What is the link between an underwear company and the blue economy?
At first glance, an underwear brand might seem like an unusual member of a blue economy ecosystem. We don’t work in marine biology or marine industry. We don’t restore coral reefs. We don’t build offshore infrastructure or develop ocean data systems. We make underwear.
And yet, we are here very deliberately.
For us, the most obvious link to the blue economy is material: we use ECONYL® yarn, regenerated from discarded fishing nets and other nylon waste. But stopping the story there would be too easy. And frankly, too shallow. Using recycled material does not automatically make a business responsible, let alone regenerative. The real work happens elsewhere. Our contribution to a blue economy mindset lies in altering the parts of the system consumers never see; how garments are designed so they last longer; how fit is solved so products are worn, not discarded; how production partners are chosen and challenged; how complexity is reduced instead of outsourced to nature.
The fashion industry is among the most harmful ones to our planet. For us, sustainability is not a marketing claim. We’ve chosen to treat it as an operational constraint, something that governs decisions across industry practices: design, sourcing, production processes, and scale. If it cannot survive there, it does not belong in our communication either. This approach is less spectacular and it rarely produces heroic stories. But it does produce fewer mistakes, fewer shortcuts, and fewer hidden costs that eventually surface somewhere else, often in ecosystems that cannot speak for themselves.
Collaboration through perspective, not preaching.
We didn’t join A’Pelago to borrow credibility from the blue economy. We joined because we believe the blue economy only works if it includes all kinds of businesses. Especially those operating far from the shoreline, whose cumulative impact is massive precisely because it feels ordinary.
We don’t see the blue economy as a narrow sector tied only to archipelago, oceans, vessels, or marine sciences. We understand it as something more fundamental. We live on a blue planet. Keeping it blue, not red, overheated, depleted, or exhausted, is not the responsibility of a few specialised actors. It is a systems-level responsibility that concerns how things are designed, produced, scaled, and repeated across industries. From that perspective, the blue economy is less about what you say you protect, and more about what you change in practice.
The A’Pelago ecosystem gives us something we value deeply: context. It places our work inside a larger conversation about systems, interdependencies, and long-term thinking. Being surrounded by organisations whose relationship to the sea is direct and existential forces us to be sharper and more precise about our own role.
Not as experts of the ocean, but as participants in the same planetary system.
A’Pelago enables dialogue between industries that rarely speak to each other, and that dialogue matters. Because many of today’s environmental problems are not caused by lack of innovation, but by lack of coherence between disciplines, incentives, and timescales.
Our collaboration with A’Pelago is not about providing ready-made solutions to blue economy challenges. It is about contributing a perspective that comes from operating inside consumer markets where scale, repetition, habit, and price pressure constantly test good intentions. Underwear may be a small thing. But small things, repeated billions of times, shape the world.
We at A’Pelago are thrilled to continue our fruitful collaboration with the other danish guy and look forward to the exciting future possibilities this collaboration will bring to the A'Pelago ecosystem. Would you like to connect with the other danish guy? Don’t hesitate to contact them or drop a message through their website
