Nahui Ollin – Kept your candy wrappers?

Now I have to admit I’m not a one for the latest fashion trends and that it generally takes me a couple months to start understanding what the designers were trying to do in the first place. However, the first time I came face to face with one of Nahui Ollin’s purses, I was immediately sold to the concept of this small Mexican brand.

Started up in 2003 by the Abadi family, they decided to create designer bags and wallets made out not of fancy materials and expensive baubles but of candy wrappers! Rather than having them recycled, which would create additional pollution, they decided to use them as such, creating funky, desirable and more importantly, sustainable wallets and bags. Now that's eco-fashion!

The designers, the Olga Abadi’s, take on an ancient Mayan crafting technique involving turning hundreds of candy wrappers and soda labels into fully functional and funky wallets. All materials are collected from small, independent factories near where the Abadi family lives in Mexico, from the candy wrappers to the leather handles.
Each bag is hand-made from around 1500 individual wrappers and follows a process of folding, weaving and sewing each one into place – sometimes taking up to three days! Every product is produced in its own color scheme and pattern, insuring that each is one-of-a-kind.

Since its launch, the brand has received a lot of attention with stars including the likes of Jessica Alba who are also adopting the Nahui Ollin bags and showing them off.

So there you go! Ladies, if you want to be trendy, cool AND sustainable, you know what to do!
For more information on the brand and its products, you can check them out on their website.

Red Beans – 100% sustainable Dutch coffee

When one mentions coffee, most people think of exotic locations world-wide… Latin America, Asia perhaps… But have you ever heard of Dutch Coffee?

Since 1891, the Neutebom Roasting company has been active in Almelo, the Netherlands. This small company was then taken over in 2003 by Gilbert Willensen and Jan Willem with the vision of providing the Netherlands with high quality and sustainable coffee beans.

The beans are 100% biologically grown with no use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers and are hand-picked, thereby eliminating the impact made by machinery, their emissions and increasing the quality of the beans as only the ripe ones are selected.

The people producing the beans are also not left out and receive not only a fair trade premium but also a bio-premium… Good ethics wouldn’t you say?