Our Ethos

Our Ethos

We want to prove that everyone from production to customer can be happy. Our aim is to demonstrate that a clothing label can produce awesome unique clothing of a high quality, at the same time we want your experience and our customer service to be phenomenal every time without exception. But most importantly, our goal is to prove that you can do all of this without someone in the chain not receiving their fair share. We believe it doesn’t have to be at the expense of someone like many capitalists will have you believe. We think the system doesn’t have to be “winners and losers”. The system is whatever we all decide to make it, so let’s make a system where everyone wins.

Dharamprakash handmaking overalls in the old factory

As you can imagine, this is not easy. We are far from perfect. But we are working every day to improve our social and environmental impact. We receive many emails form you asking about our ethics in more detail. We want to be as transparent as possible, we just struggle to find the time to write things like this. So here's Lucy & Yak in a bit more detail….

All of our clothing is made in India. 

We found a region in North India renowned for its tailors and initially used eight different businesses to see which one shared our core beliefs. Ismail was the ninth tailor in India that we used and we knew almost immediately that we’d found our man. Thats not to say we haven’t had to work to improve things. But he already had a lot of ace things in place. For example his tailors are paid four times the state minimum wage. Some of his tailors live comfortably working part-time. The working conditions when we first found him were by no means the worst we’d seen, but still not good enough. So we are insanely proud to say that the new factory is now complete. Its bigger so they have more space to work comfortably. Its clean and the lighting is excellent. Air conditioning will be fitted in time for hot season.

 

Cutting the ribbon on the new factory 

A lot has happened in just a short space of time for Lucy & Yak, and we are in the process of moving to a larger warehouse due to us being incredibly busy. 

Our team in India will also be moving to a new factory that we have helped with which looks out onto the beautiful Indian desert and farmland. It is exceptionally clean and has air-conditioning, and  to help even further with our green ethos, we’re even having solar panels installed onto the roof of the factory! Hopefully by the end of the year, we will also be able to up production!

However, we won’t stop there! There is still a long way to go and so much more to do, and we’re all so excited to see what the future holds for Lucy & Yak. We have so many plans for year two, I’ll let you in on few little secrets… We have been working on some new fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles, I know crazy right? 

 

We think the environment is pretty important so when you receive your new Lucy & Yaks, they come in a fabulous material bag. This bag is 100% recycled and they're beautiful so you can totally re-use them.

But we have bigger news…. we have switched entirely to 100% biodegradable mailing bags from Polybags.co.uk. We want to completely eradicate plastic from use at any point in the production and distribution of Lucy & Yaks. There's more work to do on that, but we’ve made a start.

We use 100% recycled card for our Thank you cards and returns slip.

Every package we send out to you will only contain items that are either Biodegradable, Re-usable, Recycled and of course Wearable.

 

 

Raju contemplating doing some work for a change

Finally, the UK side. We’re still confused that the national minimum wage is lower than the actual living wage. It doesn’t seem to make sense to us that the minimum wage for 21 to 25 year olds is £7.05 an hour and for over 25’s it’s £7.50 an hour when the real cost to live in the UK as calculated by livingwage.org.uk requires an hourly wage of £8.45!!! We are a small family business, so far everyone at Lucy & Yak is paid above the living wage as per livingwage.org.uk. As we grow and employ more people, we pledge to continue this.

Thank you again for supporting Lucy & Yak, Ismail's rural Indian village and our environment.

Love

Lucy and Chris