Most music lovers have at least a few old tour t-shirts in the closet, but for artist merchandising company Bravado, the backstock was much bigger.
At its warehouse facility in Nashville, Bravado was storing approximately 400,000 obsolete and unsold tour t-shirts and other unused merch. Now, instead of just collecting dust and taking up space, these unused products are being transformed into yarn that will be used to make new artist merchandise.
The t-shirts and other items are currently on a cargo ship to Tangiers, Morocco, where they’ll be upcycled at Hallotex, a globally known textile manufacturer focused on sustainability and fair work conditions. Over six weeks, the old merch items will be broken down and spun into new yarn, which will then be used to make approximately 280,000 new 100% recycled cotton t-shirt blanks (shirts without any designs or writing on them) to be utilized by Bravado artists this fall.
Bravado, which is focused on merchandising and branding, is a division of Universal Music Group (UMG). Artists who’ve previously collaborated with Bravado include Ariana Grande, BLACKPINK, Bon Jovi, Nicki Minaj and Billie Eilish, who, along with her mother Maggie Baird, has become a music industry sustainability leader.
“When I came into Bravado in 2021, it was quickly apparent to me that several of our most important artist clients wanted to include more sustainable practices in their merchandise offerings,” Bravado president Matt Young said in a statement. “Billie Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, was at the forefront of challenging us to develop products and practices that were less harmful to the planet. In a way, this scalable upcycling effort is a credit to her passion — she and Billie show the power that one artist has to really make a difference. What started with Billie now includes dozens of artists, an upcycling program at scale and a passionate desire to continue our progress in this area.”
“To our knowledge, this is the most ambitious upcycling project ever undertaken in the artist merchandise space,” added Dylan Siegler, UMG’s head of sustainability. “This is just one important component that Bravado and other UMG companies are undertaking to minimize our impact on the planet.”
Bravado’s other recent forays into upcycled and recycled merch include collaborations with Eilish’s collab with textile recycler and remade apparel producer Suay, Social Distortion’s Lost Love and The Rolling Stones’ Fashion-Enter, which all involved creating new items from old stock. Bravado reports that Innovations in t-shirt blank manufacturing driven by environmentally responsible artists like Eilish, her brother Finneas and Lorde, were applied to dozens of other Bravado clients including Camila Cabello, The Weeknd and Karol G.
Additionally, this past April, in honor of Earth Month, nearly 50 Bravado artists offered some kind of upcycled or sustainable merch items in their online stores, including legacy artists like The Rolling Stones, KISS, Bob Marley andThe Beach Boys.
From labels to events to merch and beyond, music companies making sustainability efforts continuously report that such sustainable initiatives are in high demand among consumers, with fans rewarding such endeavors by gravitating to events and artists who are making an effort to be environmentally cleaner and greener.