TwoThirds Brings Sustainable Surfwear to U.S. Shores
Barcelona-based brand TwoThirds is committed to protecting the Earth’s oceans through sustainable practices. Following over a decade of successful growth in the European market, the B Corp-certified surf brand is bringing its eco-conscious ethos across the Atlantic and to the American market.
And it makes sense for the ocean-inspired company to come stateside—it’s, arguably, where the brand began.
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When founder and CEO Lutz Schwenke spent a year in Hawaii as a teenager, it “changed his life forever” regarding his relationship with the ocean. Schwenke went on to study politics and macroeconomics before starting a PhD at the United Nations via an investigation program in South America for the advancement of microcredits. He pivoted to founding a smoothie company for a bit but felt compelled to do something that “made more sense” and was relevant to his passions.
“I had been wearing Quicksilver and Billabong since I was 15, and somehow those brands were getting younger and I was getting older,” Schwenke told Sourcing Journal. “I just really had the feeling there weas a space in the market for a gentlemen’s surf brand; I had to adhere to do my own thing.”
Granted, Schwenke had “absolutely no idea” about the fashion industry and started “learning by doing.” Now, 14 years later, TwoThirds employs a “groundbreaking” pre-order system that eliminates overproduction while emphasizing a regional supply chain.
“We try to source everything from Europe; most of the yarns are Italian or French, some are Spanish. Most of the production processes are either in Portugal or Spain—we even have some factories within 25 kilometers of our headquarters,” Schwenke said. “The most important thing about the European production, for the time being, is quality. For us, there was always that vision to say okay, quality comes first. If we have to make a trade-off and choose a merino wool versus a recycled wool, sometimes we’ll go for the merino wool even though it’s not recycled because we just feel that we have to prioritize quality and longevity over saying that it’s recycled.”
For this reason, TwoThirds doesn’t place much priority on certifications. It’s also why the brand developed its pre-order system.
“We feel you have to go that step further [than certifications] and really look at things in the industry,” Schwenke said. In doing so, the “blue company” was made aware of luxury deadstock fabrics from high-end brands just “lying around” factories before eventually being tossed or even incinerated. “With the pre-order system, the idea, the vision was to eradicate the problem of excess stock in the industry.”
Schwenke continued that the benefit of the pre-order and deadstock luxury systems is that they are not only the “most sustainable thing there is” but also incredibly easy to communicate to the consumer.
“I mean, you just tell someone, ‘Hey, look, there’s all this fabric lying around that would have been thrown away and we just used it,’” he said. “We just don’t throw anything away.”
This pre-order system means that consumers order their items before they’ve been produced. TwoThirds then makes the items regionally, with the consumer receiving said items an average of about 10 days later. However, this system is dependent on the European supply chain that TwoThirds has created. Now that the brand has entered the U.S. market, that model should theoretically shift.
TwoThirds’ inaugural U.S. assortment is the Summer Collection: a curated capsule of apparel including vintage slips, airy linens, swimwear and relaxed silhouettes reminiscent of a “sun-drenched ’90s surf aesthetic,” the B Corp said. As with all of the brand’s garments, the collection utilizes responsible materials like deadstock fabric, recycled polyester, organic cotton and natural corozo buttons.
As it stands, all TwoThirds apparel is still made exclusively in Europe, with the new option of being shipped directly to the United States.
“For the moment, [the U.S. market] is online, but it’s very successful, and it’s gotten us to the point of saying maybe it’s time to also open to wholesale in the United States and take it to the next level,” Schwenke said, underlining that TwoThirds is working the market based on this successful online entry. “But we’re still [figuring out] the way that we want to do it.”
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