Challenger to Watch: Petit Pli
Petit Pli is a wearable technology company. It combines technical materials and innovative garment design to create children’s clothes that grow with the child between 9 months to 4 years.
After being frustrated with gifted clothing quickly becoming too small for a newborn nephew, graduate Ryan Mario Yas founded Petit Pli in 2017 to address the problem. Evolving from Ryan’s thesis project at the Royal College of Arts, his studies of aeronautical engineering inspire Petit Pli’s designs.
With the fashion industry being the second-largest polluter in the world, fast fashion became a talking point in 2019 and documentaries such as Stacey Dooley’s Fashion’s Dirty Secrets have helped bring the issue to broader public awareness.
Petit Pli challenges throwaway culture in childrenswear. Using recycled and recyclable materials manufactured in a factory powered by solar panels and creating less clothing waste – Petit Pli has sustainability at its heart, driven by the belief that slow fashion is the future.
As part of its broader social ambition, Petit Pli hope to highlight the importance of durability and long-termism of clothing as something children then carry forward into their adult life.
Framing their brand world around ‘LittleHumans’ as an adventure to the moon, Petit Pli's range has been designed for children from the ground up, “not just miniature adult clothing”, as Yasin explains.
Petit Pli’s fight for change in the fashion industry is clear, tangible and ultimately fun with a real product rock and strong brand point of view. Petit Pli believes slow fashion is the way forward with a goal of embedding sustainability in all aspects of the product lifecycle where possible. As Dezeen design of the year award judges put it — “A sustainable yet elegant design for the most important people in the world.”
Each user touchpoint reflects the sustainable future-facing company. As an e-commerce company, customers receive the item of clothing in a box that folds into a cardboard jetpack, turning what would've been a piece of packaging waste into a toy for the child – transforming them into mini astronauts in their stretchy spacesuits. It’s a brilliant and intelligent example of ‘house media’ from NB Studio’s rebrand.
It takes a multi-disciplinary team to challenge the norms and question conventions, and Petit Pli is driven by a force of product designers, neuroscientists, sociologists and fashion designers creating the future of technical and sustainable clothing. Petit Pli is definitely one to keep an eye on while it continues to challenge the traditional ways in which we buy, own and wear clothing.
