For even the most eco-friendly parent, children’s clothes present a challenge. The most sustainable approach would be to buy a few clothes and use them until they wear out. But it can feel hard to invest in high quality garments when kids regularly come home with clothes covered in stains and tears. Not to mention how quickly they can outgrow them. It’s no wonder that many kid’s brands churn out inexpensive clothes made of cheap materials, like polyester.
But Mini Rodini, a Swedish kid’s clothing brand, wants to persuade parents that it makes sense to cultivate sustainable habits in our children from the time they’re young. This means buying ethically-sourced clothes, taking care of them, and then passing them on to new owners. And importantly, doing this means not being too precious about the garments, and being okay with imperfections on clothes. “Kids are going to be kids,” says Cassandra Rhodin, Mini Rodini’s founder. “We should let them play. But well-made clothes should be able to handle some wear and tear.”
When you first come across Mini Rodini, it’s the brand’s cool aesthetic—rather than its sustainable sensibility—that stands out. Rhodin founded the brand in Stockholm in 2006, when she was a young mother. Within two years, she expanded into the rest of Europe and the United States, selling in small boutiques like Barney’s and Nordstrom. But over the last few years, the brand has been growing quickly, at a rate of 30% a year. By the end of this year, the United States is expected to be the brand’s biggest market.
Rhodin launched the brand as a young mother because she couldn’t find anything on the market that matched her tastes. Back then, much like today, kid’s clothes were covered in patterns of unicorns, fairies, trucks, and dinosaurs. As an artist and a fashion illustrator, Rhodin began sketching out kid’s clothes that were more inspired by streetwear and fashion. The current collection features old-school baseball jackets, quirky purses in the shape of dogs, onesies featuring boxing gloves. The brand quickly became a favorite among fashion-forward celebrities, like Rihanna, Beyonce, Gwen Stafani, and Angelina Jolie, whose kids regularly appeared in Mini Rodini when they were small.
But behind the rock-and-roll vibes, Rhodin was always passionate about the clothing’s impact on the environment. Two decades ago, when she was shopping for her kids, fast fashion dominated the market. These brands tended to use cheap, low quality materials, and the clothes were designed to be thrown out when a child had grown out of them. “I’m from Sweden and we’re very familiar with fast fashion here,” Rhodin says. (H&M, one of the pioneers of fast fashion, is a Swedish company.)
Rhodin didn’t have any experience with clothing manufacturing. But when she decided she wanted to launch a kids clothing line, she decided to learn as much as she could about the global supply chain. She began looking into various materials, like cotton, wool, and polyester. But when she began asking questions, she was horrified by what she found. Most cotton on the market, for instance, is soaked in toxic chemical pesticides that can irritate children’s skin. Wool sometimes came from farms where sheep are harmed. Polyester was largely derived from fossil fuels.
Rhodin began scouring the market for more sustainable fabrics. And today, the brand has a robust fiber sourcing policy, which it delineates in its annual sustainability report. All of its plant-based fibers are certified organic, while its animal fibers are from farms that are certified to protect the welfare of the animals. All of its synthetic fibers must be recycled. “We’ve made an exception for elastane,” Rhodin says. “Our factory doesn’t have the ability to incorporate recycled elastane, but we’re working on changing this now.”
But Rhodin isn’t just concerned about how the products are made. She’s also interested in what happens to them after the customer buys them. And for the past two decades, she’s been on a mission to change the way consumers interact with the clothes. For one thing, given the price of the clothing, she doesn’t expect consumers to over-consume. Leggings cost $40; t-shirts cost $35; sweatshirts cost $66; while puffer jackets cost $140. “Sustainable fabrics just cost more,” says Rhodin. “We don’t compete with the prices of fast fashion brands, but that’s actually a good thing, I think.”
Rhodin says Mini Rodini’s clothes are designed to last a long time. The clothes are very popular on second-hand websites like Kidizen and Poshmark, where they can retain a lot of value. (Leggings can sell for $25, while t-shirts can sell for $20.) Rhodin says the durability of the clothes comes down to the quality of the materials. Well-made cotton and wool can put up with a lot of wear and tear. Many parents hand clothes down from one child to the next. “Not all of our customers are well-off,” says Rhodin. “I wasn’t well-off when I founded the company, but you learn that buying a few things that last can actually be cheaper than buying a lot of cheap things that wear out.”
Rhodin wants children to feel comfortable wearing them to play and to eat messily. The brand’s website has a page offering advice about how to remove stains, and it also sells fun sew-on patches in fun graphics, like strawberries and space ships, so you can fix rips and tears while also adding a fun design.
“What if we just got comfortable with stains?” she asks. “What if we we just accepted them? And used them as a reminder that we had a fun day playing?”
To drive home this point, the brand sells a set of patches that are designed to look like splotches of food. There’s one red splotch called “tomato sauce” and a yellow one called “daal.” The point is that the clothes will get messy; why not treat the mess as a design element?
At Mini Rodini’s two stores in Stockholm and London, the brand has “patch parties” where customers are invited to come and bring ripped clothes. Everybody gathers to mend their worn out clothes, so they can last even longer, and they don’t need to buy something new. “It’s hard to change consumer behavior,” says Rhodin. “But if you make it fun, you’re more likely to succeed.”