BIORESTORE - Sustainably Restore Your Clothes to New
A Patent Pending Sustainable Clothes Restoration Solution. 1 wash with BIORESTORE removes lint, reviving color, shape & hand feel.
Category: Technology
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Who doesn't have some sentimental clothing that could use a little refreshing! Bring them back to life with BIORESTORE!
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What if you could sustainably, easily restore your legendary concert t-shirt, your ex’s hoodie they left, your dad's perfect shirt finally handed down, your kid's favorite sweater, the dress that defined your 20’s or the precious first day garments that your baby came home in.
From an idea to a reality - even the early stage prototype tests provided excellent results, such as the hoodie above from Anna and her son Alfred.
We all have that worn out favourite garment sitting in our closet. A piece of clothing with so many good memories, that’s been lost to time, the color faded, the surface rough, bobbled, pilled, the hems and cuffs stretched and shapeless.
What if there was a way to restore them simply and sustainably?
We’ve tried and tested ALL the ‘’solutions’’ including garment shavers, softeners, razors, brighteners, scissors, combs, sticky tape, detergents, sand paper, pumice stones, elbow grease and more.
BIORESTORE replaces all of these tedious and time consuming tools with a simple, sustainable, scientific and smart solution.
To create an easy to use solution we were inspired by the simplicity of your regular washing detergents. Our team have spent the past two years perfecting and simplifying the process & product. Think of BIORESTORE as detergent 2.0 or as a 're-tergent' - restoring, refreshing and renewing instead of simply cleaning.
BIORESTORE is a Retergent which removes pilling / Lint / Garment Fuzz /Bobbles from the surface, which improves the colour brilliance, realigns the fibres, and reshapes the macro structure - ultimately meaning the shape of the garment.
On a fabric level the improvement to textiles looks like the above examples, whilst on a garment, the improvement is dramatic.
Why do clothes wear out? Whether your wardrobe is made up of mass market fashion staples, high-end pieces worn once in a while, or a daily uniform of sorts, the same thing always happens: over time, repeated washing with detergents and regular wearing means friction, abrasion and stretching of your clothing. This leads to pilling, de-shaping, and faded appearance of colors through a negative process of wear and tear called fibrillation.
On a macro and a micro level, fibrillation is bad news for garments, with fibrillations becoming visible on the surface of the garment as pills / lint / fluff / bobbles. These lead to colours looking dull, prints appearing faded, the surface no longer soft, smooth or with a sheen, the cuffs and collars become stretched & worn, and the overall fit of the garment becomes shapeless and loose. Simply put, your clothing does not look like it did the moment your eyes and hands met your favorite garment for the first time.
It’s easy to assume your garment is beyond repair and it’s time to purchase a replacement. However, the original garment & colour you loved isn’t gone. It’s simply hidden under a thin layer of accumulated fibre bundles that obscure both the original colour and fabric surface texture. Underneath this micro mass is a garment waiting for a second chance and to avoid the bottomless pit of global landfill.
From a science perspective, BIORESTORATION is a physico-chemical process where the enzymes and your laundry machine help each other. The enzymatic action targets the pills, weakens them and the centrifugal force provided by the machine detaches & removes the fibres.
In one simple laundry process, by removing the obstructive layer of fibres BIORESTORE solves all of these issues. Refreshing color, renewing print, removing pilling, restoring shape, saving garments from the back of the wardrobe, shameful wearing when no-ones looking, and life in the landfill.
Enzymes are available in abundance in nature, acting as catalysts that speed up processes of transformation and conversion in billions of natural and organic processes.
For example, the coffee and juice you drank and breakfast you ate this morning are being digested, broken down and doing there magic in your stomach, converting to energy all with the help of enzymes.
The biggest benefit of enzymes is that they are smart, really smart, only activating under suitable conditions and deactivating when those conditions are removed or are not optimal.
Simply put, during optimal conditions at 40°C / 104°F the movement and agitation of a home laundry wash with BIORESTORE, the active enzyme ingredients identify, target and remove the damaged, problem causing Pilling / Lint / Fluff Fibres on the garment surface and deep inside the fabric structure.
We know your curious, so here's the science, once the enzymes have targeted these fibres, an enzymatic hydrolysis reaction weakens these fibres from the main structure, the force from the washing machine removed loose fibres restoring the garment. Its like a lock and key, one is designed for the other, and the lock (your garment) won’t open without the key (BIORESTORE enzymes.). This is why our product only works with cotton & cotton blends.
And whats great for us, and good for you to know is that all of our ingredients have been approved by EU and US regulatory authorities.
BIORESTORE is a retergent made with enzymes and consciously selected ingredients.
In comparison to other Laundry Products often containing up-to 29 ingredients, BIORESTORE is limited & minimal formulation of 6 essential ingredients only. Unlike traditional laundry products, we have refrained from adding chemicals just for the sake of aesthetics.
