Ep. 25: Pure Sportswear’s mission to make greener sportswear Podcast

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Ep. 25: Pure Sportswear’s mission to make greener sportswear

In this episode of The WTiN Podcast, we talk to Duvan Couvée, co-founder and CEO of the sustainable activewear brand, Pure Sportswear.

Jessica Owen
Hello. My name is Jessica Owen, and I'm the Deputy digital editor at WTIN, and this is the WTIN podcast. For this series, I'll be talking to startups and other new brands across the textile and apparel industry, from sustainable swimsuits to jackets inspired by NASA technology. We talk about products the highs and lows of starting a business, and advice for others interested in entering this space. This week, I am joined by Duvan Couvée, who is the CEO and co founder of the sustainable activewear brand Pure Sportswear Duvan, talks about the company shirts made from recycled plastic bottles, how to establish the company in this sector and challenges regarding sustainability. Duvan, welcome to the WTIN podcast. Thank you very much for joining me today. So pure sportswear is a Dutch sportswear brand, and it was founded in 2016 Am I right? 

Duvan Couvée
Yeah, it started a little bit earlier, because the company is founded by Remco. Remco founded the company almost in half year earlier than we went online, because he thought a half year about, how am I gonna present it to the guys? What is the market strategy that we're gonna approach? And after half year, when he did his own research, he found out, okay, this opportunity worth so he presented to us, and that's basically 2016 when we said, okay, let's launch it, let's start it, and let's create something. Yeah.

Jessica Owen
So, so that's how it was founded then. So sustainability and this whole movement at the moment, that was the inspiration behind it, 

Duvan Couvée
yeah, part of it because Remco is one of my oldest childhood friends. We went basically to elementary school with each other, same with Thomas, and he was always like the the vegan type, the nature kind of type, and I was more like the businessman, and Thomas is more like the accountant and everything that occurs to money. So when he came up with the idea, it was, yeah, it could be anybody else approaching with this idea. So after he looked online, he tried to find out if there's any sportswear relating to my kind of lifestyle, and he couldn't find it in the way he thought it's supposed to be. So that's how it basically started, right?

Jessica Owen
So none of you have a background in textiles. Then, was it quite tricky getting into this? It was something completely new.

Duvan Couvée
Yeah, it was new, and we didn't have any background behind but the part is that we are been entrepreneurs from the age of 18, so we had quite some experience about how to approach a market, how to develop a product, how to gain your network of people, finding the right persons To approach for developing, basically your business. And if you have that kind of knowledge already, and you find the right people to do it with the product itself doesn't matter at the beginning. It will basically matter when you develop your business to a higher state. How do you say it higher stadium? How estate to know more about your product, because during the process, you learn also everything that you need to learn to develop your product,

Jessica Owen
right? Okay, so should we talk about your products then? So you currently offer sport shirts for both men and women. Do you want to just talk me through what they look like, the designs and sort of what potential sports they're used for. Are they sort of an all rounder type of garment?

Duvan Couvée
Yeah, we have two shirts for basically men and women. For the women, we have the color Lila and we have black for the men. We have called Green and also black, because want to have one different kind of color and one color that everybody basically could wear. Yeah, the design of the shirts is not that special, because we chose for a basic kind of shirt. Also, because at the beginning of launching, we had one vision, and that was, we're not going to produce a whole line of clothes and basically throw everything out what doesn't work. So we thought, let's do. It basic. Let's get a few colors and look if people wanted to buy the product itself. And that's how it basically started. So the people are basically the persons that decided if they want to have it, yes or no. And during the period of almost four year, we saw more increase of sales just because the people saw that we didn't have a totally new line of products. And one product sells really good, and the other one not. And we have to throw everything out what doesn't work environmentally. Thinking it was like, if one product sells, we add another product to it, so we have one color, then came second color, and that's how we approach the market. 

Jessica Owen
I think that's sensible, because not only for the environment and you sort of saving waste, I imagine it saves costs for you as well. 

Duvan Couvée
Yes, it's cost increasing, because we now only have to focus on what we sell, and not on what's not selling at the moment. 

Jessica Owen
So tell me about the materials. Then I think I read on your rep, your website, that they're made from 100% recycled polyester.

Duvan Couvée
That's correct. Yes.

Jessica Owen
So who makes this recycled polyester? Where? Where have you sourced it?

