Slow Fashion Label Kowtow Is Turning Its Old Clothes Into Soil Enhancer

When I visited Kowtow’s head office in Wellington last year, there was a science project growing out of the office kitchen. In a corner, next to where staff break for lunch, were tomato plants. On the surface of the soil was mulch – mulch made from discarded Kowtow garments. 

Kowtow had been playing around with turning its fully plastic-free garments into biochar. Simply put, biochar is a carbon-rich form of charcoal that’s created by slowly baking organic material, which can then be used as a soil enhancement. A year on, and this science experiment has ramped up – more of that in a moment.

It’s been 20 years since Kowtow launched, and last year, it wanted to find new ways to reward customer loyalty and heighten its sustainability commitments. In came The Collective, its revamped customer rewards program. The scheme means customers earn points not just for purchases, but also for sending garments for repair and resales. “We’re rewarding people for doing good,” says Kowtow’s founder, Gosia Piatek.

As part of the new initiative, Kowtow has launched Relove, the brand’s own second-hand platform. Kowtow purchases customers’ previously worn garments and resells them online and in-store. Though currently only available in New Zealand (with plans to soon expand to Australia), Relove has proved popular. “We’ve hardly advertised it and it’s just flying in and out the door at speed,” Piatek says. “We put a rail down in the store and it’s gone within days.”

To handle the volume of clothing, Kowtow’s office cloakroom has been converted into a makeshift Relove sorting room. Mismatched, colourful garments from past seasons sit on the racks and shelves, labelled with condition reports. “It’s such a celebration of all the unique prints and checks and colours that are bespoke to us because we work from raw cotton,” Piatek says. “Ideally, we would see [the] same garment come back multiple times.”

A dedication to keeping items in circulation is embedded in Kowtow’s DNA. Since 2018, the label has offered free repairs and has repaired more than 1500 garments. In New Zealand, they’re done by in-house garment technician Ruby Chappell. For pieces in Australia, Collingwood-based social enterprise The Social Studio takes care of them.

What happens to the garments that can’t be resold or mended? When garments are truly at the end of their life, they are candidates to be turned into biochar. All pieces are made from 100 per cent Fairtrade organic cotton, so their mono-fibre make-up is far easier to break down. With the help of community environmental partners, Kowtow has been able to transform 160 kilograms of textile waste into 40 kilograms of biochar so far.

“Garments are sourced through our Regenerate program, where we take back well-worn Kowtow pieces,” Piatek explains. “These garments we take back to convert into biochar are pieces that have already lived on through [repair and resale] services and are full of jam stains, which can no longer be used.” 

It’s still early days for Kowtow’s biochar program. Currently, its biochar is being used to nurture local olive groves in Wellington. Its future looks bright, with regeneration at the forefront of Kowtow’s circularity vision. 

The community-building, sustainable mindset behind The Collective can be found throughout Kowtow. In 2024, it publicly released an open-source handbook on how the brand transitioned to being plastic-free.

In some ways, Kowtow has been trying to become more eco-friendly for 20 years. “It’s [been a] full circle into reduction,” Piatek puts it. In its time, Kowtow has experimented with new fibres and new markets, captivated by the pull of the global fashion industry – before realising that wasn’t where it wanted to be.

“We suddenly realised we were scattergun and not being staunch to our values. [During lockdown], we eliminated all other fibres apart from Fairtrade organic cotton. And now what we’re working on mostly is circularity. We are genuinely able to close the loop because of the minimal amount of ingredients that make up Kowtow.”

At the same time, Piatek recognises Kowtow is “very ambitious”, citing her intention to open five more stores in Australia. “Ideally, one store is just Relove. That would be the dream, but we need the community to get behind it.”