Our Practices
Our goal is to set the standard for conscious creation and consumption - developing products that are well made and carefully considered. We believe that the people we work with and places we operate are treated with respect. We believe that caring about the details and making incremental improvements, sets us on path to becoming a company of the future.
Traceability
At Kotn, we believe that traceability - the knowledge of where a product came from, who made it, how, and when - shouldn’t be a luxury, but a standard.
Only 5% of the world’s top 200 fashion brands know the source of their raw materials, often having no visibility beyond the factory where their clothing is sewn. That means the farms, yarn mills, dye houses, and subcontractors that make up 80% of a product’s creation are invisible, and often suffer injustice as a result.
Instead, we start from the ground-up, working with the cotton farmers first, and then directly with every single step to ensure 100% traceability, and accountability, into everything we do.
View the full traceability feature
Quality of Life
We work with partners who believe in a commitment to their team members; not to be regarded as robots or cogs in a wheel, but as craftspeople with boundless potential.
Our partners have some of the best employee retention around, promoting from within, with equal opportunity for all. We rigorously question and regularly audit our partners to ensure the best factory environments for those who produce our products.
From Farm to Hanger
We work with natural fibres - raw, humble materials that can biodegrade at the end of their lifecycle. To do so, we work directly with the 6600 small holder farms, providing them with subsidies like fertilizer and agricultural consultants. These aids directly reduce the farmers’ operating costs by an average of 28% a season, while increasing their yields, and subsequently their revenues.
Our Schools
Since day one, we’ve donated a portion of all sales to fund literacy projects in the Nile Delta and Faiym, Egypt - where all the cotton for our collections is grown.
The children attending our second school, opened in 2018 in the village of Sakrana, are the first 37 people in that community to learn to read and write. Not only do these schools provide access to education, life skills, and opportunity, they create an exit from the cycle of poverty. Opening the door for one child opens the door for generations to come.
Through ongoing sales and special projects, to date, we’ve opened and funded twenty-five schools, with twenty-one schools in full operation.
Working with a local NGO, each purchase funds the build-out and operations of school infrastructure, salaries for teachers, laptops, books, supplies, science labs, water and electricity, furniture, technical training for facilitators, and the maintenance for the roads that link communities to our schools.
The State of Education
Accessibility: Primary schools are few and far between. This leads to over-crowded classrooms..
Lack of Transportation: Most rural children don’t have access to safe transportation and many end up dropping out.
Gender Gap: In rural Egypt, young girls are not given the same learning opportunities as boys, widening the gender gap. We’ve prioritized a 2:1 female to male student ratio in an effort to empower young girls to experience equal opportunity. As of today, our student ration stands at 3:1 female to male.
Duality: There’s a direct correlation between illiteracy and poverty.
The Nile Delta
We’ve always maintained a close tie to our roots, learning about our farmers’ struggles in the process. After many conversations with our partners, our biggest takeaway was a need for convenient access to education for their children.
40 million people live in the Nile Delta
25% of Egyptians are illiterate
70% of whom are women