RESTORING BALANCE IN THE WORLD

A SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE BRAND, DIFFERENT AND BOLD

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF BUSINESSES. THE ONES THAT EXPLOIT THE PRESENT AND THE ONES THAT BUILD THE FUTURE.

I founded Wide Open World, a sustainable lifestyle brand to build a future where balance with nature is restored. A future where sustainability means the next generation does not start with less. A future worth fighting for.

Our goal is simple: to craft beautiful garments from the finest natural fibres in the world whilst being truly sustainable. Garments that will make you feel good and that you’ll feel excited about for many years. Precious and unique pieces of clothing you will love.

Let’s face it, the world is in a mess and the fashion industry is broken. It is driving faster in the wrong direction. Synthetics are an environmental disaster, climate change is getting worse, and the exploitation of supposedly sustainable natural fibres is responsible for deforestation and biodiversity collapse.

At best, brands take fibres, make clothes and go plant trees elsewhere. How can creating damage in one place and planting in another be called sustainable? What if there was another way? What would a truly sustainable fashion brand look like?

At its core, the notion of sustainability implies there is a limit. Beyond it, balance is lost. A prerequisite for understanding this notion is having humility. Accepting that we are part of nature and depend on it. Humankind is part of the environment. Not the other way around. We need air, water, crops, bees, trees, a functioning climate, the protection of the ozone layer, and many other things we take for granted. With this in mind, if renewable resources are extracted at a rate higher than the rate at which they renew, we have a problem. Turning the Aral sea into a desert because of excessive cotton plantations, clearing forests for crops and cattle, and overfishing are a few examples. Another issue is the accumulation of chemicals into the environment, like plastics, pesticides, or ozone-depleting substances. At the regional and global scale, their accumulation threatens entire ecosystems and human health.

But we can live in harmony with nature. Indigenous people do. It doesn’t mean going back to the candle light. It means we need to reacquaint ourselves with the laws of nature and accept that we are not entitled to exploit the natural world as we wish. Not if we want to stay within safe sustainable limits.

This is why at the core of the Wide Open World business model is the notion of limit. A business cannot be sustainable if its products are harmful to life and accumulate in the environment. Think all plastics (and recycled) for example. A business cannot be sustainable if it doesn’t support keeping a balance between its requirement for land and the land required for nature to stay resilient. In the process of reacquainting ourselves with the natural world, it matters a great deal to know if biodiversity is striving, or orangutans are losing their homes, bee populations collapsing, marsupials disappearing, etc... Businesses need to be responsible for supporting the learning of where the safe limit is in each ecosystem they exploit, and abide by it. Because as global citizens, we should worry about the subsistence of spaceship earth before worrying about generating an extra unit of gross domestic product.

All natural fibres, including wool, and cotton (organic as well), are not exempt. They all start with land. And when you start with land, you have the responsibility to maintain balance with the environment.

Wide Open World goes straight to the source and partners with like-minded farmers and non-profit organisations committed to nature conservation. Together, we embark on initiatives to restore natural habitats, ensuring the thriving of biodiversity. Moreover, we are dedicated to enhancing carbon sequestration in the regions where we operate, thereby mitigating the contribution of greenhouse gases from our entire supply chain to global temperature rise. While this is a crucial step, the ultimate objective is the decarbonisation of all sectors of the economy, and we advocate for swift investments to facilitate this transition.

At the regional level, we make direct investments to increase and protect areas under strict conservation management for generations to come. We know the limits of how much we can produce while maintaining balance with the environment. We will never overstep that mark just to create more. While other brands seek volume, we seek harmony. 

Beautiful garments, unique luxurious fibres, directly sourced from farms where we create the future. Because we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Join us on the journey. Be bold and go change the world.

Olivier Maréchal