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About Us

About Yabbey by ©Yabbey

 

A Fresh Perspective on Sustainable Fashion

We’re fascinated by the colorful, extravagant world of fashion. But the huge environmental footprint and unfavorable humanitarian cost of “fast fashion” influenced us to rethink the way we make clothes.

As both fashion designers and social entrepreneurs, we believe that fashion can be a force for good. 

We care about the world we live in and the well-being of those who make our clothes, so we created a marketplace that reflects both our values and our love for fashion. 

This is how Yabbey came to be.

Yabbey is a DIY design, pattern and resource library that empowers makers all over the world to create garments and accessories based on our patterns, sell them and ship them directly to buyers. 

Our patterns are based on past, exclusive and runway fashion trends and designs from different eras, giving you access to rare, unique and hard-to-find pieces.

We make it easy for our makers to create our stylish pieces through our library of free instructions, YouTube tutorials and how-to sewing guides. We provide all the information you need to make clothes and accessories either on your own or with the help of a sewist.

Yabbey also showcases creations of the communities we support, including men and women in Myanmar, refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and other people in economically disadvantaged communities around the world. 

In the fashion world, a big chunk of the costs go to logistics, distributors, retailers and other intermediaries. We are addressing this by making fashion more decentralized

By deconstructing the fashion supply chain, revenues go directly to our makers, allowing them to continue earning from their creative work.

We can address fashion’s sustainability and wage gap by ensuring that they receive 100% of profits from their work.

At the same time, we’re reconnecting more consumers with the clothes they wear while inspiring them to make more conscious choices.

 

Our Mission

Over 13 million tons of textile waste end up in landfills each year, resulting in enormous amounts of CO2 emissions, as well as water and soil pollution. 

At the same time, factory workers are forced to withstand unfair working conditions and low wages just to keep up with the high demand of fast fashion.

We’ve realized the adverse consequences of the fashion industry, and so we’ve made it our mission to drive change and promote a manufacturing culture that is kinder and more considerate to the environment and the people behind our clothes. 

Yabbey aims to support makers from disadvantaged and low-income communities by providing a digital platform from which they can share their work, inspire people with their stories and earn an incredible living.

By decentralizing production, we are also empowering more consumers to buy directly from the makers, while providing them with information and inspiration to make more ethical choices – without compromising their love for style and aesthetic.

 

Our Story 

Yabbey (from the slang Japanese word “yabe” which means “so cool”) was founded by social entrepreneur and philanthropist Kikka Hanazawa in 2021.

The idea to create a digital marketplace of patterns and DIY resources began during the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst the shortage of medical gowns in hospitals. 

The platform started out as an online hub of resources and instructions on how to produce medical gowns. In a matter of weeks, our website quickly gained over 300,000 visitors from 180 countries in need of DIY information. 


From a small pattern shop to solving the PPE crisis with 30 million medical gowns, Yabbey was launched with the goal of reshaping fashion one creation at a time. 

Yabbey is based in California and certified as a B-Corporation. We are also recognized by Fast Company’s 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards.
 

If you are a designer or maker interested to learn more about joining the Yabbey platform, please sign up here. 

View our patterns here.

Buy DIY kits here.

Shop for creations here.

Currently Yabbeys are working from Italy, India, Ukraine, Singapore, Canada, Myanmar, New York and Los Angeles. 

Follow us on social media:

Linkedin | Intagram | Tiktok

 

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