For example, the colour of the BIORESTORE powder is chalky, which comes from a conscious decision to skip any whitening agents, therefore keeping the purest, simplest, and most minimal form of the product.
It additionally means that the powder contains no fragrance - only a very faint, neutral smell that won’t leave any scent behind on your garment.
Crucially, compared to traditional laundry solutions, BIORESTORE does not contain any silicons, softeners or optical brighteners, that bond with the fabric and deposit a layer of chemicals on the surface of your clothes.
For full transparency we share our ingredients list with you, which have been fully certified and approved by both EU and US regulatory authorities.
Ingredients:
< 5% Ethoxylated fatty alcohol. 10-60% granulated enzymes, sodium sulphate. > 5 - 15% Non ionic tensioniser, sodium citrate, adipic acid.
To get here, we started with garments at the end of their life and worked our way backwards. By this we mean, we started with our own worn-out clothes and our direct experience of witnessing textile waste in landfills all around the world.
While we knew that these mountains of wasted garments could be repurposed or recycled, we wondered if they could instead be renewed and restored.
With over 25 years of experience from the fashion, textile and material science's industry, with deep knowledge of working with textile chemistry and technology from laundry to lab and factory floor to design studio we understood and shared the frustration of loosing favorite garments to time.
To solve this, we did what we know best - we studied the yarns, inspected the garment failures, crunched the numbers and analysed the data to develop a solution which we call BIORESTORE.
It's simple, sustainability, and for us quite naturally our first thought is always - sustainability.
Let's start with the disposal and destruction - The US alone, dumps 17 million tons of textile waste each year, that’s the equivalent of 75,000+ Statue of Liberty’s, towering over NYC bleeding chemicals, dyes and effluent into the environment, slowly breaking down over 100’s of years.
Secondly is the massive consumption of materials and resources in the production of new clothing on a rapidly increasing cyclical scale of consumption. This footprint to produce simple items like a T-shirt is huge, and destructive towards natural habitats and systems, with a a t-shirt requiring upto 3500 litres of water in its journey from cotton plant to finished and store ready goods.
We could go on, presenting more and more shocking statistics, however the simple fact is that we all buy, consume and dispose of far too many items of clothing when they could be easily, simply and sustainably renewed and restored.
BIORESTORE has been in development for several years. From the initial prototype until now, it has been thoroughly tested on all types of textile products and materials in exactly the same way we would carry out tests whilst developing products for the large brands.
While all the elements in developing BIORESTORE were selected consciously based on their safety & eco attributes we went a step further. BIORESTORE was independently evaluated by a globally renown lab - INTERTEK achieving both REACH (EU) and EPA TSCA & California Prop 65 US safety standards
With our deep knowledge in textile technology, we have utilized internationally recognized textile testing mechanisms to capture the improvement in pilling and colour vibrancy. This has been measured through colour spectrometry and can be viewed on a microscopic level, and of course with visually as improvement of the garments surface and color.
Once satisfied with the results in a controlled environment, we went out and created a trial group of over 150 people both inside and outside of Sweden who then tested the product in their own home laundry machines.
The simple-to-use BIORESTORE home laundry solution has been designed to work in a similar way to regular home laundry detergents. There the similarities end, and the patent pending science of BIORESTORE Retergent begins.
Each box of BIORESTORE can restore upto 5-6 adult garments of 10 children garments or a total weighing upto 1kg of textiles.
Our simple visual guide below will help you to calculate the weight of garments.
BIORESTORE is not always a miracle worker, and there are certain things BIORESTORE can’t fix including:
- Holes
- Tears
- Excessive garment damage
- Needle holes
- Just like regular laundry, don’t mix whites with color.
- If your washing machine doesn’t have a cycle specifically for cotton garments, then you will have to manually program the wash cycle for 2-3 hours at 40°C (104°F).
- A small number of machines have a small dispensing chamber and so it’s possible that some powder gets stuck. Just like regular laundry powders, it is a good idea to check that the powder has gone into the washing machine, and give it a helping hand with a small cup of water to help it on it's way.
BIORESTORE is created for use on cotton and cotton blended fabrics, meaning any garment that is from 100% Cotton to 50% Cotton blended with other fibres.
BIORESTORE is suitable for use across a wide range of garments and textile products, below is just a few of our favorite prodcuts to BIORESTORE.
BIORESTORE has been designed to work with cotton and cotton blends, as this is a huge part of the clothing that we wear. This means that BIORESTORE will not work on 100% synthetic fibres, or animal fibres such as wool, cashmere or silk.
If you do wash synthetic- or animal fibre-based garments, not to worry. Your garments won't get damaged, they just won't be restored in the the same way cotton garments will be.
Where garments are made with a blend of fibres ie. cotton and wool, or cotton and polyester, the cotton will be restored and the other fibres will not be affected or damaged in any way.
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I saw it when it was still live, but it was too pricey for me so I chose not to pledge for it, but it still looks good