A Galway couple has launched a new clothing brand ‘KARMA’ to help bring together a love of sports fashion, fitness, and wellbeing, while helping protect our planet.
KARMA provides a range of products with the brand’s mission being to offer a range of sports items that combine both sustainability using recycled and reusable material, as well as quality through the passion for sports.
Lisa Penski and her fiancé Antoine Jacques were developing the KARMA brand for over a year before launching the Autumn.
Speaking of how the idea of launching Karma began, Lisa said: “We talked about it and decided that if we were to start a business, we wanted to make a positive impact on the world around us. We didn’t really know it back then, but we had already found our motto ‘Do Good, Feel Good’.”
Antoine added: “We did some research about the current plastic situation to find an idea that could help fight the plastic crisis.
“We were surprised to realise the sheer volume of plastic single use drinking bottles consumed world-wide, and particularly in Ireland.
“So, one of our first ideas was to focus on an alternative to single use plastic bottles.”
Not only concerned with the issues around recycling plastic, Lisa and Antoine also see the significance of the impact the fashion industry is having on our planet: “We started looking into sports fashion and began to research the impact of fashion on the environment,” Lisa said.
“We quickly realised that the fashion industry is one of the major polluting industries in the world.”
After more research, Lisa and Antoine discovered “Repreve” fabric which is made from recycled plastic bottles.
“We dug a little deeper to see what kind of actions were already being taken in the industry surrounding counteracting pollution, reusability, reducing plastic waste and this is when we discovered Repreve and realised that this is the direction we wanted to take with our business,” added Lisa.
Antoine says that the couple’s experience in the fitness industry was a huge help in discovering what would benefit the customer as well as the environment:
“As Lisa and I are big sports fans we decided to push the concept a bit further by offering eco- friendly sportswear, starting with yoga pants.
“Repreve provide high quality and super soft yarn made of recycled plastic water bottle so it was a perfect match with the theme of our brand.”
Find out more about KARMA’s background, values and product range on:
https://karmaecostore.com
