OUR DNA RANGE IS MADE FROM GENETICALLY ENGINEERED MICROORGANISMS AND DNA
DNA doesn’t just make us, us. It also makes many of the colours we see in the natural world. So instead of using synthetic dyes to colour our DNA range we use genetically engineered microorganisms and DNA. By implanting plant DNA into self-replicating bacteria, brewing that bacteria like beer, then submerging our clothing into giant baths of the stuff, we can now grow the colours that dye our clothes.
UNLOCKING THE COLOUR CODES OF DNA
It's all thanks to two Cambridge scientists named Orr and Jim who have figured out how to pick out the genetic sequences that create specific colours in nature, and use them to grow colours from scratch in a lab. Their work comes several billion years after nature figured out how to use DNA to make colour, and 70 years after Francis Crick and James Watson – also at Cambridge – discovered the structure of DNA itself.
OUR MINERAL RANGE IS DYED WITH ANCIENT MINERALS, ROCKS AND VOLCANIC SOIL
As we continue to look for new, low impact ways to dye clothing, we’ve turned to the colouring tools of early man - minerals, rocks, and soils. Garment dyeing clothing in minerals only requires heat, time and pressure to get the colour to stick, and only creates two by-products - water and sediment. Both of which can go straight back into nature.
PREHISTORIC MAN USED THEM TO PAINT THEIR CAVES, WE USE THEM TO DYE OUR CLOTHES
We use everything from ochre, a reddish brown, iron-rich mineral used by the first human artists 164,000 years ago, to celadonite, a blue-green mineral formed when lava interacts with sea water. And because the dyes we're using are non-synthetic, the colours they create are softer and less intense.
OUR BLACK ALGAE RANGE REINVENTS HOW THE COLOUR BLACK IS MADE
The colour black is everywhere. From our phones to our cars to the ink in our pens. But black has a dark side. Every black thing you own is likely to contain carbon black - a pigment derived from petroleum. So we're on a search for the new black. Over the last few years we've been working with US biomaterials company Living Ink to accelerate the adoption of black algae as a way to colour clothing.
