2025 has been the year that we finally made a dent in our ever-growing pile of offcuts, which have been stored and hoarded in our factory since the inception of Good Good Good in 2016. Last year saw us produce our first ever Strip-Stripe garments – the name that we’ve given to garments made out of strips and patches of excess fabric and offcuts, owing to their stripey variations in colour and texture. This year, we continued the project with a full Strip-Stripe capsule collection that we exhibited in Paris during Spring/Summer fashion week, and our first footwear collaboration with Paris-based babouche brand CALLA. Stacks of offcuts and excess fabric have always occupied corners and cupboards at our factory. Even when we moved from Daniel’s parents-in-law’s factory in Maitland to Woodstock in 2022, where we’ve settled into our current independent manufacturing operation known as Together MFG, our offcuts came with us!
There are various reasons for why we are so sentimentally attached to what is essentially our fabric waste, which should be clarified to lay readers and customers who are often surprised to find that garments made of “offcuts” are more expensive than something made out of virgin materials. Firstly, and important to mention before anything else, is that throwing textiles away would be contributing further to the worldwide landfill dilemma that’s already being exacerbated by our industry. We love the earth more than we love having extra space in our factory. Second, our fabrics are expensive, and even the offcuts are too valuable to discard. Lastly, many of the fabrics that we have kept the offcuts from are sourced from some of South Africa’s most prominent textiles designers and mills, and are too special for us to give away. All of these factors have led us to hold onto our waste in the hopes that an idea or opportunity presents itself that could see us use them in an innovative and useful way.
Last year, we cracked the code for the first time with our first ever Strip-Stripe product in the form of a patchwork T-shirt, using the excess single jersey that remains from the regular T-shirt production runs at Together MFG. The Strip-Stripe T-Shirt consists of strips that were hand-selected and cut down. The making process behind one of these T-shirts is arduous. Strips need to be sewn together two at a time on our production line, before being sent to our ironing department to be pressed straight. This process is repeated over and over as the strips are added together until, eventually, the sheet of Strip-Stripe fabric is large enough to cut the panels of the T-shirt from. The result is a dense and textured elevated version of our Heavy T-Shirt. They come in single-colour variations, as well as playful duo-tone versions. Since the first run of these tees in 2024, we’ve made some minor adjustments to the overlapping bite between strips, to make the T-shirt more durable and to ramp up its textured look.
For our SS26 collection, we stepped it up and extended the Strip-Stripe technique to a handful of our other styles, including our Clubhouse Jersey, Hoodie, Balloon and Cargo Trousers and Drawstring Shorts. For most of these garments, we experimented with using offcuts from our fleece production runs. For the past few seasons of Good Good Good, we’ve run hoodies in up to seven different colours, leaving us with countless different options for colour combos to make up our fleece Strip-Stripe garments with. Producing these garments, even more so than T-shirts, takes a big effort. Most of them are made up of smaller patches which take the form of different shapes – squares, diamonds, rectangles. Offcuts are selected and cut down into these shapes by hand, and sewing them together to make panels takes much longer than it does with the single-jersey strips we use for the T-shirts. The final products, however, are worth the trouble. These fleece items, especially, feel like weighted blankets on the body, and their textures and colours are a real treat.
Our footwear collaboration with CALLA ties our Strip-Stripe offering together, giving our customers the opportunity to bathe in the comfort and softness of our offcut project from head to toe. While our offcut-made garments until now have all been made out of textiles that we use in the factory on a regular basis, though, our collaboration with CALLA made use of the excess fabric and offcuts left over from the more unique textiles that we have used for the last 10 years of Good Good Good collections. These included Benjamin Nivison’s merino wool textiles made in the Indian Himalayas and various different fabrics from the Mungo Mill which have featured in every Good Good Good collection over the years. We sent these offcuts all the way to Marrakech in Morocco, where CALLA’s network of artisans wove them into rugs before cutting and making them into one-of-one pairs of babouches. We’ve always loved CALLA’s fluffy and colourful shoes, and we’re proud to see bits of Good Good Good heritage woven into the same shapes and textures.
After hoarding offcuts for almost 10 years, we’re proud to have finally found a formula for how best not to waste any of our resources. We love our textiles, and we wouldn’t want to do them (or our customers) a disservice by using them simply for the sake of using them. While practicing sustainability is an important intention of our business, it was crucial for us that this patchwork project of ours wasn’t driven purely by a desire to create a “sustainable” product. Instead, we stayed patient for an idea that could see us use our waste in a way that we feel adds beauty to our collection. We’d rather have people learn that our Strip-Stripe T-Shirt is made out of offcuts than have it be clear to them by the way the T-shirt looks and feels. It took us some time, but we’ve learnt how to lean into the textures and colour combinations that our offcuts can offer us when transformed into something new.