If you never leave, you will never know. Only upon seeing the enormity of the world, does one understand what significance a place of origin holds. Every kind of preciousness takes a personal encounter before one goes, oh… I see.
Founded by two girls, Pico is an underwear brand started by Phoebe Hunter-McIlveen and Isobel Williams-Ellis in 2016. Being good friends for years, they have been puzzled by one thing since their school years. They realised that regarding the origin of the clothes they wore everyday, they knew so pathetically little. “If we are to be more conscious in the making of daily choices, we should start with the first thing we put on when we wake up in the morning!”
And so began their journey in search of the source, and the destination was North India, where Pico’s first series was born. They worked with a small local factory, using organic cotton sourced from farmers’ cooperatives, to make Pico’s first piece of underwear. At every stage of the production process, they would spend time to interact with it in person before making choices, and they know every staff at the small factory that they work with. One time, while visiting a cotton ginning factory in Titilagarh, they were met with a great thunderstorm. Everyone was unnerved by how close the thunder sounded, but fortunately there was an enormous lightning rod nearby, and thus they were able to avoid a lightning strike. What luck when everyone is huddled together.
There are many farmers’ cooperatives in North India that adopt completely organic and sustainable plantation methods, dyes, and weaving and sewing approaches. Through training by instruction and in practice, they enable farmers to attain the ability to independently manage their produce and production methods. This turns the craftsmanship and skills that they have garnered through daily routine into solid knowledge that will never go to waste, because they are certainly invaluable. Besides a friendly production process, the dyes that Pico uses are recycled and reused in a hut that runs on solar power. Upon treatment, 95% of the dye is recycled into drinking water, while the remaining 5% goes into bricks used in constructions. Oh, only then did I know they can be utilised like so.
Like other brands that insist on small productions, it operates at a pace different from the market. So slow, so that people may understand what the basic needs of life are, and the time they take.
Pico does not have much variety, but its website explains in detail each step of the procedure from seed sowing to at last, the completion of each piece of underwear. These clear and precise displays enable one to follow the course for answers, and with answers, one is content. It also seems that the minute differences one only finds on his body are the origin of all the most direct discoveries. Once a small change occurs, it activates the whole body. It may not be dramatic, but it is inside the body and ready to burst, like a new sprout.
When the whole process is as transparent as that, I wonder if it is at all possible for sincere and kind people to create things that are uncomfortable.
Changing for the better, is when everyone takes the one only heart that is his and works upon it constantly, and the process that this gradually amounts to.