Duvan Couvée
We have a third party in America, that source basically the material, and creates from the material, also the product itself. That's one organization that does it for us. The reason why is that, if you're a startup and you're starting in a business that is to going sustainable, you don't have, or otherwise have to speak for myself, we didn't have the money to go from zero to the whole product produced by how it is right now and make sure that the process was profitable. So we found parties that already doing it and made it for us possible to produce a shirt and also sell it. So the thing that we looked at at the beginning, when we start with the with the idea, what kind of material are we going to use to produce a 100% sustainable support brand, if you're looking to bio textiles like bamboo, eclectic bio cotton, all that kind of stuff, then you will see that the CO two is still not lower than when you find out that recycled plastic is already there So you don't have to make it new. Your carbon footprint is lower than any kind of new produced material. So also, with in mind that there's an war, let's say a war against plastic, we still haven't find the solution to recycle the plastic back to the basic of Earth oil. And if we cannot find a solution for that, we have to find another solution, to give plastic that has been restored or been roamed around a second life, to make sure that we do the best that we can to use everything in the advantage of something that's already been there. So that was the reason that we chose for recycled plastic, and that the plastic is coming from the ocean, out of fishing nets and all that kind of stuff. That's only a plus site for us in the story for creating our sports brand. 

Jessica Owen
Do you know much about the process of taking this waste from the ocean and how it's then turned into the fiber that you use?

Duvan Couvée
The process is basically like this is that we have NGOs, we have certain organizations that collect the plastic. If it's from the ocean, it's still being collected at the shore, where we get only the PET bottles, like your coke bottles, your soda bottles. Let's that way, the soda bottles that can we use to create a certain kind of plastic? That plastic has been more to tiny, tiny plastic balls that we basically can use to get it on a high pressure into yarn, and from that moment, it's only a weaving process to make sure that the product, in this kind of case, the shirt itself, can breathe, and also let air through and let the water of your sweats and other kind of process just leave your body instead of it's getting hot. And,

Jessica Owen
yeah, that right? Well, this was one of my questions. Actually. I was going to ask you whether recycle polyester is actually as durable and it performs just as well as say sports were made from non sustainable materials. So it sounds like it definitely does.

Duvan Couvée
There is no difference between new material and recycled material, but we look to the quality of the shirt itself, and that is the that's the part that we did quite a lot of research for, because a lot of people, a lot of companies, said, Yeah, recycled plastic, recycled polyester, isn't that good as new plastic. The only problem that comes with that is that a, it is really big lie, and B, creating new plastic is more profitable than using recycled plastic because of the higher cost that it comes with. That's the only difference with recycled plastic and new plastic.

Jessica Owen
So did you say there that it's more expensive then than virgin polyester?

Duvan Couvée
Yes, okay, and you see it also in the cost itself. You can buy new polyester sports shirts for already three, four euros, if you look at the recycling process that we have with the recycled polyester, the basic shirts that you can buy are starting from an 15 till 16, sometimes 20 euros. So you see that there's a totally difference between the cost of making a new kind of polyester shirt in regarding to the recycled polyester shirts. And one of the reasons of that also is that there are not lot of people making recycled polyester, turning that in yarn to make out of that clothing or sportswear or anything else. So to make a profit out of that, you need to hire your cost to make the same amount of profit that you would do if you sell just new polyester shirts. 

Jessica Owen
So you've mentioned that you're using recycled polyester, but I also understand that you use sustainable yarns and dyes as well. And obviously this is something that maybe some companies don't always think about, that if you're making a sustainable garment, you want it to be completely sustainable. So can you tell me more about your yarns and dyes? 

Duvan Couvée
The yarn that we use is not that special, because the yarn is also 100% recycled polyester. So if you look to the basic of the shirt itself, the yarn, and also the weaving, the material is 100% recycled plastic. If we are looking at coloring the shirts, because that's one of the most chemical parts that we have in every kind of situation when you produce clothing wear, not only sportswear, it's the coloring that has the most chemicals and is the most violent for the environment. We chose for a type of coloring that if you wash it in your washing machine under 30 agree, yeah, then it doesn't break down within the water itself. If you use our sportswear, and you will wash it at like 60 degree, yeah, of course, with every kind of clothing wear sportswear, it will break down in your washing machine, and it will eventually end up in water systems we chose for coloring that also breaks down, that doesn't harm any environmental kind of how do you say that environmental situation? So if it comes in the water, it will break down, doesn't harm us or doesn't harm the environment doesn't harm any animals whatsoever. We also made it possible that when people buy our sports shirts, that they can send it back when it's finished, and we can basically circular the product back to the basic product of the plastic material, where we can make a new shirt from.

Jessica Owen
So do you send that back to the factory and that you made the shirt and they sort of, I don't know, shred it, break it down. Is that how it worked?

Duvan Couvée
No, for that, we have a different kind of party. Okay, they're based in Europe as well, and they built a machine, basically, and second generation machine already that if you put your plastic bottle within the machine itself, just to give it an A face, it will break it down till the material that it split the color session with the plastic itself. And the plastic is then turned back into the raw material where they can make new recycled plastic from. So it doesn't turn back to the earth oil where it's basically made from, but it's been brought back to make recycled plastic again, from. 

