All our pieces are designed and drawn in Paris, in our offices. The creative team imagines all the models: dresses, blouses, jackets, shoes, jewelry that will make up our collections. Pieces inspired by each member of our team, born from their desires but also from yours. Because we try to take into account each of your feedback, your wish to find a model from a past collection, to see a sizing again... From the beginning, we have also decided to equip ourselves with our own design office which allows us to be totally autonomous in the creation of our collections, from the first drawing to the final prototype, including pattern making and the multiple modifications decided during the fittings that punctuate the creation of a collection.

Once this creative work is completed, our partners take over to ensure the production of your pieces. Between 80 and 90% of them (the proportion varies depending on the collections and the time of year) are produced in France, in 2 workshops in the Paris region and a factory in the Aube.

The choice of Portugal

To keep up with the pace and endless inspirations of our creative team, we had to look for new workshops outside of our "classic" know-how and capable of producing knits, shoes, jeans, jewelry... In France, the costs of these workshops are often too high for us to be able to offer you pieces at reasonable prices. This is why our choice turned to Portugal, a country with incomparable know-how and which gives us the assurance that the standards of the European Union are respected (taxation, labor law, environmental standards...). Portugal is also relatively close to France, which allows us to reduce our carbon footprint for the transport of our pieces (freight only by truck). For all these reasons, all our knits, jeans, shoes, leather accessories and jewelry are produced in Portugal.

OUR MATERIALS

Since our Spring 2021 collection, we have chosen to work primarily with French suppliers to offer you as many fabrics printed and/or woven in France as possible and thus ensure their quality and reduce the carbon footprint of our products. This does not yet constitute all of our materials, but we are working to make it the largest part!

We are also working to ensure that our suppliers systematically specify the origin of the raw materials used (cotton, viscose...) to go even further in their traceability. This is a more complicated exercise than we thought, given that most of them source from international "wholesalers". But it is part of Our Promise for the coming months to be perfectly transparent about the origin of each of our materials.

Made in France

The piece was entirely produced in one of our Parisian workshops

Made in Portugal

The piece was entirely produced in one of our Portuguese workshops

OEKO-TEX Certified

The fabric does not contain any products harmful to health

Natural Material

The fabric is composed of 100% natural materials

100% French Fabric

The fabric was woven in a French workshop

Printed in France

The fabric was printed in a French workshop

Recycled Polyester

The polyester comes from old clothes or plastic bottles

Organic Cotton

The production of organic cotton is more ecological and ethical

Certified materials

OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 is a label that allows us to certify the non-toxicity of textiles and dyes. Pieces bearing these certifications are therefore safe for your health. We have set ourselves the objective of using 100% OEKO-TEX standard 100 certified materials by 2022.

Recycled materials

Synthetic materials are among the most used in the textile industry, but they are also the cause of significant pollution. This is why we want to reduce their use as much as possible. When we need to use synthetic materials, and in particular polyester, we will now always choose recycled polyester. This is produced by reusing textile production scraps, used clothing or plastic bottles. By choosing this alternative, we are therefore certain that the environmental impact is minimized.

Animal materials

We have chosen, out of conviction, not to work with several materials that do not correspond to our values. This is why you will never find fur, angora, silk, exotic leather (crocodile for example), feathers or down in our collections.
For some of our knits, we still have compositions that include alpaca or cashmere, as these materials allow us to achieve the softest result for your skin. But we do our utmost to select recycled versions of them.

Prohibited products

Alkyphenols, Phthalates, Fluorocarbons, Chrome VI, Halogenated flame retardants
We are already very careful to ensure that the fabrics we work with do not contain products harmful to your health. This involves long discussions with our suppliers to guarantee the absence of these products in the materials they use.
But to be 100% sure, we choose to use as many OEKO-TEX certified fabrics as possible. This objective will be almost achieved for the summer 2021 collection and totally (we hope!) for the fall collection (except for our "Transformation" capsules, for which we will reuse fabrics already in stock in our workshops).
Tomorrow, we will go further, by requiring each supplier to respect the tolerance thresholds for the various products listed below and by carrying out laboratory tests to ensure that there is no shadow of a doubt.

OUR PRICES

Our goal has always been to offer you pieces at the fairest price, without compromising on quality. We defend a model without intermediaries and without distributors, which allows us to set our prices to be as fair as possible.

This is why we decided, from the launch of SAAJ, not to offer you sales, a system favored by fast fashion. Some brands can afford to offer sales twice a year (or more) because they practice margins that are well above those we have established at SAAJ. Instead of sales, we prefer to regularly offer you capsules at affordable prices made from fabrics in stock in our workshops. Moreover, we organize a clearance sale once a year (in August) which allows us to clear out the remaining stock (limited, because we also want to avoid overproduction).

SHIPPING YOUR PACKAGES

We have been working for 2 years with the company Marguerite to manage the logistics and shipping of your packages.

Marguerite is an integration company: it supports people far from employment to train them and offer them positions within its establishment. It is a company with a social project that touched us and in which we found ourselves.

Created in 2012, Marguerite is very attached to helping young companies like ours in their development. We have established a real relationship of trust with them, and they accompany us in all our developments. They prepare each of your packages with heart, and believe us, it is not always easy to follow us with all the little surprises we want to slip inside...

