From yarn to bed linens: sustainability and luxurious comfort with Totum
Welcome back to our “Redefining Luxury” interview series, where we contemplate the essence of luxury and explore its many forms and definitions. Through open conversations with creators, entrepreneurs, and passionate individuals, we talk about the process behind designing luxurious, pleasurable, yet thoughtful creations and their importance in the modern world. In search of joy, marvel, and inspiration.
In this edition, we talked with the co-founders of the lifestyle and design brand Totum Project - Ria Dunn and Alexandra Normand.
Ria and Alex are co-founders of the lifestyle brand Totum which cultivates environmental wellness through meaningful design without setting boundaries of an inner and outer world. Through their products, they create experiences that aim to create a stronger connection with our environment, hoping it will inspire us to become better protectors of the nature we depend on. Meeting the ladies through a mutual friend, I was fascinated by their concept and products and instantly became curious about their story. It turns out we have quite some passions in common, including running a sustainable business, creating luxurious beauty, and all of that with immense love for the planet at heart.
The ladies met at a perfect moment, both standing at a major crossroads in life, both of them no longer resonating with the current values and business models of the industries they were in. A mutual search for more balance has brought their paths together. Ria ran her own successful brand in Italy and worked in fashion for over 20 years when she started feeling this strong pull to take a step back and reassess her life.
“I threw myself into the one thing that made me feel myself and make me feel whole. And that was nature. I took two and a half years off to study the plant world. I studied plant medicine, identification of plants, I’d do a lot of harvesting, and foraging, drying the plants, making beautiful teas and natural cosmetics, and even started to dabble into natural perfumes, making infusions and experimenting with aromatherapy. For me, it was really this incredible exploration of the natural world and understanding of all of these resources that are around us that so many of us don’t know about.”
Meanwhile, Alex was in the process of stepping out of her corporate job in tech and becoming more and more environmentally aware. She enrolled in a sustainability management course, which opened her eyes to the challenges we’ll have to go through over the next 10 years. There is a infinite amount of time to make a change, and it became a priority for her to contribute to that. After meeting with Ria, it became clear over time that they are on the same page regarding vision and values in life. Together, they decided to grab this opportunity and summon the courage to start building Totum step by step.
Developing the project is something that took a lot of exploration in the first stages, and the quality of the materials was of utmost importance. Alex and Ria are very aware of the fact that you can’t produce anything without having an impact on nature. Acknowledging that humans will always be making stuff and doing it in a way that’s mindful of our environment and how it impacts our surroundings is more than crucial, so they make sure the product adds value somewhere.
“We can’t change all of the dynamics in the world, but it’s good to think about how we can change our personal lives, slow down and change how we wake up in the morning. The way we have our first coffee, our first meal, our first interaction of the day… Making those small meaningful changes is what it’s all about.” says Ria.
MATERIALS WITH STORIES
Ria’s, designer and creative director, infatuation with stories of fabrics and pieces of clothing that age with you throughout life was something that laid a solid foundation for Totum. Since the kind of materials they wanted to work with weren’t available on the market, creating them from scratch became of great importance.
“It’s something that gets better with time, kind of like those old blue jeans that when you get them, they’re a little bit more structured, and then they end up getting soft and moulding to your body, so really our sheeting and that fabric, in particular, is designed to be like that, that it just gets better with time. The kind of effect we’re looking for in the materials is very specific, and it’s not very common. We have this appreciation for the imperfection of natural materials, whereas, in the fashion industry, a lot of people are trying to eliminate that part of the material and make everything really perfect and standardized. I was trying to create materials that have a lot of stories in them. We began to do a lot of work on the weaving to try and find these combinations of materials, going back to the old world in the way things were made back in the days. The durability. We work a lot with 100% natural materials, like cashmere and hemp (which is of specific interest to us, and we try to do as much development with hemp as possible), and we also work with linen and some cotton, organic cotton... And that’s just really an exciting process. It’s also an important process to go through with your weavers and get excited together. Get them really on board, motivated, and really understanding of the project. That’s been a lot of fun.”
Totum is all about having the courage to flip the script and make sure the business model works for everybody. Obviously, the environment, the final customer that’s buying and also the people that are working on the project so that there can be more balance in general.
