Fewer clothes made better.
If you've got this far, it's because you want to know what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Well, here we go.
We're Asphalte. And at Asphalte, we have a clear mission: to make sustainability accessible.
In practice, this means we make quality clothes, made in Europe, that look great for years to come and don't cost a ton. To do so we have a not-so-secret weapon: preorder.
Why are we doing this?
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the textile industry has gone off the rails.
30 years of huge volumes of poorly made clothes at rock bottom prices has become one of the biggest threat to the planet, polluting our environment and exploiting the people who make them.
At Asphalte, we do the opposite. Good quality, in small batches, at a reasonable price, made in Europe by people who are treated properly. And all the while controlling the environmental impact of production and transportation.
In short, we want to play our part turning things around.
Our promises to you
Less but better
Like you, we'd rather have one excellent garment than 5 not-so-great ones. And if more of us felt the same way, we would stop producing 100 billion items a year.
Stop wasting
Instead of overproducing and ending up with loads of unsold items, we produce only what’s been ordered thanks to our preorder model. All at the best price all year round.
More transparency
As well as polluting, the textile industry is super opaque. Quite a combo. As far as we're concerned, we choose our materials and our partners to ensure total traceability.
The Asphalte method
To achieve this, here's the plan:
First, we focus on your needs.
We're not into mass-producing stuff you don't need. On the contrary, we want to tailor our products to you and manufacture them on demand:
- Co-creation. You decide from A to Z. Collection plan, cut, colours, materials: we don't do anything until you give us the go-ahead. In fact, that's what our famous questionnaires and the 'co-creation' tab in the menu is all about.
- Preordering. It's simple: your purchase triggers the production process. You waiting a few weeks means that we avoid overproduction and logistical costs. We invest the money saved to provide you with the best raw materials and European know-how at the best possible price.
Then we work like hell developing your clothing.
After analysing your responses to the co-creation questionnaires, our product team takes over. Here's how it works:
- Our stylists design the garment. They combine your feedback with vintage samples to reproduce details and finishes that have lasted through the decades.
- The product development team finds and tests the best materials with an independent third party lab. After that, they knuckle down on the fit and find the perfect balance between comfort and durability
- We collectively flesh out the project to get a good idea of the final result. If we're convinced, we launch prototyping with our production partners and keep developing them until we have the perfect result. This has been known to take up to two years. Ultimate Jeans anyone?
Finally, we launch the preorder.
The material is bought, the patterns are ready, the machines are set up, the launch is scheduled. That's it, we can finally open the preorder campaign.
This happens every Tuesday at 10:00 CET sharp. Every week at this precise time, 52 weeks a year, a new product is available to preorder for 6 days only. So each Sunday at midnight, we close a preorder and start counting up the quantity to produce.
The timing may seem tight, but it's the best we've come up with to streamline shipments and deliver to you right at the right time of year.
Once your order has been confirmed and the preorder have closed, our partner factories get busy producing your item. This takes a few weeks, sometimes longer, but we think it’s worth it to get the best level of quality for this price. And more and more people seem to agree.
A few words about our ethics
It's important to be clear on this: we only work with manufacturers in the European Union. This not only allows us to visit them regularly and concentrate our supply chain, but it’s also a real guarantee of the people who make our clothes’ social wellbeing.
The second important thing is that we hand-pick them. This guarantees a high level of product expertise and certification. Before we shake hands, we discuss flexibility, production capacity, labelling, working conditions, traceability and transparency, just to make sure that everything matches with our ethics.
This is one of the major advantages of our human-scale model. As we only produce a small number of different items, we have a limited number of partners. This means that we can select them very carefully, really get to know them and visit them often.
A question of impact
We make no secret of the fact: we aim to provide the lowest impact and best value for money on the market.
We're not going to pull the "clothes that do good for the planet" trick, because all new products have an ecological footprint. But we do make a real effort to limit it and mitigate any impact when possible.
Whether it's by choosing certified natural fibres, focusing on proximity and sustainability, avoiding overproduction or producing in countries with eco-conscious energy policies, we adopt the most responsible approach possible.
Above all, we tell you everything. Thanks to FairlyMade, an independent partner, we show you each step of every item on its sales page, so that you can see its footprint at a glance. In an industry as opaque as ours, it seemed essential to us to give you all the information necessary for you to make the right consumption choices.
Best wishes from Bordeaux
By the way, who is this 'we' we've been referring to?
Maybe we should have started there: Asphalte is a little group of forty odd people who work tirelessly from the city that gave the world that cannelé.
It's no easy task to take a photo with everyone's eyes open, here’s our best shot:
Will, Rod, Dorine, Ben, Benj', Servane, Agathe, Alban, Camille and the others: they've all been working hard since 2016 to do just what we’ve described. Not forgetting Jimmy, Oli and Pete who’ve been keeping you entertained in English and German for the last 4 years. Why do we all get up in the morning? Because we're convinced we've got a real solution to some of the big problems with the fashion industry.
Thanks for reading this, there’s a lot to the way we work so we know it takes a bit of brainpower. The best way to follow the rest of the adventure is to sign up to our newsletters below. We guarantee it won’t be boring.
Until then,
The ASPHALTE team