Honest By: Fashionably eco

A fashion brand with a conscience. This is how you might describe Honest By, a clothing brand launched in Belgium in January that claims to be the “first company in the world to share the full cost breakdown of its products”.

With trousers selling at 400 euros and up it is indeed heartening to know that nobody is getting rich at the expense of child workers in a developing country. But rather than just tell you that their products are socially and environmentally sustainable, Honest By actually gives you a product by product breakdown of the companies involved in the manufacture of the garments: company name and address, number of employees, time taken to cut and assemble the item, even how long it took to iron the clothes ready to be sold!

As if that weren’t enough, they also give you a breakdown of production costs, not forgoing things like ‘bias tape’ (worth approximately 0.44 euro cents) or hang tags but even more importantly, without forgoing the mark up cost and explanation of why its ok to mark up the price twice for wholesale and twice again for retail.

Finally, Honest By also breaks down the carbon footprint of each of its items giving exact metric calculations of C02 produced and their equivalent in driving time or electric consumption.

All in all there is little to fault the company on as long as you can afford the expensive price tag!

Find out more: www.honestby.com