MAKING THE BED AWESOME AGAIN
First of all, Totum aimed to focus on the bed and the quality of sleep as sort of the first part of the development. Ria was speaking with a herbalist, and he said something to her that was important and meaningful: “You can come up with all the natural medicines you want, but the bottom line is that if someone is not sleeping well, that’s the first thing you have to fix.” And that stuck. The idea is to make people want to stay in bed, sleep well and cultivate intimacy within that sacred space. Goal number one was to develop beautiful sheeting. For example, the bedsheets are made of satin on one side, which is the side that touches against your skin, and linen on the other side. And what is beautiful about these sheets is that the more you use them, and the more you wash them, the softer they get.
But really, Totum transcends way beyond the bedroom.
“It’s a lifestyle, really. And so, the creation of these sacred spaces and quality is something that kind of permeates your whole life. So we started a small capsule collection of wearable things because it was a natural thing to do, obviously, considering my past, but also these beautiful natural materials kind of becoming your second skin. It just seemed very natural to extend our concept into wearable things as well.”
At a time when everyone moved towards comfort during covid, spending more time at home, the timing of creating for that environment specially made sense. However, the cuts are slightly different from your standard loungewear. They’re unique in a way that you can really make them into a sort of second skin of yours that you wear all the time, and you can dress them up or down, which makes them universal. By carefully doing only one collection development a year, instead of the normal fashion cycle, Totum aims to bring back the business model of producing quality, durable items that don’t need to be constantly updated because they are timeless in their essence.
Ria says: “I want to create things you don’t want to live without. Things that make you feel good. That’s really important for me. It’s all about letting you shine, feel amazing and also look good while being comfortable. That’s always been my motto when it comes to clothing.”
MENDING PROGRAM
We all have those unique and special pieces in our closets that are such part of our journey that we keep them until they literally fall apart. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to ensure they stay around for as long as possible. If they’re made of quality materials, it makes sense to mend or patch them up if any damage occurs, and they will still look great, if not better because it gives us space to add character, creativity and a little piece of ourselves onto the garments.
Totum plans to put together a mending program to help and advise on mending the fabrics, depending on the particular material and type of damage, sending extra pieces of fabric to allow you to love your garment for a long period of time. It could easily be one of those pieces that your descendants enjoy. So, at the end of the day, you might be spending a little more money than usual to own these quality pieces, but for a good reason, all things considered.
“If there’s been any sort of an accident on the side of the customer, we’re happy to provide them with fabrics, extra buttons, or whatever is needed in their individual case. We like to encourage people to reach out to us and speak to us about the product because, for us, it’s also really inspiring to hear their journey. Putting humanity back into things.”
CERTIFICATIONS & SUSTAINABILITY
Totum is fully devoted to structuring itself in a way to be truly sustainable and to give back from the start. Joining One Percent for the Planet is just the beginning of the journey, a show of commitment. The next step would be working out a system for measuring the lifetime impact of products. For example, based on the Higg Index, polyester can have a really good score if it’s recycled, even though it might wear out and become worthless very quickly. Silk, on the other hand, is durable, you can keep wearing it for ages, yet it doesn’t have a good rating based on the same index system. Totum would like to initiate a conversation with the community about the materials and choices that are being made daily. With the unsettling amount of greenwashing these days, it’s important to navigate your way through all of the schemes that recreate materials only to make them look sustainable. Still, the deeper you go, you find out they’re actually not. Justifying the excessive production of plastic is by no means an option here.
“We as a company have decided to go with just pure natural materials. For us, recycling plastics is not a solution, so we’ve kind of decided not to be using these recycled polyesters, which are trending right now. Taking a plastic bottle and making it into yarn is actually not very healthy whatsoever. And in that specific case, to be able to make recycled yarns out of plastic bottles, you need to have certain conditions for plastic bottles. What often happens is that the recycling of bottles themselves are not always in perfect conditions, they’re not always bottled water, so they end up producing the plastic bottles just to reuse it, just to make the yarns.”
Hemp yarn has shown to be a great option because even though it’s not certified organic, it grows organically naturally. You don’t need pesticides to grow it, it’s a very thriving material that doesn’t need much water. It’s a plant that was very popular before World War 2 that sort of disappeared, and it’s making a comeback, even though it’s still quite hard to get. Ria and Alex believe in hemp and its many applications and will continue investing in it in hopes of it becoming more of a staple in the fashion industry in general, also to be able to restore good balance in the pricing.
Currently, Totum is working on further textile and colour developments, experimenting with bedsheets that are made of a blend of hemp and cotton, which is quite an unusual combination in the world of bedding at the moment.