Dress Up Your Little Ones with Clothes from Love the World Today, a No Brainer for Scoring Conscious Baby Clothes that Don’t Skimp on Style

• Q. Tell us about yourself and your background.
• Love The World Today was started in October 2015 by my sister Dipti and I. Dipti comes from the corporate world and has around 13 years of experience as a marketing professional. I am an educator for preschoolers and a professional dancer.


• Q. How did LTWT come to be?
• The idea came to us when my niece was 3 years old. Dipti struggled to find good quality clothes that were made from natural fibers. We shopped for her when we travelled abroad but couldn’t find such clothing here. That same year I was working with kids and we were doing a theatre piece on trash management. Through that, we learnt about waste in the fashion industry. It was an eye-opener to see the kind of waste that is generated and it got me thinking about sustainability. Dipti had been wanting to start something on her own and we decided to work together.


• Q. Have you designed children’s clothes before this?
• This was the first time for us, and though we have a small team including a designer on board now, at the start we did everything ourselves. We were very clear about the kind of clothes we wanted to make and we wanted to run this professionally.

• Q. Are there any memories from your own childhood that you try to bring to your creations?
• Being sisters we have a lot of shared memories and recollections. Our very first collection was called Once Upon a Cotton Cloud. It was made n a blue colour palette, reminiscent of how we spent our childhood days playing the cloud gazing game. Another line that came from our childhood memories was sleepwear. Button-down shirts and pyjama sets are the norms now but we remember our father in a crisp white kurta-pyjama. That inspired the ‘I want to be like Grandpa’ kurta pyjama set.


• Q. What is your process and who designs the clothes?
• A lot of our work is done backwards. It’s much easier to make clothes sustainably when you work with available fabric instead of designing the clothes first and then sourcing fabric. We have worked with available swatches, and at the start, we had limited orders and then designed accordingly. Now our team of designers first outlines what they have in mind if it’s something with handwoven fabric, the colours. Then we finalise the colour palette and the fabric. As soon as the fabric comes in we go into production.
  
  It’s not just about how the garment looks but also about functionality. Kids love to run and play and even at functions or weddings they are always running around. We try to think of ways to make it comfortable for them, with details like pockets as children like to collect small things, surprise elements such as a little colour somewhere.
  
  It’s important to remember that handwoven fabrics come with a certain cost, hence clothes made from these fabrics should last and not be the kind that can be used just once or a few times. Children grow fast and outgrow clothes quickly, which is why our designs are made such that a dress eventually becomes a top for example.

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• Q. What are you trying to achieve?
• One reason to start LTWT was to figure out a way to make clothes sustainable. Sustainability in the fashion industry is very complex and layered. It starts right from the farming stage with the cultivation of organic fibers. What happens to clothes once people are done using them? Hence the idea of giving people the option to return garments once children outgrow them so we can donate or upcycle them. At the production level, there's a lot of scrap fabric which we upcycle into accessories. It's about how we are really raising our kids.


• Q. Tell us what makes clothes from LTWT special?
• The fact that they are really made with love. They are made for not just design and aesthetics but also to be sustainable. As an educator and a mother, we have given a lot of thought to what we are giving our kids at a very early age. If we raise them with clothes and other things that are sustainable they will consciously take that forward.


• Q. How are they different from other labels that offer customised or organic clothes for kids?
• When we started in 2015, there were only 3 or 4 such brands. Now the market has bloomed because there are a growing understanding and need for them. And there is space for everybody and for brands that promote responsible fashion. It’s good that there are more brands like us as more people will be educated about sustainability. What needs to happen next is for customers to get smarter and ask more questions about quality and how thighs they use are being made.

• Q.What are the challenges of running a brand like LTWT, especially with the vision you have?
• We don’t really have challenges in running the brand. We are very clear about what we are trying to do and that makes choices very simple. If I want to make clothes with handwoven fabric, I know it will cost more and am willing to pay for it. If you have a purpose then decisions become easy as it is a choice of one kind of material over another or certain manufacturing processes.
  
  If there are challenges then it would be educating people about conscious clothing. People have moved towards organic food but are still not paying attention to what they wear. So yes, educating people was a struggle, because unless you come from a textile background you can’t tell the difference between types of material. Few people read the label or pay attention to whether it’s cotton or a cotton blend, whether it is made in India or Bangladesh. To us, these things matter as we want to support local farmers and craftsmen.
  
  Finding the right partners for manufacturing, finding people with the same vision as us, took some time. At the start, quantities were a problem as our orders were small, but now we are working with the right set of people.

• Q. How do you ensure quality?
• We have identified certain partners and vendors. Once that is done and the right relationship established, that ensures quality. We also try to test the clothes by kids in the family to see if they will last- if a child is running around in them all day. We take a lot of care and attention at the design stage. We also advise parents through the care instructions. Our clothes are mostly made of cotton, handwoven fabrics and have to be cared for to ensure the clothes last.
  
  We have also had people who have used some of our clothes for 5 years, passed down from one child to the next. There will be some fading due to multiple washes over time.


• Your website mentions upcycling. Please tell us more about how that works.
• We tell parents that if their child has outgrown our clothes to send them back to us. We donate or upcycle according to the condition the clothes are in. Upcycling is very much a part of Indian culture and kids will often wear hand-me-downs. But we have to give credit to people to make clothes last as only three times have clothes come back to us! One parent from Hyderabad sent us a carton of her daughter’s old clothes and we used them to make a patchwork quilt for her.
  
  We are trying to eliminate waste at every level. Our accessories such as hair clips and hair ties are all made from scraps of fabric that are usually discarded during the process of making clothes. That’s why they are all very unique and no two pieces will be alike.