- People often say to me, they're like,
"What is SUAY?"
and I, now at this point, only can answer
that SUAY is radical positive change.
(upbeat music)
My name is Lindsay Rose Medoff
and I'm the CEO of SUAY Sew Shop.
We are a production sewing shop
and we specialize in upcycling,
meaning we cut up old post-consumer product
and turn it into new, desirable product.
Growing up, fashion was a true way to express myself
and I remember the first time I went to a thrift store.
This was the 7th grade and I walked in and it hit me,
this is the mother load, this is the mecca,
this is who I am.
The textures, the colors, the history, the opportunities
that I saw in that thrift store as a young 7th grader
has driven me for the rest of my life
to take all of this old stuff that no one wanted anymore
and turn it into new product.
Fashion is one of the biggest polluters on the planet
yet it's one of the most celebrated ways
of expressing yourself.
So how did we get here as an industry?
The textiles that don't get thrown in the trash
are being baled up.
Some of those bales are being buried in landfills
or being shipped into other countries
where we're selling it off by the pound.
But the stuff that does keep sitting
and does keep staying, we keep collecting and saving
and it really has nowhere to go.
And that's where Remade can really step in.
(upbeat music)
And so, what we're doing is we're basically
take a bale of old flannel shirts and cut them up
and turn them into entirely new product.
We're able to cut up hundreds of thousands of pounds
of old textiles that were deemed for landfills
and that's what makes us so powerful.
(upbeat music)
So sustainability is not just a word
that's attached to a product, it's a way of life, I think,
that we all really have to embrace.
I mean the way it's gonna work is if everyone becomes
the everyday hero in their own community.
And speaking up for what they know
is actually gonna have an effect
on whether we have a sustainable future.
So we have a store of post-consumer product,
a beautiful sewing shop and we're all kind of like
busy little bees running around cutting up garbage
and sewing it back together for the world.
It's cool. (chuckling)
And then when COVID hit, it changed everything.
We actually quite quickly jumped to our feet
and started raising money to start producing masks
and give them away to front liners and community members
and people that were immuno compromised.
And we've given away over 75000 masks to date
and are still giving away masks every week.
SUAY is also now half store half food bank.
We recently started a food bank for garment workers
and now each week we're feeding up to 250 garment worker
families a week.
I really urge people that are involved in fashion,
if you're wearing clothes then you should care about this
because these are the same people that are sewing
the clothes that you have on your back every single day.
'Cause change is habitual, right?
What we have to do from a personal level
is to make shifts to create the kind of change
that the world desperately needs.
We're here to show the world
that you do have the opportunity to live every day
doing a little bit better than the day before.
Change is here and we just have to keep trying
to get more people on board.