, things like sleeves, bodies and belts, and fit them as precisely as we can into the  fabrics that we’re using.

It’s a sort of Tetris, in which we have to keep on going back and fort from the program to the dimensions of our design to make the perfect pattern, using at least 92% of the fabric.

This is not an easy job, and it’s time consuming, but it’s a fun puzzle te solve.

We make sure to leave

as little scrap fabric as possible

By using smart pattern making software, and reusing the little bit of fabric that is left to make other small items.

Reuse of the leftover fabric

The scrap fabric that does get left over after the cutting of our patterns, we collect and reuse. Of these pieces we make the cute bags in which you receive your clothing when you order with us, superhero capes for kids, and headscarves.

The pieces too small for making bags, capes or scarves we use for little things like lining, drawstrings or borders. 

In the end we have used every single bit.

Meet Krishna

Our master tailor

Slow Fashion, fair trade and Social Responsibility

Next to making sure not to burden our planet with our business, we also want to support the people who call this planet home, in the best possible way. We take this very seriously, because every hand that lends it’s skill to our business, is one that we are incredibly thankful for. 

A big issue with fast fashion as an industry is the exploitation of people. This is a horrible reality and a cause worth fighting against.

We have our atelier in India, in which our tailors and seamstresses get treated how we wish to be treated ourselves in a safe and comfortable working environment. 

Our master tailor Krishna, and his son Abhishek, oversee the production and organise everything on their end for Uma Nomad. Krishna and Abhishek are beautiful people who really care about our employees. We are very lucky to know them and to have them on our team.

Our tailors get payed a fair wage, by the day instead of by piece. Payment by the piece makes for a stressful working environment, and reduces the quality of the work.  We want our clothing to last for a long time, so we make sure that the stitches that hold these precious fabrics together are made in peace and with care. 

Our tailors are our friends and we look after them, even when it all goes terribly wrong.

Due to covid we lost two of our tailors; Babulal and Rudmal. This was incredibly sad, and a great disaster for the families they left behind.  Without the income of their main breadwinner, and without a support system to fall back on, Rudmal and Babulal’s children and their mothers would quickly fall into poverty.

For the time being we are supporting them by donating the income that they would normally have if their father and husband would still be alive, to give them time to grieve without worry about money, until we find a better solution to help them out in the future. 

If you would like to help us support these families, please do send us a message. Every little bit helps.

CO2 neutral shipping

biodegradable packaging and elephant poop!

Everything we make, buy and sell leaves a carbon trail. We all are growing aware of the impact that this has, and that’s good! Because now we can do something about it!

Cutting down carbon emissions is the most important thing we can do in our journey towards a sustainable future, so we do this were we can by choosing the most carbon neutral materials and processes.

We ship all our order in biodegradable packaging, made from recycled cardboard, and the little info flyers that we give you with your order are made from elephant poop - how cool is that?

The CO2 emissions of the shipping of our packages we offset by planting trees. You should be able to see this calculated at checkout.

We believe a clean energy future is possible, if we all play our part. And we want to play our part. 

to become better

We need you

We sure hope our values fit yours, and we would love to invite you to think with us about more sustainable solutions so we can grow as a business, and as people.

We want to do this together with you, because it’s us; the people, who can change the future of our planet into a brighter one.