Cork is an astounding material
It is a perspective changing material.
The old perspective people had about "producing" involved a sacrifice.
An animal has to die to get it's skin. A factory worker in India has to get chemical poisoning. A field of trees have to be cut down.
A sort of "you can't get something for nothing" perspective.
The more evolved perspective is that of the apple tree.
It much more aligned with how nature really works.
You, you big hairy ape, walk up to a tree and pluck its fruit from it. You get to eat it and get loads of lovely vitamins and sweet flavours.
Then in exchange, you "drop" it's seeds somewhere far away. And a cute little baby tree grows.
A winning team.
Those "scientist" guys call it symbiosis, which is their fancy way of saying teamwork.
Nature wants us to work with her. It's just more efficient, and teams are more fun.
We don't have to destroy her to "get what we want"
She actually is trying to give us what we want! You just have to know where to look!
And our ancestors, the clever clogs, actually knew where to look: the Cork Oak tree.
This tree grows in Portugal.
Now Portugal is hot.
Not "nice shaped booty hot"
...
well maybe
...
But "the sun is making the dead wood on the forest floor so dry that it might catch fire" hot
And because of this heat, that's actually what happens a lot - Forest fires.
This Cork Tree had to develop a smart way to protect itself from these fires.
So it trapped air and water inside of it's bark in a really interesting way that made it super fire resistant.
This worked.
The trees that had this bark were safe and so they thrived.
But what is interesting for us is that this extreme experiment conducted by Mother Nature actually had some very useful side effects.
Number one is that, since the tree got used to having it's bark burnt off, it got comfortable being naked.
This is really special because when you rip the bark off most trees they die.
You wouldn't do well without skin.
But the Cork Oak actually does better when you peel off all it's bark every decade or so.
Infact, when you harvest this bark off the Cork Tree's correctly, they live longer.
It must be like a snake shedding it's skin.
Now, what's even cooler is that this bark has some amazing properties, such as being easy to shape into almost anything, being super fire resistant, and even waterproof.
The ancients used it thousands of different ways, from Medieval monks using it as insulation, to Egyptians using it as fishing floats, and even Romans making shoes out of it.
Pre-modern Europeans very famously figured out that it was good at plugging wine bottles...
*Throws eyes up to heaven*
We do love our wine here in Europe...
But recently, as we've gotten better and turning it into cool things we have seen people like NASA use it to protect their rockets from extreme temperatures
when blasting into outer space.
Ehrm.. yeah... well we make it into... cool handbags...
...Others have used it in furniture, musical instruments, hockey balls, and much much more.
There are even people working on making bulletproof vests out of it.
Overall, this fabric is an incredible substance that we are really starting to adapt to the needs of modern society.
It's one of Nature's great gifts.
She's offering a hand and saying "let's work as a team".
We here at Grow From Nature have accepted that offer.
We are going to take Cork mainstream and distrupt the horribly unsustainable fashion industry...
...But on one condition...
...We're going to do it with style.
About Grow From Nature
Our story is quite simple.
Like most people in the last decade, we were exposed to the madness of modern industry by the internet.
And like most people, we learned to value the preciousness that is the earth.
We believe that the future is all about finding sustainable solutions to modern consumption habits.
We really believe that you can look good, have style, be a capitalist, and also cause minimum harm to the environment.
We believe this is achieved through harmonizing with the amazing gifts that Mother Nature has scattered all across the world.
For example, the best food doesn't come from factories, but actually grows out of the ground.
What amazed us was discovering that one of the greatest solutions to the wasteful modern fashion industry was growing in our back garden here in Portugal.
Cork fabric.
We couldn't believe it. It was the perfect example of natural harmony.
So we studied for years until we were ready to quit our jobs.
We built a network out of the scattered workshops around our local area.
That was hard work, but all along we kept the dream in mind: Building a fashion brand for the future. A brand which combined style and substance.
And our work paid off. We started to make sales. We opened up our shop in Portugal. Tourists would wander in and rave about the amazing products and their astounding stories.
We started our online store on Etsy.
Now we are ready to take on the world. Now we are ready to move to the next level. Now we are ready to build a community focused on finding solutions to environmental problems and adding substance to style.
Thank you for being part of our community!
