DOEN Foundation supports MARTAN: “Upcycled fashion is also scalable”

MARTAN is a Dutch fashion brand which combines fashion, film and entertainment into amazing concepts. It is all about exploring where art and circularity can meet in fashion in a natural way. We spoke to MARTAN’s Eugenie Mulier.

“I used to work for large European fashion companies where I saw the amount of waste at first hand. That’ s were the seeds were planted for my desire to change this,” says Eugenie Mulier, head of sustainability at MARTAN. ” So I started upcycling hotel linen. By teaming up with creator Diek Pothoven and designer Douwe de Boer in the context of MARTAN, we are getting even more impact.”

MARTAN has just launched its latest, fully upcycled collection, which consists of 60% upcycled materials and 40% residual materials from the fashion industry. “Basically, residue is new, unused material that often ends up as waste in other scenarios,” Eugenie explains.

MARTAN (formerly Archivist Studio) is one out of five winners of the DOEN Textile Call 2022. According to DOEN Foundation, MARTAN’s business model accelerates the transition to a circular and fair textile industry. That’s why MARTAN is receiving 50,000 euros to help the company grow. “We are going to use the funds from DOEN to develop the new collection and for marketing purposes,” says Eugenie.

The DOEN support also has other positive side effects: “I get approached a lot more by interesting parties and we get media attention because of it. It’s also great that we’re really in a kind of network now. We are referred to in one breath with companies we have always looked up to,” says Eugenie.

“DOEN brings us into contact with each other and with other relevant parties. The advantage is that we are all quite small companies and can now exchange information with each other. That creates all kinds of new opportunities for cooperation,” she adds.

“In five years’ time, we want to be the market leader in upcycled fashion and have a certain turnover to show that it is possible to scale up with upcycled fashion,” Eugenie emphasised. “Frontrunners are desperately needed in the fashion industry to show that it is lucrative to take this route.”

“For accessories, there are some brands who are currently successfully scaling. For an entire clothing line, it is more difficult because you work with relatively small textile panels on which you have to place patterns in order to make something out of it. Because the panels are small, you automatically make a smaller fashion item out of them. This makes it difficult to upcycle individual pieces of clothing. Unless you find larger surfaces of fabric, such as sheets and tablecloths,” she explains.

MARTAN had the honour to open Amsterdam Fashion Week on Wednesday 31 August at the Grand Hotel Amrâth. Here the company showed its first fully upcycled ready to wear collection, made of rejected hotel linen and tablecloths from the restaurant industry and visually inspired by the architecture of the world famous hotel.

MARTAN won EUR 50,0000 in the DOEN Textile Call 2022. ImpactCity and Stichting DOEN have a longstanding and successful partnership. We both promote entrepreneurship and innovations for a better world. ImpactCity creates an optimum ecosystem that facilitates entrepreneurs to start and scale up their businesses. DOEN Foundation supports sustainable and social start-ups by means of subsidies, loans and by investing. With this partnership we work together to strengthen the ecosystem for impact entrepreneurs with a special focus on improving access to capital.