the tiny closet ethos

my promise to the work and you

I am a small-business owner, responsible for manufacturing and selling new clothing from outsourced fabrics. I make my business available to both a domestic and global audience yearlong. Because of these choices, I am very conscious of how I operate my business, and I take every action necessary to minimize my carbon footprint, support ethical wholesalers, source and use only dead stock fabric, and eliminate waste with made-to-order production.

Though being a shop owner and a dedicated minimalist seem to contradict one another at times, I do have a few set rules I stick by in order to feel good about how I run my business and my life:

Rule# 1: I don’t have clothing inventory. All orders are made to order by me. Clothing is only made when you order it. Which actually makes it even better I think.

Rule# 2: I buy only dead stock fabric. Which is fabric that big clothing brands are finished with at the end of each season. Hundreds of thousands of gorgeous yards of fabric that are scheduled to go to landfills, I buy to lessen the waste. Instead of having fabric made for my line. Since I opened my shop in 2016, I've kept literally thousands of yards of fabric out of landfills. And I intend to keep doing so.

Rule# 3: Everything I make has a use and hardly anything is thrown away. I sell my samples that my models wear at the beginning of each season - or they’re used to make other designs. I also use scrap fabrics for drafting new patterns and creating dye samples.

All garments are sewn with care by the same hands, start to finish. No assembly lines here. And as I plan to expand, I will continue to make sure The Tiny Closet operates ethically and sustainably in virtually everything that I do, from electricity use to tools, to mindful employment and of course, the fibers, dyes and textiles used.