Sustainable fashion: trendy sunglasses that look good and don’t ruin the Earth in their making
Ballo, a sunglasses maker in Cape Town, has spent the past eight years producing handmade sunglasses from materials such as wood, cork and advertising billboards.
It is part of this new wave sweeping the world of sustainable fashion and accessories brands that create products out of recycled materials and wood offcuts.
Alistair Barnes, founder and CEO of Ballo, which he created in 2013, grew up in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands; his father was an architect and his mother an artist. From a young age, he was often found drawing pictures of shoes, cars and whatever he laid eyes on.
“Even though I never really studied entrepreneurship, I always knew I wanted to have a brand,” he recalls.
After a brief stint in advertising, marketing and web design, it all changed when Barnes’s friend sent him a blog post of a company selling wooden sunglasses, that it claimed were made in the United States.
Barnes contacted the company and offered to distribute the brand locally.
However, 18 months after he started distributing the brand, he found out the sunglasses were in fact not made in the United States, but imported from China – a far cry from their marketing pitches.
It was then that Barnes took the plunge and embarked on his own sunglasses company. Ballo was born in 2013.
“I thought, let’s do this locally and authentically and really sustainably. So I found an engineer who helped me develop the product. We spent six months prototyping and developing the product … we found a way to create (the sunglasses) using wood offcuts and recycled paper laminated together.”
The business started small, with Barnes cycling down to the Old Biscuit Mill Market in Woodstock. When the Watershed opened in 2014 at the V&A Waterfront, Ballo extended its reach there as well.
Within the first year, Ballo had started exporting to Germany, in addition to selling to locals and tourists in Cape Town.
The Ballo team grew, with 14 people working for the company from 2014 to 2016.
Barnes expanded the material from which he made his frames while still keeping in line with the brand’s values of sustainability and recycling; he used offcuts from other fabric manufacturers, cork, African fabrics, as well as advertising billboards.
For every pair sold online, Ballo plants a tree to offset the environmental impact of shipping or transporting the sunglasses.
To this day, the brand says it has planted more than 1,000 trees; it has partnered with a company called Greenpop, which it pays every month to plant the number of trees needed.
Ballo then receives GPS co-ordinates of the trees, most of which can be found in reforestation projects along the Garden Route.
“Sustainability is a journey. It’s not about being perfect … it is about doing the best you can. So I’m just doing my best while trying to please the consumer,” he says.
Sustainability is a journey. It’s not about being perfect … it is about doing the best you can. So I’m just doing my best while trying to please the consumer