Our Story & Mission
Having visited Margate in 2018 I fell in love with the Kent coast and the idea of removing myself from London and all it's influences. Having founded Les Animaux in 2015 initially as a continuation of what I had been designing for other brands it soon started to dawn on me that the fashion industry as it had been and continues to be did not make sense anymore, it was so remote from our lives and just did not seem relevant to most people’s needs.
I started to think about what I wanted to offer and the idea of interacting directly with the customer was so powerful, to serve their needs with a product we made ourselves and built to be timeless whilst also being low impact on the environment and cruelty free, were always at the core of our brand identity.
Sustainable & Conscious Production
When founding Les Animaux the aim was to create a brand that functioned outside the standard fashion industry where product is created with increasing regularity, almost immediately de valuing anything previously bought and owned. Clothing brands are producing new stock at such a rate that on average 30% of all garments produced go unsold. This dead stock is seen to have little to no future sales potential, often due to being considered by the brand and customer as out-of-season, outdated, or simply having very low demand.
One of the main ways that retailers dispose of their unsold stock is by sending it to landfill sites across the world or they are incinerated with people in the UK throwing 300,000 tonnes worth of clothes away every single year. Meanwhile, less than a fifth of our preloved clothing is ever recycled.
We passionately believe that clothes retain their value and beauty for years so long as they are carefully maintained and the focus for Les Animaux as a brand is to produce sustainable and conscious production so that in our small way we are tackling the global glut of discarded fast fashion. We are totally transparent in our production (we literally have an open curtain policy between the shop and the studio) we hope that you can trust that we are doing everything we can to uphold the highest ethical standards.
Organic Fabrics
We use organic fabrics because unlike most synthetic fabrics, which can take hundreds of years to decompose. Natural fibres like organic cotton and linen are biodegradable and return safely to the earth and natural fibres can be fast-growing and regenerative quickly without destroying resources.
We are very considered when cutting our fabrics to reduce wastage and we are always thinking of new ways to use the tiniest pieces of fabric. We use small offcuts are used to make business cards and labels and are finding that in our shops it's a great way to start conversations around sustainability.
Re-Imagined
Our Re-Imagined collection is a selection of carefully selected pre-loved and vintage pieces that that we repair, rework and re-dye them. This collection is resold at a lower price point than our main collection.
We also look for our items on re-sale sites and buy them back so we can repair and re-dye them to sell as pre-worn pieces in our stores.
Aftercare
Our whole aim is to deliver garments that will last. For us, sustainability is about buying pieces that you will wear for a very long time and, in order to achieve this, we are happy to offer free repairs on garments when the damage is caused by wear and tear. In addition as we dye all our pieces in-house we are also able to offer a "re-dye" service on our cotton based items where we can re-dye the garment in the original colour if it has started to feel jaded or if its a light colour it can be re-dyed to an alternative colour.
Our Process
Our collection is designed to be "season-less", meaning any piece of our collection can be worn all year round and will last you a lifetime.
We never go on sale because we make a large amount of our pieces to order and we replace our retail stock as it sells. If something has not sold we re-look at the style so see how we can make it more interesting to the customer with fit or new colour meaning that we don't have dead stock. Read more about our design & production process here
Organic Fabrics
We use organic fabrics because unlike most synthetic fabrics, which can take hundreds of years to decompose. Natural fibres like organic cotton and linen are biodegradable and return safely to the earth and natural fibres can be fast-growing and regenerative quickly without destroying resources.
We are very considered when cutting our fabrics to reduce wastage and we are always thinking of new ways to use the tiniest pieces of fabric. We use small offcuts are used to make business cards and labels and are finding that in our shops it's a great way to start conversations around sustainability.
Re-Imagined
Our Re-Imagined collection is a selection of carefully selected pre-loved and vintage pieces that that we repair, rework and re-dye them. This collection is resold at a lower price point than our main collection.
We also look for our items on re-sale sites and buy them back so we can repair and re-dye them to sell as pre-worn pieces in our stores.
Aftercare
Our whole aim is to deliver garments that will last. For us, sustainability is about buying pieces that you will wear for a very long time and, in order to achieve this, we are happy to offer free repairs on garments when the damage is caused by wear and tear. In addition as we dye all our pieces in-house we are also able to offer a "re-dye" service on our cotton based items where we can re-dye the garment in the original colour if it has started to feel jaded or if its a light colour it can be re-dyed to an alternative colour.
Our Workshops
We run Workshops in our Margate and Rye stores covering a variety of skills and it's a great way to share ideas and meet new people. We passionately believe that clothes retain their value and beauty for years so long as they are carefully maintained and we have learnt and developed many tricks to repair and re invent garments that may show signs of wear. We wanted to share some of these almost forgotten skills and with anyone who was interested in learning them to use on their own clothes.
In addition we have adopted a zero waste approach to the materials we use and we are always looking for inventive ways to re use scraps such as for patchworks that can be used in garments and home furnishing, also toys and novelties which was the inspiration behind our patchwork and toy making classes to utilise scraps and discarded items to reinvent and create objects to treasure for the future. See more about our Workshops
