Product with a Story – The Do Good Yoga Mat Bag
By Svintha Bootsma from Common Texture
The idea for our Do Good Yoga Mat Bag originated from the time us three co-founders were all living in India. You can’t live in India without trying out some form of yoga right? So many kinds of yoga classes, so many ashrams, retreats, workshops and master classes to choose from. It was inevitable that one of the Common Texture team would be bitten by the bug.
The second thing you can’t avoid whilst residing in India, is textiles. Besides the regular stores we visited stalls outside of the commercial areas. Some shops were neatly constructed with stacks of folded fabric from the floor to the ceiling and others just have it in piles on the floor for rummaging. We were astounded by all the beautiful high quality fabric that could be found. After a few visits to those fabric areas, we started asking questions about where this fabric came from. We were told they were mostly remnant fabric off cuts from the large textile factories in South India.
Surplus fabric waste from garment factories producing for big multinationals. Leftovers and surplus fabric end up in landfills or at best in these local neighbourhoods where fabric sellers try to make a living reselling it. India is one of the world’s production front runners in the textile industry and they are left with a by-product of this mass production which is the enormous amount of fabric waste.
We had decided to produce yoga mat bags as our first collection and we kept coming around to the fact that we didn’t want to add to this fabric waste by producing our own run of textiles. We set out to produce a yoga mat bag by combining perfectly fine textile, destined to be waste and polluting the earth, with our yoga lifestyle of compassion and awareness towards the planet and use what is already out there with a zero waste attitude.
It led to us developing the coolest yoga mat bag we could dream up – the Do Good Yoga Mat Bag. We made some good connections and found really great quality cotton canvas fabrics in many shades and stripes that we could mix and match together. This involved hours of hand selecting, sorting and rummaging through piles of textiles and trimmings, ensuring only the finest quality fabrics were being used.
The design of our Do Good Yoga Mat Bag is minimalist, staying close to the quietness and a serene yoga practice. Combining soothing colors and stripes in 100% cotton canvas using upcycled fabrics and trimmings in an attempt to reduce waste and turning something negative into a positive.
The result is a yoga mat bag for daily practice with a strap for over the shoulder or crossbody wear and deep side pockets for wallet, keys and phone. It makes it easy to carry your mat to class and store it at home rolled up, keeping your mat in the right shape, clean and protected.
Our yoga mat carriers are truly handcrafted one piece at a time, ethically produced and most importantly earth friendly, with each design a limited edition.
To see more of the collection sold by Seeds of Wonder click here.
Common Texture set out to produce a yoga mat bag using perfectly fine textile, destined to be waste and polluting the earth, using what was already out there, aligned with their vision of zero waste.
