Inside Freedom Ecowear’s Forest Workshop
The first thing you notice at Freedom Ecowear’s workshop is that you can hear it being made. Birds, bees, the breeze moving through the trees, all of it carrying over the hum of the sewing machines, because the whole atelier sits open to the air in the Dominican bush.
Vivi designs the brand here with her partner David, on a patch of land in La Vega that they have left deliberately wild. When she told me the temperature on this plot runs lower than everything around it, I assumed she meant it loosely. She did not.
Two Degrees Cooler On Purpose, A Sustainable Workshop In Nature
Vivi said the workshop’s patch of land was around two degrees cooler than its surroundings and connected that with the plants they kept. That was the difference she reported during our conversation; I did not carry out a temperature survey.
They Told Her To Move The Swimwear Workshop To The City, She Said No
The advice came again and again, and she ignored all of it. “We’ve been told several times you need to move your brand to the city to make it work,” Vivi said. “We don’t listen to them, because we have the internet and we’ve been able to make it work here.”
She has a personal reason for the open air design too. “I used to work in my father’s company in entrepreneurship, the office, the building, the box type of thing,” she said. “Not my favorite. That’s why we decided to make this more open, natural, with more air and light.” It is home to the whole operation under one open roof, the cutting, the sewing, the ironing, the packing. A rural Dominican Republic workshop quietly out shipping the city brands that pitied it, the full reach of which has its own story.
Clean Air The Ethical Garment Workers Can Breathe
We talked about the dust visible in the workshop light. Vivi connected her preference for natural fibres with what she wanted the people working there to breathe. It was a concern she described, rather than an air-quality measurement or proof that this workshop was free of exposure risks.
Sustainability Is Also The Air In The Room Where Your Swimwear Is Made
We almost never ask what the room where a garment is made is like. The open workshop and the plants around it made me ask that question. Its setting was something I could observe; its air quality would need a different kind of assessment.
It widened the questions I wanted to ask about clothing: the materials, the people making it and the place where they worked. Keeping plants around a workshop was part of Vivi’s account of her choices. It did not, by itself, verify every environmental or working-condition claim about the brand.