Hoodies and upcycled denim from fabric bound for landfill

On her way to school, Anna Haruna walked past massive, toxic fashion waste dumps every day. The continuous exposure to the burning smoke, she says, eventually landed her in hospital with a severe respiratory illness. It was, she says, "a massive wake up call."

BLVR is what she built. It is a circular fashion brand based in Nigeria that intercepts textile scraps, plastic waste and discarded automobile tires before they end up in open landfills, and turns them into "timeless fashion pieces and accessories" rather than disposable apparel, she says. The brand has designed and sold its initial runs of hoodies, pants and upcycled denim items to its first wave of online customers.

“I realized that our communities cannot afford to wait for massive, slow industrial changes. We need direct action.”

Anna Haruna

There is no factory. Instead of heavy, expensive machinery, production is passed to a decentralized network of local young makers and independent artisans, which she says gives them stable green jobs. Anna manages the digital brand strategy and online architecture. Her creative director, Shedrach David, a painter and multi-disciplinary artist, guides the design. Automated model rendering and ghost mannequin image editing let the brand present its pieces to a global audience with almost zero overhead costs, she says.

The bottleneck now is visibility, she says. "Our network of artisans has the capacity to produce more pieces right now, but we need to unlock greater market demand."