Elvis & Kresse’s handbags are made from upcycled fire hoses and luxury label offcuts. But the most essential component isn’t a material or technique, it’s the founders’ deep commitment to solving the global waste problem.
In 2005, Kresse Wesling, half of the team behind the U.K.-based upcycled bag label Elvis & Kresse, saw a pile of Duraline fire hoses on a fire station rooftop, where she says they were awaiting “an imminent and undignified death” in a landfill.
While they often have a longer life than the usual landfill suspects, say single-use plastic, fast-fashion, food waste and the like, fire hoses do have expiration dates. “Fire hoses are decommissioned for one of two reasons, they either reach the 25-year end of their health and safety life, or they are too damaged to repair,” Wesling told Ethos via email. She paints a picture of the hoses as active participants in one of the bravest and riskiest jobs. “[The hoses] either miraculously survive 25 years of active service, or they die trying,” she says. Fire hoses are crucial in saving property, forests, and countless lives from fires, which are increasing as a result of climate change — caused, in part, by the emissions produced by sending items, like fire hoses, to landfills.
There are no firefighters without fire hoses. And just like fallen firefighters are honored for their service, Elvis & Kresse say the tools that help firefighters do their jobs are also deserving of a more dignified send-off than being heaped into a landfill. How could something so important, so life-saving, be deemed “trash” to be simply thrown away?
For Wesling, a multi-award-winning environmental entrepreneur with a background in venture capital, and Elvis & Kresse co-founder James ‘Elvis’ Henrit, there had to be a better answer. The two weren’t entrepreneurs in search of an idea, “we didn’t set out to make luxury accessories,” Wesling says. Neither of the founders had a background that could have prepared them for the challenge. “We simply wanted to save the hose,” she says. “We couldn’t let these lustrous, durable, life-saving coils of deep red nitrile rubber go.”
In 2007, environmentalist Annie Leonard confronted the concept of “away” and our overconsumption problem in the short video, The Story of Stuff. “There is no such thing as away,” Leonard said in the video. “When we throw anything away it must go somewhere.” The video went viral, amassing millions of views (nearly 9 million at publish time), and evolved into a podcast, a book, a blog, and multiple video series. Despite Leonard’s best efforts though, 15 years later, we still have a massive “stuff” problem.
According to Plastic Oceans International, we’re producing more than 380 million tons of plastic every year — and nearly 50 percent of that is single-use. Fast fashion is also on the rise, expected to grow by more than nine percent a year through 2028. Since Leonard’s video debuted, the production of fast fashion garments has increased by more than 400 percent. Globally, more than 100 billion garments are produced annually and 92 million tonnes go to landfills — the equivalent of a garbage truck’s worth of clothes every second.
“We apparently have enough clothing to last the next six generations,” Wesling says, “and it is indeed a fact that the most environmentally friendly shoe or shirt or bag is always the one you already own.” The same is true for materials, she says. “We don’t need new ones… we need to cherish what we have.”
Upcycling is one of the biggest sustainability trends in fashion in recent years — ocean-bound plastic, one of the biggest environmental threats, is now being used in shoes, activewear, underwear, swimsuits, and more. Textile-to-textile recycling is on the rise, and last year, Coach launched its offcut and deadstock-focused spin-off Coachtopia, earning instant cred amongst Gen Z’s eco-conscious cohort. But there are improperly disposed of materials in every direction, and some offer more untapped potential than others.
So Wesling and Henrit figured out a way to save the fire hoses. In 2005, they started with a simple range of belts and slowly grew from there. In the nearly two decades since the launch of Elvis & Kresse, the label has rescued all of London’s decommissioned hoses and donated 50 percent of the profits to the Fire Fighters Charity. “These hoses are still working hard, long after their first life,” Wesling says. “Imagine that,” she says, “hoses that were supposed to die in landfill are helping injured firefighters.” It’s a textbook example of the power and potential of a circular economy.
Securing the materials is fairly straightforward, Wesling says. The label helps the firehouses by solving a waste problem and it reduces the material costs. Then, Wesling says, with any new material, “we ask ourselves 3 questions.” First, they assess whether or not the waste is a match for their skills, “are we the right people to save it?” The second question they ask: “Do we have a chance at solving this whole problem (we never want to dabble, we want a total solution).” And, finally, they ask “do we love it?” Wesling says they have to love it “because we are going to be spending an awful lot of time with it.”
The label doesn’t just use upcycled fire hoses, though. Taking the sustainability commitment to the extreme is as essential as reducing waste in the first place. “We collect waste tea sack paper from Clipper Tea, separate the layers, iron them flat, and then transform them into our own packaging or cut and print and fold them into our leaflets… all so that we can reuse paper, rather than choose a recycled option which would have a greater utility footprint,” she says.