Jessica Owen
I also wanted to ask you about any finishes and technical properties, I think you mentioned earlier that you wanted to ensure that your tops were breathable and they performed just as well as any other sports top. So can you tell me about any sort of added features and technology that you use? 

Duvan Couvée
The features that we have is that the weaving process of the material gives the opportunity for our sportswear to breathe properly. And because it's a polyester kind of type, it's also directly a dry fit system, because any kind of sweat, water or anything else doesn't stay on your shirt. So with the weaving process and the fact it's polyester with a little bit of air, your shirt dries basically directly and doesn't hold any kind of smells of things on the shirt itself, especially if you walk with it for like a marathon or something like that, then it's getting quite heavy, of course, because that always happens, but the smell doesn't stay on your shirt, except if you don't wash it for like, a year, yeah, of course, then it's different, but that's for any kind of material,

Jessica Owen
right? Well, that's quite interesting, because obviously odor control is something that normal polyester anyway, that that's quite a big challenge, because obviously it sticks to these synthetic fibers, so that that's great.

Duvan Couvée
What happens also is that a lot of people that wear polyester kind of shirts, some people have get an allergic reaction to it, and some people not. The only thing that we did with it is that we gave a coating to make sure that nobody would have an effect of the polyester within the shirt itself. And also, the coating that we use is environmentally friendly, doesn't have any chemicals with it, so it's also good for the skin itself. That doesn't harm any kind of way your skin doing, what kind of sports you do. Okay,

Jessica Owen
so I also wanted to ask you about the company's journey so far. So obviously, you're still a relatively young company. So how difficult has it been to establish yourselves in this industry, and how well has the brand been received so far? Yeah,

Duvan Couvée
that's a really good question, because when we started, we were looking to similar kind of companies to give us a blueprint of how they did it, how we could basically approach it or do better. But the problem is, is that we are at the beginning of something new. We are at the beginning of the whole sustainability movement that's already been going on in the electricity sector, in the food sector, is now coming up within the clothing industry. But if you are looking to the subject sportswear, it isn't there. So what we had to do, we had to teach basically ourselves and learn by just doing and just make mistakes and also learn from the thing that we did good. How are we going to approach the market? So if you look online of how many people are looking for sustainable sportswear, it's a quite a small group of people. So you want to target those people. So Remco did online marketing is working for one of the biggest company in Holland as well. So that's our advantage, that we have to the market, that everything that we do is done from the inside, without any external parties. So we looked at the market. What are people looking for, if they're looking for sustainable sportswear, and where are they coming from? So we target those people to find out if they were interested in just our sportswear. And little by little, we find out that more people were getting a notice of who we are and what we are doing, and basically spread the word for us in the community of the sustainability and also in the sports world that look at pure sportswear, look at what they're doing right now, and keep in mind what are gonna do. And that's how we built, basically our brand. And during the way we did some interviews, one of the highlights. That we had was in november 2018 when we went with pure sportswear the prime minister of Holland on official business trade mission to Colombia to talk about sustainability and fits mobility to look, where can we improve our business with the locals over there, where sustainability is upcoming, but they have a lot of plastic, and they have already the manufacturers that turn plastic into yarn. So in what kind of way can we work together to increase the business here, but not only in Holland itself, but also to move forward in Europe, and hopefully later on, just further right. 

Jessica Owen
That sounds pretty exciting then. So how was that trip?

Duvan Couvée
Yeah, the trip was really amazing, just to be a part of something really big, to represent not only your business, but also be a part of a Dutch National Trade Commission to advise people in Colombia, where I personally come from, I've been adopted to Holland. So it was also for that kind of a special for me, but just to improve the way of life that we are having by just talking about sustainability and see what are the possibilities to do so, and how can we, as Holland, help them, but how can they help us as well, and all that, all that kind of connections and a process, and basically the people you meet, yeah, that's incredible. That's really incredible, and it brought us further for who we are, and that gave us also the opportunity to be who we are. Right now, 

Jessica Owen
I wanted to ask your opinion on the textile industry and sustainability as a whole. So it's something that's obviously gaining traction in the news, especially over the last year, and I wanted to ask you about your opinion on this, whether the textile industry can become fully circular, considering that there are a lot of big brands with established supply chains and a way of doing things. So do you think this is possible? Do you think we can turn things around? 

