Introduction to Forever Greenwashing

Written by co-founder, Jonas Kapper

Forever greenwashing is Kappers first collection. By utilizing other materials than conventional leather, Kappers main focus is to become more green. 

 

The stories on each bag

On every bag, you can read the story from the people who is close to us. We have asked them what they focus on in regards to sustainability. Their opinions are important to us - and it is important to us, that we can live up to their honest ambitions and expectations towards sustainability. 

The material

In the process of finding alternative materials, Kapper found all sorts of materials; pineapple-, grapefruit-, cork-, cactus- and apple leather. While testing and researching them all, we found that proper information in regards to the process was extremely hard to find. 

Some supplier and factories was better than others, to properly explain the details about the process of how their material was made. Most underplayed informations such as what the fruit-based material was mixed with to make the good-looking surface. 

It was only after nearly 6 months we learned that apple leather also contains other things besides apple. The information about the proces and all external sources, never mentioned anything about how much plastic the material contained. 

What is apple skin made of

The Apple leather (apple skin) is therefore a 50/50-mix of plastic and apple leather. We wish that we could offer bags in a 90/10-mix or something even better, but that is unfortunately not available at the moment. This might at first hand seem bad, which is what we thought as well.

We had a hard time figuring this out, since we already invested in the first prototypes. We tried to research the market again, just to find out, that even though apple skin contains 50% plastic, it is still the best fruit/vegetable based material on the market. 

Of course we tried to look into conventional leather again, but we agreed on that none of the current conditions suited our ambitions or ethics. To make products in the same quality as ours, we knew we needed to produce them with monochrome tanning, which is a very chemical proces. If not done right, it destroys local environments and damages the people working with it. 

A lot of certificates are available at the moment, but we know that a lot of companies use sub-supplier on sub-supplier, which makes it hard to control that the 1st supplier quality controls the 3-5 of its own suppliers. 

The current market

Even though we are sad to inform that Apple leather consists 50% of plastic, we are still making a difference. 

All other alternatives are either 100% plastic, such as the worlds biggest brands monogram styles. If you know a bit about brands, you know that brands starting with G and L, are doubling down on their monogram designs year after year. All of their bags are made of canvas (often cotton) with a plastic coated surface, which makes it look like leather. 

Our choices

Our ambitions can be summed up short: 

• Challenge the market.
• Use the best and most sustainable available materials
• Ensure proper working ethics throughout the parts of the value chain, that we can control.

Our promise of honesty

We promise to be 100% honest. We believe that one of the current biggest problems with the industry, is dis-honesty = Greenwashing. No one is perfect, but where it really goes wrong is when brands start lying, misleading consumers or embellish the truth.

Therefore, there are some things we want to get up-front. 

• We do not have a direct relation with the supplier of the material. The company is big and we do not have the size yet, to be "let inside". It is our ambition to do so. 
• We do not know the specific details about the dying process. 
• We use shipping companies such as GLS and DHL, which are widely known, but not directly known for their interests in sustainability. 

As soon as we reach a size where this is possible, we will strive to become better. This is our ambition throughout this entire process: We are new, we will make mistakes and we are not perfect, but we will work everyday to become better and fix the mistakes we might make. 

We promise to be open with our mistakes. Honesty, ambitions and the courage to do things different than the rest, is what we believe will make a change in the long run. 

 

The stories on each bag

On every bag, you can read the story from the people who is close to us. We have asked them what they focus on in regards to sustainability. Their opinions are important to us - and it is important to us, that we can live up to their honest ambitions and expectations towards sustainability.