The process is not without its challenges; many of the materials Elvis & Kresse collect are not yet the textiles they need to be. “We have invented processes, designed and built new machines, and are constantly troubleshooting and innovating,” Wesling says. “Maybe we should call it troublevating…”
Elvis & Kresse employ a team of skilled craftspeople with the same skills common in any luxury craft workshop, “and then you have to add a great big dollop of adaptability,” Wesling says to work with the unique materials. “We have always invented new techniques or adapted or built machines when the classic techniques or standard equipment didn’t work. Our mission is to rescue these materials, which means that everything we do has to resolve the tensions posed by them, and must also celebrate their unique history.”
This vision, Wesling says, means the team has to “genuinely interrogate every decision, no matter how small, with the same question: is this going to make the world better for other people’s grandchildren?” This, she says, is a great shorthand for achieving unselfish sustainability. “Destroying some of the planet might not be bad for your own grandchildren but when it is other people’s? Then you have to protect the whole thing,” she says. This ethos is also reflected in how the company operates and treats its employees.
A certified B Corp, Elvis & Kresse does not sub-contract, so the founders are involved in all steps of production. “[W]e absolutely know the who, where, and how of all of our product manufacturing,” Wesling says. The company is Living Wage certified, meaning the minimum wage for employees is a Living Wage and increases from there. “We do not have unpaid interns. We do not pay by the piece.” The Elvis & Kresse team are all fully employed with regular hours, holidays, “lovely working conditions,” and, Wesling says, “a very progressive set of policies, which started with the Ethical Trading Initiative base code.”
Since the label launched with upcycled hoses, it has expanded its use of materials, including offcuts from fellow British design label Burberry, in a partnership that started with the Burberry Foundation in 2013. “It has had a hugely positive impact on our ability to apprentices and offer work experience opportunities,” Wesling says. “Equally, we gained a real insight into how a larger luxury business functions, and how difficult it is to innovate and map out decarbonization at that scale.”
Talking with retailers helped. Wesling and Henrit spoke with salespeople at London’s best stores to better understand which bag shapes were perennial, “what did people really use, year in and year out.” That led to 11 designs that worked with the limitations of the materials. “Over the years we have only ever made improvements or added styles based on genuine customer feedback,” says Wesling. “The pieces we have reflect almost two decades of listening, adapting, and revising.”
Like other luxury designers, Elvis & Kresse eschew ‘trends’ and prefer timeless and functional designs created for durability and longevity. Their approach is not “managing” the materials they source, but rather, responding to each one’s uniqueness. Wesling says this means they can take small scraps and turn them into any size and shape. “A few years ago we created a tapestry for a hotel in Nashville, it was 10′ high and 40′ long, all from waste! Because we are weaving it means that you can play with color, shade, and patterns. Even the smallest amount of scrap can become a feature square for a one-of-a-kind piece.”
During the pandemic, Elvis & Kresse put this to the test on a project with Queen Mary University that also launched them into a new category. “We have always been distressed by litter,” Wesling says. “In the U.K. we litter around 32 million drink containers each year, which have a devastating impact on small mammals.” A study by Keep Britain Tidy showed that these containers are responsible for the deaths of about 4 million small mammals each year. “And because we just don’t ‘love’ these materials, we don’t recycle them either,” Wesling says. About 20 percent — 2 billion aluminum cans — don’t get recycled because they go in the wrong bin. They wind up in landfills instead.
“Our response to the aluminum was to design and build a solar-powered microforge (a pipette tool), ensure that it could be built for around $500, and then to open source it.” Wesling says they did this because this is a global problem, “and when you can fix it you should share the solution.” The label will offer its first aluminum pieces soon — all made from the cans they collected, washed, and forged themselves.
Wesling and Henrit are also driven by the concept of making Elvis & Kresse a truly “regenerative” business that extends beyond the materials in its bags. “We couldn’t think of any way to genuinely do this without taking on a degraded landscape ourselves, as part of the business, and bringing it back to abundance,” Wesling says. So they decided that the best thing to do was to buy a farm, “the worst farm we could find,” and then take a soil-first regenerative approach.
Wesling and Henrit have a knack for this; just like they have set the standard for upcycling materials, they’ve doubled the soil carbon at their New Barn farm in just three years. They reduced power consumption by 94.7 percent, too, Wesling says. It’s all the same approach they take to scrap materials — not managing, but responding to it. “We have built a natural waste treatment system, a near passive workshop, planted a regenerative vineyard, and 3000 trees,” she says. “So we will have wine, we will have fruit, and more importantly,” Wesling says, “we will have brought this farm back to biodiverse abundance.”
Learn more and shop the collection on the Elvis & Kresse website.
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