Duvan Couvée
To be fully honest with you, at the research that we did, there's one big problem that comes with it, that's profit. Everything that has to do with profit and lower the cost to make bigger profits always bring troubles with it. If we look at the bigger companies, what they do to make a lot of profit, they don't concern about what sustainability does for us, the only thing they do is, how much money can we make out of it? And they will demand it also by the manufacturer, and if they cannot deliver, they will find somebody else who will so what happens is that the manufacturer also tries to cut corners to make sure that the client is happy by what they do and what they have. So if we stop the sustainability nature where products come from, and also the how much profit that we make on one product, we give also the manufacturer, the possibility to look at, where do I get my product from? How sustainable is it? Is it? Can I sell it the way that it's get received? And also, I think that governments are quite a spill within this, because if we turn our eye away from what happens somewhere else, where the law is different from here, and we allow companies to sell products over here, knowing that products are being made under rare conditions and not the way that we want it. We have to find those companies, and we have to make sure that even if we are talking here about sustainability, the whole process from there also is sustainable. And in that kind of way, it will take quite a lot effort, also lot of bad information that we have to bring outside to inform everybody about what is going on, before everything is going to be circular, because if we don't get the information about the product and the process of creating a product, we will never know where it comes from, and we don't know where it comes from, we will always be stupid in the kind of way that it doesn't matter because we don't know it. So it will be okay. So

Jessica Owen
you're saying that the industry needs to be a lot more transparent then really? Yeah, definitely.

Duvan Couvée
You need to know, basically, like in Holland, if you buy a grocery product and you look at the product itself, they need to tell us which country it comes from. It. And if that's only a beginning from, where your product comes from? Yeah, you can decide for yourself. Do I want to buy this product? Yes or No. If they said that it comes from Bangladesh or India or Sri Lanka, yeah, and it comes from a big concern, like, I'm not gonna call any names or what's but the bigger concerns you have to think by yourself is this product made honestly, yes or no, and the bigger the concern, the cheaper the labor country where it comes from is basically already and sum up that there could be a possible indication or of not honest labor. So

Jessica Owen
moving on, a bit, I wanted to talk about your company and what you're going to be doing in future. You've got your men's and your women's sports stops at the moment, and you did say your company is not about producing whole range of clothes that might not sell and then they'd just be thrown away and discarded. But is there anything that your consumers would like? Would they maybe want a couple of options for maybe some bottoms or shorts? Yeah,

Duvan Couvée
yes, they are. And one of the things that we had a problem with was financing, financing the whole operation, because everything we did was bootstrapped, and all money that went into the business came out of our own pocket. So that was quite an operation itself. But if you want to grow and you want to scale up, you need to find some financial support. That's what we got. And also, with the publication of being pronounced and announced as by World finance as most sustainable sport brand of 2019, gave us credit. A lot of Yeah. How do you say that credits? Also by the financial institute, that I can now tell you that this year, we will launch a woman sports legging made out of recycled fishing net, in combination with Alice tan and also a sports Sports Shorts for gentlemen, made out of recycled plastic. And we're gonna do something new, and that will be halfway summer. We're gonna introduce a sports socks, performance socks made of 100% bamboo.

Jessica Owen
Oh, right, interesting.

Duvan Couvée
Yeah. So we're gonna move up, and that's only because people asked from us why it's only shirts. Why don't we have any other products and that when basically that much that we thought, okay, now we can make the stop further to be assured that if we introduce the product itself, it will sell also.

Jessica Owen
So looking at other sustainable materials, then that that's on your agenda,

Duvan Couvée
yeah, because in the end, pure sportswear won't also be part of a plastic free world. But just like I said earlier, if there is no other solution for the plastic to yarn around or just been useless stored, then it's a good opportunity for us to create our sportswear with it, but eventually we have to look also further to the future. What if plastic doesn't exist anymore? What kind of materials are we going to use to still have our sustainable sport brand? So we are going to look to bio textiles and the bamboo performance hooks are one of the first experiments that we're gonna have and going to introduce to the market,

Jessica Owen
I can imagine they'll be really soft and comfy to wear. Actually, they're not going to rub when you're running or something. Yeah. Okay, so I only have one more question for you, and that is, where would you like to see the company in, say, 10 years time? The dream

Duvan Couvée
that I have is that pure sportswear not only going to be known about the product that we produce, but more about the message that we try to send out. And a message that we try to send now is that it doesn't matter what are the people think of what you're doing, if you want to succeed in everything you do, if it's sustainability, or if it's in your sports performance or anything else, just make the best out of it. And if you put all the effort into it that you do, you will eventually succeed. And with that said, we hope that we will stay not only for 10 years, for 20 years, but for next generations to come. And just here to say that we've made a basis for further generations, right?

Jessica Owen
So I think that's all we have time for today. So thank you very much, Devon, for sharing your journey with me. It's been it's been really great to learn more about pure sport. Was worth

Duvan Couvée
Thank you very much for having us, and thank you for this, for this podcast.