Less is always more: a chat with Leonardo Gobbato on sustainability everything

Leonardo Gobbato is the co-founder of Pamuuc, a slow-fashion brand born in Barcelona from the minds of two entrepreneurs whose goal is making the fashion industry care about the planet, by leading by example.

Our mission is to provide durable essentials, meant to be used every day

The name Pamuuc comes from the Turkish word Pamuk – i.e. cotton- and it carries our desire of being natural and pure. Natural and pure is also the way in which we have started our sustainable fashion journey … Indeed, this brand is an actual reflection of our habits. We realized that we stopped buying from fast fashion brands and invested in fewer higher quality products that we really needed. 

The extra mile required to be more responsible only amounts to an extra 10 minutes of search, but it gives you SO much more

“Turning towards smaller, more niche and more sustainable brands has revealed to be a way to find much better than what is easily available” Leonardo explained. 

“We want to make people understand that owning few high quality products is a much better and wiser choice than owning tons of low quality products. That’s another reason why we created Pamuuc: to show people that clothing can be made sustainable. This is our biggest ambition”.

We’d like people to think more about what arises from over-consuming cheap clothing

The questions to ask are easy and burdening at the same time: How is it so cheap? Did they underpay the workers to make this item? Are there children involved? Am I contributing to forced labor and underpaid work?

“We wished more people understood that marketing and nice shops in fast fashion and conventional fashion hide a lot of problems behind. Thus, we created Pamuuc on three founding pillars: educating, making better products ethically and finding processes and new ways of making fashion more sustainable” 

Sustainable fashion is about ensuring that there’s no harm done in any step of the manufacturing process  

This means no unfair prices and processes that can lead to hurting fauna and flora, originating poverty and violence and producing non recyclable waste.

“Our next step will be officially certified organic as a brand. But we want to do it the right way: no secrets, no hiding where our raw materials come from and who is working behind the scenes for the garments you see in shops or on our website” he said

The biggest challenge for us has been finding like-minded people 

“Most people are pressured by bigger brands looking to produce crazy amounts of products and don’t want to shift towards a better tomorrow. Projects and companies that are certified organic, Vegan, Fairwear … are very few and finding them is very difficult” he explains

“Even by looking on GOTS website directly you may encounter certified organic companies asking for minimums of 20k pieces to start producing with them and are secret about most of their operations and quality of their yarn” he continues.

It’s just difficult to find the right people in this world. Luckily we are heading in the right direction as we have found the people we needed to start, here in Barcelona.We want a different business model to push people to buy what they NEED and not impulsively like fast fashion brands push you to.

To people approaching sustainable fashion I only have one thing to say: research, research, research. 

“Research what other brands do, how they do it, how fast fashion does it. Understand the problems of each type of production and get as much information as possible on the raw materials you want to use. Check if you can do it locally to avoid transportation around the world… Basically set up your idea right before launching anything. 

“The Story” in sustainability is the most important thing, the products are just a consequence of how well you prepared to start making them” he concludes

Pamuuc is one of the amazing brands on Renoon. Discover more about its values and products on their brand page, add it to your feed, and leave your Reaction!