Etiko – Helping Make Fashion Fair & Sustainable

To minimise our environmental impact, Etiko manufactures predominately unisex garments and footwear. We use classic designs and silhouettes that have proven to be customer favourites over the past 14 years.

Examples include rubber-toed canvas sneakers, rubber thongs, hoodies, T-shirts, leggings, singlets and underwear. These wardrobe staples don’t date and therefore deter customers from participating in fast-fashion fads.

All of our products are made from high-quality natural materials including organic cotton and sustainable rubber. Our brand always has been vegan, and we avoid plastic by using recycled paper and cardboard for our swing tags and packaging.

Etiko strives to demonstrate industry excellence by designing quality Fairtrade products at genuinely affordable prices, and taking responsibility for our waste.

By avoiding synthetic fibres almost entirely, we ensure our clothing won’t release microfibres when washed and can biodegrade at the end of their lifecycle.

Our footwear take-back program rewards customers with store credits and facilitates rubber recycling from our old shoes, helping to close the loop on our waste. We aim to implement a similar recycling scheme for clothing later this year.

We also sell replacement shoelaces, which can help extend the life of our footwear, and offset our carbon emissions by supporting the plantation of forests in East Timor.

To differentiate ourselves from other fashion brands we take innovative steps to reduce our environmental impact and ensure our garment workers receive a fair salary.

To do this we:

• Only use certified organic textile and sustainably farmed rubber to manufacture our products;
• Avoid plastic by using recycled cardboard and paper for our packaging;
• Offer footwear recycling for unwanted shoes and incentivise the program;
• Offset our carbon emissions;
• Are vegan;
• Aim to educate customers through our monthly newsletter/blog;
• Trace our supply chains from cotton seed to finished product;
• Pay our textile workers a Fairtrade Premium on top of manufacturing costs to ensure they achieve a living wage (the first fashion brand in Australia to do this)

In 2008 Etiko won the Banksia Environmental Foundation Award for most sustainable business in Australia. The first and only fashion brand to ever do so.

Etiko is the  ONLY fashion brand to receive an A+ rating for ethical production in the Australian Ethical Fashion Report every year since the report began in 2013 .

In 2016, Etiko became the first  fashion label to ever receive an Australian Human Rights Award for addressing the issue of exploitation in fashion supply chains.

Etiko has helped hundreds of companies apply the UN\’s Sustainable Development Goals to the procurement of branded clothing. Clients include RMIT, KPMG, Salvation Army & the Australian Greens.

Etiko has assisted numerous Aboriginal Arts Centres apply sustainability and social impact to the production of a variety of fashion items …from natural rubber thongs (Injalak Arts) to fabrics (Anindilyakwa Arts)