&OR COLLECTIVE
Founded 2020 Headquarters Montreal
Founders Kristen King, Katie Green, Rosa Halpern and Drew Green
Starting a fashion brand that balances style with environmental responsibility is no easy feat, especially with textiles accounting for an estimated 450 million kilograms of waste annually in Canada. Enter retail-industry veterans Kristen King, Katie Green, Rosa Halpern and Drew Green, the co-founders of &Or Collective, who previously worked for companies like Aldo and L’Oréal. They launched their women-led clothing brand last summer with a collection of zero-tolandfill garments that form the basis of a conscious capsule wardrobe.
The company uses organic cotton and sheep’s wool certified for ethical treatment and sustainability. But what really sets &Or apart is its highly technical production. “Our ‘secret sauce’ is our use of flatbed knitting, a solution to the fashion industry’s alarming waste problem,” says Katie Green. Flatbed-knitting machines are digitally programmed so that only the precise amount of yarn needed to create a particular garment is used.
Circular-knitting machines, which are more commonly used in mass garment production, work faster than flatbed ones but have limited design flexibility. Moreover, traditional cutand-sew manufacturing requires several panels of fabric and multiple machines—for shaping, cutting and sewing—to create a single piece of clothing. With &Or’s process, a readyto-wear garment can be made on a single machine, significantly reducing the amount of energy consumed and materials used. Green says their production methods reduce pre-consumer textile waste from an industry average of roughly 15 per cent to less than one per cent.
And that one per cent? &Or recycles it through a partnership with SuperCircle, a company that links consumer brands to specialized recyclers and also manages circularity for global retailers like Uniqlo and Reformation.
“Every step of the way has been about making thoughtful, deliberate choices,” Green says. By sustainably producing adaptable and highquality clothing, the company hopes customers will keep these staples in their wardrobes for years, not seasons. “We are set on redefining fast fashion by championing conscious consumption.”
&Or uses flatbed knitting, a technique that reduces pre-consumer textile waste from roughly 15 per cent to less than one per cent