Kat & Phoebe from ettitude: Clean bamboo, a fabric innovation for a more sustainable, regenerative future

Clean bamboo, a fabric innovation for a more sustainable, regenerative future

In our mini-podcast series, "I Built a Company That Makes a Difference," we speak to inspiring small business owners to learn how and why they started their own businesses as well as the lessons they learned along the way. 

This week, we sat down with Kat Dey and Phoebe Yu, the co-founders of fabric innovation and lifestyle brand Ettitude. Ettitude makes eco-friendly home essentials, including bamboo sheets, duvets, and bath accessories that are 100% organic, plant-based, vegan and cruelty-free. 

Phoebe's mission is to "dramatically reduce the negative environmental impact of textiles by replacing cotton, viscose, rayon and polyester with better alternatives." They're also a B-corp and certified carbon-neutral company—not too shabby for an eco-friendly business venture! 

Source: www.ettitude.com

A successful business partnership spanning an ocean 

First off, we wanted to know how Phoebe and Kat got together to co-found Ettitude. Living in Australia and having already founded, scaled, and sold a direct-to-consumer company, Phoebe approached Kat online to be her business partner. 

The two were a great match, sharing expertise in textiles and a desire to promote environmentalism in the fabric industry. Although Phoebe was in the United States, they wanted Ettitude to be a global company, so their geographical distance didn't deter them from launching the company. 

Small business owners and eco-friendly innovators 

Phoebe and Kat began marketing Ettitude's patented bamboo textile, which they call Clean Bamboo. Familiar with how wasteful cotton production is, they saw an opportunity to reduce environmental impact using their proprietary fabric greatly. 

"We were able to create this very special innovative textile. We call it Clean Bamboo. It doesn't use any harmful chemicals. 

It is a closed-loop manufacturing process in that we will recycle the water in it and also recycle the organic solution we use to dissolve the bamboo to get the fiber out. 

So it uses 200 times less water than conventional cotton and also saves 38% of carbon emissions." 

Successes and failures running their own business 

We asked the pair what their biggest success and biggest failure have been as business owners. After all, running one's own business doesn't happen without its fair share of bumps and bruises! 

They were quick to mention achieving a patent for their textile and B Corp certification as being two of their largest wins so far. As for failures, they see obstacles and problems as learning opportunities. According to Phoebe, running a successful business means using setbacks as a chance to create a better product for consumers. 

"Certainly, there are a lot of mistakes along the journey, but none of the failures have been fatal yet. So I think we usually don't call it failure. We call it learning or even a test. Like, for example, when we first launched the fabric, it was not as good as we thought. 

We kind of constantly even keep improving... Things like getting the yarn to be strong but still very fine. No peeling and being able to dye it very vibrant colors... So that's a lot of, like, you just have to iterate the test and see how it goes." 

Furthering sustainability as a business owner 

We like to ask our guests, if they could get 85% of the world to adopt a single behavior to further environmental sustainability, what would it be? This time was no different, and we appreciated Phoebe and Kat's answers. 

For Kat, the answer was choosing to eat less red meat: "I think [eating less red meat] could help the world quite a lot in terms of reaching our climate targets—and it's an easy one. You don't have to become a vegetarian or a vegan or a pescatarian. You don't have to define yourself as anything. You can just be conscious about it and choose maybe to swap one meal a week to start." 

For Phoebe, she focused on our culture's excessive use of plastic: "Use less plastic, especially single-use plastic... I kind of carry my keep cup around everywhere. So I always ask people if they're okay with that for filling my coffee. I just use my own cups instead of even a paper cup." 

Both are simple changes, yet ones that can make a dramatic difference given enough support from the public! 

We applaud Phoebe and Kat's attitude towards sustainability and their development of business models that put concern for the environment above financial gain. Business ownership is a complex task, so seeing Ettitude thrive while promoting green causes is great. 

To hear our complete conversation with Isabelle and discussions with other entrepreneurs making a change in a big way, check out the episode on our website. 

🌐 Visit www.ettitude.com
👋 Connect with the co-founder Kat here