Luxurious Upcycling

With upcycling trending up in the fashion industry, many famous online shopping website such as etsy.com and Artfire.com offer a large variety of upcycled products like colorful jewelry cuffs created by using old vinyl records. To put into perspective how much the number of upcycled goods being sold has increased it was interesting to learn that Etsy’s upcycled products have increased from 7,900 in 2010 to nearly 30,000 in 2011. That is an increase of about 275%!

            Clothing companies that are known to make luxury goods are also getting into the upcyling scene as well. Instead of throwing away many of their remaining popular Birkin handbags, Hermes thought that they should join the party by using these leftover materials to create beautiful furniture items. This collection by Hermes is known as “Petit h” and it launched on November 20, 2011 in London. The goal of these products was to show how creative one can be reusing materials rather than throwing them away.

            The following are some of the products that were featured by Hermes:

Photo: A mirror frame from the Hermès’ “Petit h” exhibit in London (www.stylebubble.co.uk)

Photo: Stool seats from the Hermès’ “Petit h” exhibit in London, (www.stylebubble.co.uk)

 

            With companies like Hermes trending toward upcycling, it could definitely pave the way for other luxury brands to the same things. If luxury brands are upcycling, then there should be no excuses for other companies not to reuse materials.