Why This Dominican Swimwear Brand Keeps Its Workshop In The Bush, Two Degrees Cooler Than The City
Why does this Dominican sustainable swimwear brand keep its workshop in the bush? Because the patch of land Freedom Ecowear preserves runs about two degrees cooler than the surrounding area, the workers breathe clean air instead of microplastic, and you can hear the birds and bees over the machines. Standing in that open air atelier with Vivi Rufino and David, the couple who built the place together, Vivi explains why they refused to move it to the city.
Inside Freedom Ecowear's Sustainable Swimwear Workshop In The Dominican Bush
The first thing you notice at Freedom Ecowear’s workshop is that you can hear it being made. Birds, bees, the breeze moving through the trees, all of it carrying over the hum of the sewing machines, because the whole atelier sits open to the air in the Dominican bush.
Vivi designs the brand here with her partner David, on a patch of land in La Vega that they have left deliberately wild. When she told me the temperature on this plot runs lower than everything around it, I assumed she meant it loosely. She did not.
Two Degrees Cooler On Purpose, A Sustainable Workshop In Nature
She measures it. “The piece of land where we’re at, it’s very different than the surroundings,” Vivi said, standing in the open air space. “Also the temperature is lower than the surroundings always, there’s like two degrees lower, because of the amount of plants we have around. We preserve them. We don’t cut them just because we don’t want them around.”
They Told Her To Move The Swimwear Workshop To The City, She Said No
The advice came again and again, and she ignored all of it. “We’ve been told several times you need to move your brand to the city to make it work,” Vivi said. “We don’t listen to them, because we have the internet and we’ve been able to make it work here.”
She has a personal reason for the open air design too. “I used to work in my father’s company in entrepreneurship, the office, the building, the box type of thing,” she said. “Not my favorite. That’s why we decided to make this more open, natural, with more air and light.” It is home to the whole operation under one open roof, the cutting, the sewing, the ironing, the packing. A rural Dominican Republic workshop quietly out shipping the city brands that pitied it, the full reach of which has its own story.
Clean Air The Ethical Garment Workers Can Breathe
This is the part that moved me most, because it is about the people, not the aesthetic. In a synthetic factory, the workers breathe what the fabric sheds all day. Here they do not. We were watching dust drift through a shaft of light when Vivi caught herself on it. “When I was little, I used to love seeing the dust like that, by the light, because it had this magical feeling, like fairy dust,” she said. “But then, as I grew older and knew all the possible things it could be, especially working in this industry, it wouldn’t be so magical to have just microplastic.”
Sustainability Is Also The Air In The Room Where Your Swimwear Is Made
We almost never ask where a garment is physically made, what the room is like, what the people in it breathe. Freedom Ecowear makes that question impossible to dodge, because the answer is so visibly different: a cooler patch of preserved forest where the air is clean enough to be part of the product.
It widens the lens. Sustainability is not only the fibre and the dye, it is the lungs of the person at the machine and the trees left standing around them. When a brand preserves its own land and you can hear the insects on the recording, that is not branding, it is the proof. It takes very little to notice who actually makes our clothes, and under what sky. Our sustainable clothing guide carries the wider picture.
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