Beech, Flax, Cotton and Mulberry: Where Everything We Sell Comes From

Our sleepwear and bedding come from four main raw materials: beech wood, flax, cotton and mulberry silk. They are gathered in four completely different ways, with four very different costs to the land — and a brand that describes all of them with the same word is not telling you anything.

So here is the whole picture in one place, including the parts that do not flatter us. For how those fabric choices were first made, read the snoozyn story.

Flax — the quiet best case

Flax for European linen grows in a narrow coastal belt from Normandy through Flanders into the Netherlands. It is one of the few fibre crops whose environmental story needs no qualification:

• Rain-fed in its native belt — typically no irrigation at all
• Naturally pest-resistant, so very low chemical input
• Pulled rather than cut at harvest, then field-retted by dew and soil microbes — a weather-driven process rather than a chemical one
• No waste stream: long fibres become textile, short fibres go to paper and insulation, seeds to linseed oil and feed, woody core to board and animal bedding
• Grown in rotation roughly once every six or seven years — a good break crop that leaves soil better than it found it

Our linen is 100% French flax, stonewashed, at 170 GSM, cut into a duvet cover, fitted sheet and pillowcase pair. It is also the longest-lived fabric we sell, which compounds the advantage. The full flax story is here.

Beech — forestry rather than farming

Modal is made from beech cellulose. Managed European beech forest self-seeds rather than being replanted, is rain-fed, grows on ground that would not support a food crop, and yields considerably more fibre per hectare than cotton does.

The land story is genuinely strong. The processing is where it is decided: turning wood pulp into fibre means dissolving cellulose, and whether that is clean depends entirely on whether the mill runs a closed-loop system that recaptures its solvents and water. "It's modal, so it's sustainable" is not an argument. How modal is actually made.

Cotton — the honest problem child

Cotton is the thirstiest fibre we work with, and no growing method changes that. Farming practice does change other things that matter — pesticide and fertiliser use, crop rotation instead of monoculture, and how much chemical exposure the people working the fields carry, which given cotton's historically outsized share of global insecticide use is not a small point. We hold no fibre certification, though, so we call our own cotton what it is: cotton. We use it across most of our children's range and several adult ranges. We are not going to call cotton a low-impact crop, because it is not. We use it where it is clearly the right fibre for the job — hard-wearing, washable, breathable, simple — and, in our bedding, choose long-staple grades so it lasts long enough to justify the water it took. In bedding, that means the Cloud Cotton, Plain Cotton and Silky Cotton sets. Why children's sleepwear is pure cotton.

Mulberry silk — gentle crop, real ethical trade-off

White mulberry is perennial, hardy, tolerates marginal soil, needs modest water, and is not ploughed up and replanted each year. Sericulture is labour-intensive rather than machinery-intensive, so energy use is low and rural employment is high. On land and water, silk does well.

The trade-off is at the cocoon. Conventional reeling requires the cocoon to be processed before the moth emerges, because a moth chewing out breaks the continuous filament that makes silk what it is. The alternative — peace silk — gives broken, spun fibre that is duller and much less durable. It is a genuine conflict between two things people care about, and we would rather name it than skip it. The full silk story.

Side by side

Material	Water to grow	Land	Main caveat	Where we use it
Flax	Very low — rain-fed	Rotation crop, improves soil	Creases permanently	Linen bedding
Beech	Very low — rain-fed forestry	Non-arable, self-seeding	Processing must be closed-loop	Modal Cloud sleepwear
Cotton	High, however it is grown	Arable, competes with food	Water use is not solved	Cotton bedding, kids' and adult sets
Mulberry silk	Modest	Perennial, marginal land	Ethical question at reeling	19 & 22 momme sleepwear

After the raw material

Sourcing is only the first third of the story. Two things happen next that we can speak to directly:

• Our factories are audited, and we keep those audits on file. We work with a small number of partners rather than spreading production thinly, because a short supplier list is the only realistic way for a business our size to actually know who is making its clothes.
• Packaging is recyclable and plastic-free — no polybags around individual garments, no plastic filler, and gift packaging is recyclable too.

The part we have not solved

We do not yet hold third-party fabric certification. When we can evidence it, it will appear with a certificate number and not before. We also do not run a take-back or recycling scheme, and the elastane in our stretch sleepwear is not biodegradable — we use it because it extends the useful life of a garment, which we think is the better trade, but it is still a trade.

The single biggest lever on any of this is not the fibre at all: it is how long you keep the thing. Two sets rotated and washed at 30°C will outlast five bought cheaply and washed hot, by a margin that dwarfs the difference between any two fibres on this page.

Read the whole position on our sustainability page, the technical specifications on the bedding fabrics page, or start from how to read a fabric spec.