Interview with Nick Reed, founder of Neem London.

An innovative, sustainable, unique brand that we have the pleasure of working with.

What is Neem? A healing plant that has been called ‘An ancient cure for a modern world’.

Just like your garments that are able to combine style and ethics for a sustainable and fun life!

Who you are and what you do

I’m Nick Reed and I’m the founder of Neem London – we are a brand focused on low emitting yarns; we work with Canclini mostly on an exclusive 50% Recycled cotton 50% Organic cotton blend which we have run an a life cycle assessment against so we know it’s extremely low emitting. Post-consumer wear we can then take that product back and we have built a supply chain that allows us to recycle the product.

We have created a clean style that we believe is a modern office hybrid style smart, comfortable and elegant.

What are the main philosophies and products of your company / brand

Our philosophy is that this industry emits, quite often designers are lazy when it comes to understanding the fibers, the sources and the impacts – we aim to be low emitting and of course Carbon neutral, ideally we want to be carbon zero, yet we will still invest in schemes.

The industry has become reliant on man made fibers or cotton with no traceability and we ant to ensure that our products can be  recycled or biodegrade and we trace the yarn back to farm, if we can.

We also use CLO3D and the render that into an avatar to avoid sampling waste and we aks our customers if we should make the shirt before it goes into production

https://neemlondon.com/collections/shop-collection/products/the-school-boy-stripe

The key products are our knitted shirts we developed with Canclini, these emit the equivalent to 25 bananas and about 45% less than a standard cotton shirt, it’s not enough to be organic, you have to understand the end of life and all aspects of the supply chain for example what energy use your producers are using, if they’re not using or moving to renewable energy, this is a red light for us.

https://neemlondon.com/collections/recycled-shirts/products/recycled-italian-sky-dobby-popover

So we are a green light for you….

Canclini were supportive of the product, we are quite annoying – we ask many questions, run LCA and don’t place big orders…yet. I’ve known Massimo, Simone and Mauro for over 20 years, we’ve even played some cricket together on the beaches of Gallipoli.

Expectations for 2022

Build the brand, this is a 3000 day job and we want to ensure our products are correctly produced.

We offer a take back scheme, so we want to scale that and we will look to launch some linen products and some trousers, but we have to make sure there is a clear end of life.

We will open a pop-up shop in October.

https://neemlondon.com/products/the-wear-well-take-back-bag

And now a curiosity about you that you want to reveal to us

Apart from the fact I love cricket and played to a good level, pre-launch we built our Instagram account to over 3k followers and accidently deleted it, we now have what we call a FUCK ZUCK approach and we are trying to scale without giving money to Meta.