Founded in Carlsbad, California in 1993, the lifestyle clothing brand Prana is trying to reach 100% plastic-free packaging. Although Prana hasn’t set a final date for that target, the company is getting close, says director of sustainability Rachel Lincoln.
Lincoln, who recently marked a decade with the company, explained that a 2010 photo from Prana’s store in Boulder, Colorado, was the catalyst.
“They had a daily shipment of product to put on the floor and, in unpacking it, there was a jumbo pile of plastic,” she said. “They compressed it as much as they could, but it almost touched the ceiling and was at least a doorway wide.”
The employees pointed out that those plastic bags, known as polybags, weren’t sustainable. Prana’s leadership agreed and established an internal team with members from across the company that walked the warehouse floors and came up with solutions. The result was a process where each product gets folded into a “sushi roll” tied with recyclable raffia.
Lincoln shares how Prana is eliminating plastic packaging, and what Columbia Sportswear Company’s acquisition of the company for $190 million in 2014 has meant for their novel approach.
What’s the point of a polybag in the apparel industry?
A polybag is a shipping method to ensure that a garment stays clean and in the same condition as it left the factory because most product goes by boat from Asia to America. That can take 30 to 60 days.
Then a lot of the larger distribution centers (DCs) have automated systems that rely on a polybag’s properties to smoothly transition from the box that it came in to the packaging area.
How did Prana develop an alternative?
We felt that we would work around cleanliness if it became an issue, rather than assuming that it would become one. We shipped product back and forth and tested product from Asia. There isn’t a cleanliness issue in our DC.
We created a how-to roll guide for each product type, whether it’s a swimsuit or a jacket or a pair of pants. Our QA team works with our product team to ensure that every new product has a roll method. Then we train our facilities on how to roll or fold our product for the most effective packaging option. They roll the product and tie it with raffia instead of putting it into a plastic bag and taping it shut.
Now we put a master polybag carton in each box rather than 52 individual bags. We reuse that one large bag as many times as we can. If a product is white, it will probably still get a polybag. A dark rinse wash denim might also get a bag so it doesn’t transfer color to other garments.
Where is Prana now in relation to your packaging goal?
Since 2010, we’ve avoided using about 13 million polybags. For Spring ’20, the season we’re selling and shipping, about 76% of our total collection is polybag-free.
We’re working on a couple pilots to get closer to 100%, and we’re looking at alternatives to a traditional polybag for products that still need to be packaged differently.
What has been the biggest challenge?
When we started, our distribution center was right outside our office doors. As we’ve grown, we merged our plastic-free packaging with a major DC that’s used to automation.
We were able to create an area within the DC that allows for our packaging to go through it. Having a parent company that believed in the way we’d been doing things was important. We’ve found that the speed is not inhibited for either the roll-packing portion at the factory or the shipping method in the US. It’s just as efficient.
Why don’t all apparel companies use your process?
People are concerned about product being unclean based on their distribution centers. Maybe they got pushback from a vendor saying, ‘This is going to cost more, we can’t do it.’
The apparel industry has been around for so many years that to challenge the assumption that something will cost more isn’t the status quo. Everybody’s moving as fast as they can to get product on the floor. But we like to think that we do things with more of a holistic view.
Are you going to share your process publicly?
We want to make sure that it holds enough value for everybody before we publish it, but we are open when people come to us. I do talk individually with plenty of brands. REI wanted to pilot this and we gave them contact information for our raffia tie supplier. Now we leverage that for buying in bulk.
What advice do you have for fellow industry leaders?
The size of the apparel industry can be intimidating, but if you want to be leader and do something different, you actually have to do that. Sometimes it’s scary. Sometimes your first three ideas might not work, but you have to be okay with that and keep trying. The failures are just as important as the wins. Eventually you’ll come to something that works.
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