Adore Me taps Ever Dye to source sustainable dyes

The startup has developed a low heat, low-energy, biobased pigment dyeing process.

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Adore Me has partnered with French sustainability startup Ever Dye for a capsule collection set to be released next year, the company announced last week.

DTC lingerie brand Adore Me, which is owned by Victoria’s Secret & Co., has been on a recent partnering streak with sustainability startups. The new deal with Ever Dye “furthers the brand’s mission to make low-impact lingerie more accessible and affordable to customers,” according to the release.

The majority of energy consumption in dyeing garments happens in the process of heating water, which is required to make dyes catch on to fabric, Ranjan Roy, vice president of strategy at Adore Me, said in a recent interview with Fashion Dive. To solve this problem, Ever Dye has developed a low heat, low-energy, biobased pigment dyeing process.

The capsule collection will include pieces in orange, red and black, because these colors work more naturally with Ever Dye’s tech to meet Adore Me’s needs, Roy said.

While the current partnership is only for the capsule collection, Roy said Adore Me hopes to eventually use Ever Dye’s tech on all aspects of its production.

“The idea that the entire dying process can be shortened in time [and] require potentially 75% less energy, and that changes everything,” Roy said.

Adore Me received B-Corp certification in September 2022, and has since announced partnerships with Carbonfact, a fashion-specific carbon management platform that helps track a company’s carbon footprint, and Commonshare, an artificial intelligence and data science platform that helps brands with sustainability compliance and sourcing. These partnerships are rapidly changing the way Adore Me operates, Roy said.

When seeking new partnerships, Roy said Adore Me looks for whether the deal could create systemic change, as opposed to one-off solutions. It also seeks partnerships that can make products more affordable to consumers.

“We already start to see how these different partnerships can work together, because now as Ever Dye gets implemented in different parts of the supply chain, we can actually granularly measure what is going to be the carbon emissions reduction and factor that into the larger strategy,” Roy said. “For us, carbon emissions reduction is the North Star. And with sustainability in general, there's always going to be, again, with this partnership specifically, waterways, water pollution, overall actual health of the fabric, these are all things that it also helps effect.”

Its strategy is also to promote affordable sustainability, and Roy sees Adore Me as a brand that can show that sustainable products don’t need to be expensive or look a certain way. Its sustainable products cost the same amount as the other products, Roy said.

“We show that sustainable fashion can be affordable, inclusive, and they can look just like normal products, and can be fun and for everyone,” Roy said.