New Friends: SUST - An Organic Women's Clothing Company

SUST ad in the May 2009 Issue of Dwell.

My first reaction while I was reading through the latest issue of Dwell Magazine and came upon an ad for a clothing company called SUST was, good name! We've been calling ourselves Susty's since we first got started over a year ago and are always on the look out for long lost friends. Couple that with the fact that I also use arrows in my marketing materials for my consulting firm Be One Creative and my heart started to beat a bit faster. After digging a bit more to learn about the company, its product, and its founders I started to uncover some striking similarities about how our companies came to be.

As we are always researching ways to diversify our Venture Space, we recently began discussing the incorporation of retail to supplement our co-working office and conference space. We will be coming out with our own line of t-shirts during the summer but we are also researching a collection of the latest sustainable, ethical, and responsible clothing lines. This in mind I contacted SUST to get further information.


SUST, Spring 2009

SUST is based out of San Francisco and was started by two childhood friends named Tristan Gribbin and Marion McKee. Tristan and Marion went through high school and college together in Northern California, which has always been a vortex for fresh thought and progressive culture. After working on their own careers and projects they recently came together in order to harness their creative potential and to realize their dream of harnessing the fashion industry to promote a positive movement of environmental sustainability and social responsibility.

Generation Sustain has a similar story. We were started by two sets of childhood friends who grew up together, attended the same highschool and college, and came together to start a business based on the positive and inclusive communication of sustainability. Tory Hanna and myself studied Environmental Design and have been working on harnessing the influential power of the built environment to create positive social change. We've always agreed that if the buildings and landscapes that we walk through every day have the power to influence our collective behavior, so must what we walk around in, clothes. Ethical and sustainable fashion, marketing, and product development are what Alee Marsh and Jennifer Kehoe have begun working on. The pair will both be graduating this year from the University of Massachusetts and we're excited to see what they will work on when they have a lot more time on their hands.


www.getsust.com

SUST's collection is made entirely of US grown 100 percent organic cotton in San Francisco. By working with US based cotton growers, local California based manufacturers, and mainataining a close relationship with the production of their garments, SUST ensures that true "fair trade principles are woven in every step of the way." Portions of their proceeds are also given to support ecological causes.

Their Spring 2009 collection invokes a minimalist beauty that seems to be very much a part of their business ideals. Their bright colors and simple elegant fits are depicted well in the photos of the collection taken in Iceland by Tristan's Icelandic husband, photographer and director Stefan Arni. The collection reminds me of the form of design that has influenced me the most, Scandanavian Minimalism. That said, if I were a woman, I'd wear their clothing. The clean lines and quality materials highlighted by bright colors suggest a positive break in a cluttered dreary environment.

SUST, Spring 2009


An example of Scandinavian Minimalism I spent much time in and around.
Shot facing north next to the "Black Diamond" Library in Copenhagen, Denmark.

We are happy to have come across this exciting new business and are looking forward to somehow working with SUST in the future. Our similar paths to starting our ventures speak to a new paradigm for innovation and sustainability, one that has moved away from alarmist environmentalism and cause elitism and will hopefully harness the power to influence through accessibility and quality design.

More information about SUST and photographs of their spring line can be viewed at www.getsust.com.

Interior Shots of GSVS1

Mckenzie Rollins Checking out the view with a book in our lounge.


Our workstations were built by our first tenant, Justin Lively. Pine wrapped with canvas and finished with poplar. Neutral and cool.


Raechel digging in to a book next to Joie Watson of Shine Design's Desk.

Dwelling on San Francisco

I was in San Francisco this past week to attend Dwell Magazine's conference focused on "Building Communities in the Modern World." I had few expectations but was impressed by the line up of speakers so I was sure that I had to take something away from the two-day event. San Francisco loves design, loves the color green and of course loves itself, as it should. San Francisco has, by far, the most comprehensive set of environmentally friendly initiatives and incredibly strong public and private support for all things "green," of any American City I have traveled to in the past few years. The steering wheel for the green bandwagon is most definitely in the bay area. That said, with all the free tree-hugging love oozing from the central west coast, how does the 'sustainability conspiracy,' spoken of by moderator John Hockenberry, conspire to win over the rest of the United States?

The answer, I believe, is with a shift of attitude expressed in the communication of this movement. For years now the liberal pockets of the US have been nurturing the family of green movements that have evolved out of environmentalism. This nurturing has led to a great deal of momentum but also a great deal of protectiveness. The choir may be growing but not at the exponential rate needed for the ideals of sustainability to hit home with a large populace of the US that dismisses the green movement as elitist. Hollywood is buying hybrids faster than automobile companies can make them. Fast food now serves locally grown products and organic coffee. Fair trade is cool and green is chic. This may be a move in the right direction. If sustainable, responsible products can infiltrate mainstream America perhaps we do not need to convince anyone. We can herd the sheep right into the fresh green pasture and they can unknowingly graze the fair trade grass until the earth heals itself, right?

I foresee a backlash. I, who once thought the only way to save us, was to stop driving SUV's and go back to some type of neo-hunter-gatherer society, find myself frustrated with the liberal elite who want to keep this movement to themselves and away from American industry. We get it, why don't you?

This exclusionary attitude is exactly what the conspiracy needs to move away from, for example, treehugger.com. Discovery Channel recently announced that the purchase of treehugger.com to compliment their new eco-channel 'Planet Green' as part of their push to bring green to the mainstream. I have visited treehugger.com, I have used Treehugger to look for jobs and research topics. I also know people who use the term tree hugger as derogatory slang. Perhaps the people at Treehugger and the Discovery Channel can make it safe for the closet environmentalists to come out and win over young professionals who have discovered the joy of organic fair trade lattes, but by nobly trying to change the social connotations of a negative term they have limited their potential for broad social change.

Not to say that the sustainability movement is entirely exclusionary or elitist. The excellent lineup of presenters at the Dwell event showed that the notion of inclusive action and communication is alive and well, so, back to the conference.

Alice Waters and her presentation of the edible schoolyard exemplified this attitude with her push to empower every child with the skills to grow and provide for their community. The Architect Frank Harmon opened eyes to other parts of the country by introducing the California design community to modern North Carolina prefab; a doublewide trailer home on stilts, which was received by a chorus of nervous laughs. Reed Korloff, former Dean of Tulane University's School of Architecture demonstrated how a student designed and built green home can be affordable, appealing, and a strong investment.

The last question posed to the final panel by moderator John Hockenberry was, how much of the current green initiatives would remain intact in our society and how much would become fad. The panel, consisting of Frank Harmon, Reed Kroloff, Geoff Manaugh an editor at Dwell and author of Bldg Blog, the architect Lorcan O'Herlihy, and Gwynne Pugh of Scarpa Architects, answered with overwhelming realism leaning toward pessimism ranging from 50 to 80 percent fad. I agree that this is an uphill battle and much of this green-chic will fade to fad but Geoff Manaugh had a different take, one that hints at a fully charged youthful push. This push, naive as it may be, will not only help to get the ideals of social and environmental sustainability into mainstream America, but make it second nature so that eating locally grown organic foods, building self cooling / heating buildings powered by renewable resources, and placing human and environmental health above fiscal prosperity will become the system that we live in.