Why Bamboo?

Quite simply bamboo textiles are good for our skin and good for the planet too.

The technical bit...

It’s not that technical really, it just makes sense when you know the facts! No wonder bamboo textiles and fabric is becoming recognised as the wonder fibre of this century.

Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet with some species growing at a rate of 3 feet per day. It requires no chemicals or assistance to grow, in fact it's a weed! Bamboo fabrics are therefore use organically grown plants.

So, getting back to the point, sometime around the turn of the millennium, some clever people in China sat down together and decided to try turning bamboo into a fibre. Cotton, they rightly presumed, had had its day. Cotton requires vast amounts of pesticide, fertiliser, irrigated water and labour, even the organic stuff is water intensive. It uses around 20% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the pesticides. It takes roughly one-third of a pound of chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) to grow enough cotton for just one T-shirt. Not so with bamboo. It simply made sense. And lucky for us, in 2002 they succeeded in making a viable yarn out of bamboo fibre.

This is almost as much of an evolutionary and ecological leap forward as harnessing solar power, or wind power. Cotton is lightweight, breathable, cheap, takes dyes well, dries quickly – you name it, how could anything else be better than cotton? Well, bamboo is better than cotton. Yes, bamboo beats cotton on every count. Bamboo is more breathable than cotton, it’s more absorbent than cotton but it dries as quickly, it’s naturally antibacterial especially when combined with a small percentage of cotton or polyester, it’s softer to the touch yet it is more durable than cotton, and it’s much more ecologically sustainable than cotton.  It’s wonderful and we love it.  We hope you do too.