Island Girl Boracay: Eco-friendly fashion
October 20, 2011 by kikaygurl
Filed under Featured, What's In Store?
Island Girl Boracay
In this environmentally -challenged times, we become truly beautiful when we are positively driven. Island Girl, a brand of resort wear and accessories based in Boracay, lends its share in the greening of fashion by using only naturally-sourced materials and crafting them into artfully-made accessories and beachwear. The store, which showcases eco friendly products expertly hand-worked by rural communities in Cebu, recently opened a retail outlet at the Island City Mall in Tagbilaran, Bohol. Owner Janice Uy Chua shares with us inspiration behind the brand:
How did Island Girl start and how did it grow to what it is now?
We have been exporting fashion jewelry to all over the world for close to 25 years now and our line was always just fashion accessories—necklaces, bracelets, earrings made from natural materials like wood, shells, coconut, plant fibers and seeds. Then in 2002, my mother had the idea to take what we know from fashion accessories and put them on sandals. We thought we needed a brand that could encapsulate both our natural line of fashion accessories and sandals in one and after several months of brainstorming, Island Girl was born. It was a stroke of pure luck that while vacationing in Boracay, we learned that D’Mall, Boracay would be expanding their existing property to include more shops. We jumped at the opportunity to put up our first Island Girl shop there because Bora is the perfect place to showcase our line of resort fashion accessories and sandals.
Where do you source your materials and who designs and crafts the accessories?All our materials are sourced locally, mainly from Cebu, its neighbouring provinces, as well some areas of Luzon and Mindanao and we make it a point to HIGHLIGHT the natural element in every single product. Our shoe materials are also bought from local producers of rubber and leather. We wanted to ensure that everything about our line, from the sourcing of materials to assembly of the finished product is all done in the Philippines to make them wonderful gifts/souvenirs for tourists to bring back home with them. We have a Product Development Team that designs our wide range of sandals and fashion accessories.
What is your involvement in the design of the collection? I head the Product Development Team so my job is to do the conceptualization of the line for each season, creates the themes that the collections will revolve around, suggest new materials and combinations to experiment with, and approve or disapprove the end-product of these experiments.
You recently opened Piece of Green also in Boracay, tell us something about the philosophy behind the brand called “upcycling?”
Upcycling is a very exciting concept. Although it is not exactly a new concept, it has become more and more popular these days as people have become more concerned about the environment. We fell into it by accident, actually. By chance, we discovered that there are several collectors of industrial excess materials from factories that can still be turned into things that are of higher value with a little help from us!
At A Piece of Green, we have created signature collections of fashion accessories and souvenir items out of what we consider our “main-stay” elements. These are collections made from crushed bottleg glass, plastic tetra pack chips, newspapers and magazines, and colourful electric wire casings. We are always in search of new elements to use and upcycle. It really is true what they say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!
Your products are geared towards the female clientele. Do you intend to open a men’s line?
Soon! A lot of our accessories, especially those at A Piece of Green are actually unisex! We intend to expand our retail base domestically by joining more trade shows/bazaars in Manila and develop more presence online with the launch of our website, www.islandgirlph.com in the coming months. The site supports e-commerce, incorporating PayPal and credit card payments as alternative payment options to the usual bank transfer system so that our tourist customers can still purchase our latest collections even while they are back home!
