As part of our Happy New Decade celebrations, we chatted to Quang Dinh, co-founder of Girlfriend Collective – the cult new-to-Selfridges brand whose ethically made activewear is all about having a positive impact on the world and spreading joy. 

What led you to start creating sustainable activewear?

My wife and Girlfriend Collective creative director, Ellie, was working out with friends and felt there was nothing in the activewear space that really stood for something – other than pure performance and that mantra of ‘be the best’. So we launched Girlfriend Collective in 2016. 

Sustainability is such an important topic. How do you approach it?

Everyone at Girlfriend Collective knows that what we’re doing [in sustainability] is pretty important but are also aware we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. We want to cast a wide net, so we talk to our customers as real people, like we’re their girlfriends, someone they’ve known for a long time. We want our customers to have a smile, even with such a dense and heavy topic.

How would you describe Girlfriend Collective?

We’ve always wanted Girlfriend Collective to be not just a brand that sells clothes, but an opportunity to be positive within the world.

We want to be a hero brand that people look to and think ‘oh man, they’re doing it right, across everything’. We’re not doing what we do because of a marketing gimmick. We didn’t add on plus sizes; we did them from the very beginning. Similarly, we didn’t develop sustainable fabrics because they were a hot topic; we did them from the very beginning.

Our products are for everyone. Sure, they perform for people who are in the gym all day long, but the fabrics work for everybody, regardless of where you are in life. We constantly ask ourselves: how do we design activewear that is fashionable for a very long time but is also as functional for as many people as possible?

Tell us about your sustainable fabrics…

Activewear is obviously a bit of an advert for synthetic materials, like nylon and polyester. As a manufacturer, you can either buy virgin yarn or post-consumer yarn, which is recycled. At the time, no one was really choosing the latter as it’s more expensive to use and processing recycled yarns is way more finicky, simply because they’re not pure – there can be problems with dyeing, for example.

It took about a year and a half of development before we got our finalised recycled fabric back, and, when we did, we had an ‘oh my God’ moment – it literally is the best sustainable fabric you could have in activewear.

We use ECONYL® for our LITE fabric – made entirely from landfill and ocean waste, and perfect for activities like hot yoga. Our core leggings are made from polyester that has been made from recycled plastic water bottles.

How else is Girlfriend Collective sustainable?

There’s environmental sustainability, sure, but we also want to champion social sustainability. We work with the Fair Wages Coalition and The Rainforest Alliance, enabling people to afford things like the infrastructure to pipe water so they don’t have to buy it in single-use plastic bottles. 

What makes you feel positive about the future? 

I want us to think about how we continue to innovate. There’s so much plastic that’s already been made, so how do we upcycle all of it? Last year, we launched our take-back programme. If we make synthetic clothes, we need to be able to take them back and remake them into great new clothes. So we work with a mill in America to develop our fabric to be remade into new leggings and sports bras. We want to close the loop, not add to the current mess. I really feel like that’s the future.