Mango Joining Regenerative Cotton Brigade With New Collection
Mango’s new eco-conscious ethos has inspired the Spanish retailer to add a new fiber to its material matrix.
For the first time in its nearly 40-year history, the Barcelona brand will introduce a capsule collection of products featuring regenerative cotton, available for purchase in the second half of next year. This sustainable step was made possible by teaming with Materra, a British-Indian company focused on designing scalable solutions to grow and source climate-resilient, transparent and equitable cotton, for a two-year collaboration.
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Additionally, the fast-fashion brand will leverage Materra’s digital platform to trace the journey of its cotton through the value chain. That mobile and web app, Co:Farm, syndicates implementation support and personal agronomy for farmers and generates primary Tier 4 impact data for brands. Mango said Co:Farm will provide “unprecedented levels” of transparency, allowing the retailer to oversee more than 300 data points covering environmental, social and economic elements like soil health, fertility, irrigation type and practices, nutrient management and sowing details, in real-time.
“As a global fashion company, we have a clear goal: to help create a fairer society and reduce the impact of the fashion industry on the environment,” Andrés Fernández, Mango’s sustainability and sourcing director, said. “This is why we have joined forces with key partners like Materra, who will help us move more quickly to ensure that 100 percent of the fibers we use are sustainable by 2030. The product is at the heart of Mango and sustainability has been part of our DNA for over 20 years. For this reason, we want to continue inspiring the world through collections that are responsible [to] our environment.”
Materra works directly with farmers in India to create custom cotton sourcing programs for fashion brands and textile mills to plug and play into existing supply chains. Its long-staple cotton program is designed and implemented to regenerate soils, ecosystems and farming communities through an outcomes-based approach.
“Our regenerative program—our ‘mitigation’ strategy—is built upon three core principles: restoring biodiversity, reducing resources usage and raising farmer livelihoods,” a representative for Materra said. “Regenerative is not a rigid, time-bound set of standards that ignores place, context or ecosystem. It’s a method of continuous improvement, making it easier for even the most skeptical farmers to commit to better practices for both themselves and their land, reducing the risk of a loss in yield and profits.”
The future-proof cotton company ran three consecutive cotton trials at its U.K. test site in Essex to create its original cotton growth recipe, with the pilot taking place on a 1.5-hectare farm in India’s Gujarat cotton-growing region. That farm grew extra-long staple cotton—historically known to be challenging to grow in large quantities in that area, considering its specific climate conditions. To combat this, Materra’s advanced R&D employs climate adaptation strategies to prevent reliance on arable land or consistent rainfall.
“Our foray into truly future-proof cotton started with our keen interest in hydroponics and its ability to be adapted across a variety of landscapes and crops,” Manterra’s representative said. “We believe hydroponic cultivation has the potential to serve a very purposeful role in certain geographies with land that is non-viable for traditional agriculture after decades of heavy soil degradation and overfarming.”
Materra works with three farming communities, covering about 1,000 smallholder farmers in Gujarat as well as Maharashtra. Next year, the program will expand to more farmers in new communities.
The commitment to work with companies such as Materra to employ more sustainable fibers is a “key strategic pillar” of Mango’s value proposal and integral to the company’s overall sustainability strategy, Sustainable Vision 2030, which was unveiled in December. One of that roadmap’s goals is to source 100 percent sustainable or recycled fibers within the next seven years. To achieve this, Mango has set interim targets to reach by 2025: 100 percent sustainably sourced cotton, 100 percent recycled polyester and all of its cellulose fibers traceable and from a controlled origin.
In line with this pillar, the Barcelona-based brand introduced its first denim collection in January, designed according to circularity criteria to simplify recycling at end of use by following the Ellen MacArthur Jeans Redesign guidelines to make the 15-piece women’s collection.
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