When me and Yuri set out to start this project we realized that we clearly didn’t have the know-how or the experience to create a competitive product right from the start, what we did have were the obsessive approach that characterizes us in each of our endeavours, the will to learn from any possible source but most of all the pleasure that doing so gives us.
Not only, it is clear to us that because progress in outerwear is (and has been) making major steps daily, the marked is flooded with mass-produced products that might be essential to the fuelling of this constant innovation but they are also an extreme expense of energy and resources.
The other aspect that caught our attention was the short life of clothing (not just outerwear in this case) or better, the vision that a majority of us have, partly a result of the culture we’ve been brought up in, partly imparted on us by a consume-led industry, that once an item has expired its prime state it is to be thrown away.
Obviously in making these statements we are aware that other companies are making great efforts to provide services that repair their items when possible and encourage the recycling of old garments but we believe that while this is an approach restricted to outdoor companies the rest of the industry has to catch up.
It’s with these ideas in mind that we decided to open Rayon Vert BETA, a line of prototypes, handmade by us in short batches, so that we can experiment freely but most importantly gather the observations of the users in order to gradually create a better product without creating unnecessary waste.
In addition to this we’re currently providing (until the demand doesn’t render this impossible) a lifetime warranty on all of our BETA products, that way when you burn a cigarette hole through your bag you can just send it back to us to patch it up, unless you want to do it yourself.
Me and Yuri have since had our first BETA weekend, he came over from Milan on a Thursday evening and we worked day and night through to Monday morning to make our first batch of prototypes, only leaving the studio to go to Popular Café (our local greasy-spoon where Memhet and his family, come what may, bless us with their best cooking).
It’s common, in our group of friends, to refer to a piece of clothing as “definitive”; this is a symptom of the constant research that we’ve always put in looking for a garment that requires no betterment.
While we have realized that in the world that we live in this is (thankfully) impossible we strive to chase the better option through time and continuously upgrade it as well as ourselves in the hope that what we enjoy doing most also becomes what we do best.
