Introducing BAM DNA

What’s in your clothes, and who made them? How were they made, and what’s their environmental impact? What can you do to minimise their impact even more? BAM DNA is here to help you get the scoop!

We believe that information is powerful, and we want to put that power in your hands. Our customers trust us to do right by people and the planet because it’s been part of BAM’s DNA from the get-go. But for the fashion industry as a whole to make a real change, we all need to be more transparent. We’re sharing the story behind every item and giving you the lowdown on how you can help shape its future.

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Bam Dna Logo Bamboo Clothing

Who made your clothes?

Now you can see who made your clothes at every stage of the process.

We carefully consider everything, from the crop or raw material your garment is made from, to every process that it goes through. Now you can see which raw material or fibre went into your product and why we chose it. You can see who made the fibres into yarn, then fabric, then finally who stitched your item of clothing.

We can share this with you because we’ve been mapping our supply chain for years. We still have a few gaps (it’s an ongoing process) but where we do, we’ll highlight them and tell you what we’re doing about it.

What can you do?

You’ve already made a better choice for the planet by choosing a lower impact product – hooray for you! We hope you’ll love and wear your BAM item for many years to come. In fact, one of the best things we can all do to reduce the impact of clothing, is to keep it in use for as long as possible.

Care

Wear more, wash less. That’s the biggest bit of advice we can give you. As a society we tend to wash our clothing too often and this can wear them out faster. Try hanging a t-shirt back up to air it out for a day or two and you’ll probably get at least one more wear out of it before needing to wash. Try spot cleaning or putting your jeans in the freezer for a few hours to freshen any odours.

To reduce the impact when you do wash, choose lower temperatures and line dry.
Check out the individual product page on our site to check for any special care instructions on your BAM item.

Millions of garments are discarded each year that could continue to be worn with a simple repair. If you don’t feel confident getting a needle and thread out yourself, there are plenty of tailoring and repair services out there with the skills to do all sorts of repairs. The bonus is the cost of keeping your all-time favourite jacket going for a few more years is likely to be a lot less than buying a new one!

BAM is currently investigating partnerships with repair services to help make it even easier for you – watch this space.

BAM is partnering with the resale platform Continue. Click here for more information.

Sharewear is a charity on a mission to eliminate clothing poverty and reduce clothing waste in the UK. When we met them in 2020, we were shocked to learn about the scale of clothing poverty in this country. It’s especially shocking given what we already knew about the scale of the clothing waste problem.

In 2022, we offered customers a postage-paid donation bag at checkout. The response was phenomenal leading to over 4000kgs of high-quality clothing being donated throughout the year.

The service is on pause now due to a lack of volunteer availability to receive and sort donations. If you’re interested in volunteering with Sharewear or sending a donation directly to them (they are based in Nottingham) please contact [email protected]

Eventually all clothing will get to a point where it can’t be worn anymore. At this point, we still want to ensure the materials can be recovered and recycled, ideally back into clothing again. Closing the loop on clothing means fewer virgin resources will be needed to produce clothing in the future.

BAM’s 73 Zero circular range has been designed to be recycled and is certified by the Circular Textiles Foundation. We offer a free take back scheme on these products so we can ensure they end up in the right place. Just check here to see if your product is included.

If your product is not yet included, please take it to a charity shop or community clothing bank so it can be disposed of responsibly.

 

How can we tell you so much about your clothing’s DNA?

We’ve been mapping our supply chain and working with Life Cycle Analysis experts Green Story to measure our impact for years. Our BAM Product DNA is powered by their new technology which is not only allowing us to make huge steps forward with our traceability and impact goals, its also enabling us to share what we know with you.

01 - Mapping our supply chain

We’ve been mapping our supply chain beyond our garment factories for many years – it’s an on-going challenge as things are always changing. Until now we’ve relied on declarations and trust in our suppliers to gather this information – asking our suppliers to tell us who their suppliers are. Green Story’s system now allows us to improve our traceability by collecting and verifying the information on an individual products level.

Green Story’s industry leading platform uses the most credible data sets, specific to the production locations in our own supply chain – so as a single example, they know the efficiency of the energy grids in the exact locations where our factories are, and they take that into account when measuring the energy required to make our clothes. They also use a globally recognised standard of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, ISO 14044, to calculate the impact of our products.

Green Story reviews greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy use and blue water consumption from cradle to gate (this means from the raw material through every stage up to and including cutting & sewing your clothes). They can also include primary data, so for example, if one of our suppliers invests in solar panels, we can see how that lowers our impact.

We can see exactly how much better our clothing is for the planet than conventional alternatives. But more importantly we can see where we can cut our impact further – this information drives further reductions.

Finally, we share this with you. Transparency is an essential part of reducing our impact because it lets you hold us to account and make sure we do exactly what we’ve said we would. And you can make informed choices about the clothes you wear – you can see the impact of every item of our clothing on our website.