It is also thanks to Marguerite that we can offer you customer returns every Wednesday and Sunday morning. We have set up an optimized return process with them, so that the pieces are available quickly after receipt in their warehouse.

Finally, Marguerite is located in Paris intramuros (which is quite exceptional...). Once again, this allows for a short cycle and we can thus be more reactive regarding restocking and delivery of pre-orders.

OUR ACTIONS
AGAINST OVERPRODUCTION

One of our main objectives is to offer you our collections in sufficient quantities while avoiding overproduction. This is why, during the launch period, some pieces may run out of stock quite quickly. These shortages are due to the fact that we have chosen to work with human-sized workshops... It is therefore not possible for us to produce very large quantities. We have rather chosen to do restocking afterwards, in order to produce only pieces that you ask us for and that we know will find a buyer.

Despite all our efforts, it is almost impossible to determine precisely what will please you the most and in what proportions. With each launch, we have surprises, which leads us to an impasse: either we produce little but risk that many of you will not find your favorites and feel frustrated, or we choose to produce the entire collection in large quantities to satisfy the greatest number... but we then risk having a huge amount of stock in our warehouses at the end of the season; which also results in significant economic and environmental waste.

We have come to the conclusion that we simply have to leave you this choice, and organize ourselves upstream so that in a few days we can satisfy the greatest number while avoiding waste. After each sale, we analyze the pieces that pleased you the most, the registrations for stock alerts, in order to offer you the most awaited pieces in restocking. This allows us to have total control over our fabrics, and to know very quickly what we can reproduce. Depending on our stocks, we can therefore relaunch productions quite quickly to offer you a restocking.

However, we noticed that this system did not prevent frustration, as the stocks were not sufficient, even in restocking... This is how, in October 2020, we decided to offer you a pre-order system. Pre-orders are available on the day of the sale, to meet a greater demand for certain pieces.

Thus, after each sale, we analyze the pieces that pleased you the most, the number of pre-orders for each of them, the registrations for stock alerts, and we thus determine precisely the quantities that we must produce to offer you the most awaited pieces in restocking. This is possible thanks to a perfect mastery of our fabrics and our local and short-cycle production mode. Over time, this production model has become our economic model and one of our greatest prides.

Many of you ask why we only offer pre-orders on the Sunday of the sale? Simply to allow you to receive your pieces within a timeframe that we consider satisfactory, as we must launch production within a fairly short timeframe. There are also logistical reasons: on Monday, we launch a production based on what has been pre-ordered, with a small surplus for restocking and we must ensure that the pre-orders are shipped before the restocking. Offering pre-orders for a longer period would make the task impossible for us.

Unfortunately, at the end of the season, we always have pieces due to customer returns, and the time necessary for the return of a piece then its control and its restocking. It is out of the question that they should be thrown away, burned or otherwise - techniques unfortunately recurrent in the fashion world.

This is why we have set up a calendar for the return and restocking of our pieces:

If at SAAJ we do not offer sales, our Annual Clearance Sale (every year in August) allows us to take stock of our pieces, and to make you happy by offering you models at affordable prices. We cannot, like some brands, offer you sales several times a year, because we prefer to offer you a fair price all year round. The Clearance Sale is therefore an opportunity for us to resell stock that is sleeping in our workshops. Regarding the price offered, the margin is very low, because that is not the purpose of this initiative but it allows us to cover the production costs and reinvest this money in our future productions.

And for all the pieces that have not been sold, it was unthinkable for us to throw them away. All our prototypes, as well as the pieces that have not been sold within two years of their initial release, are donated to the associations Secours Populaire and Emmaüs, which allow their reuse, or their recycling if they are too damaged or defective. A beautiful way to give a second life to these pieces that are sleeping in our workshops!

AND FOR THE PIECES THAT ARE NOT SOLD?

And for all the pieces that have not been sold, it was unthinkable for us to throw them away. All our prototypes, as well as the pieces that have not been sold within two years of their initial release, are donated to the associations Secours Populaire and Emmaüs, which allow their reuse, or their recycling if they are too damaged or defective. A beautiful way to give a second life to these pieces that are sleeping in our workshops!

HOW DO WE OPTIMIZE
OUR FABRICS?

Optimizing our fabrics is essential to avoid the loss of our raw materials.

First, let's talk about pattern optimization. Our pattern makers work on software that maximizes the fabric for each pattern. The parts that make up a piece are positioned so that the waste is as small as possible.

How to reuse our fabric scraps?

Despite this optimization, there is always waste... and often, these are small spaces between the "pieces" of our parts that do not allow us to reuse them for production because they are too small for the production of a blouse or dress. We then had the idea to use these fabric scraps for a new piece: our scarves!

We offered them to you for the first time in September 2020, to accompany our beautiful Isaac coats, but not only since you could also buy them individually to dress up a bag, your wrist and your hair. For our Spring 2021 collection, we have revised the pattern of these scarves so that they are longer and easier for you to wear, but still using only fabric scraps. Emilie, one of our stylists, has therefore worked on a new pattern that allows us to create a longer scarf, without it requiring fabric necessary for production.

How to reuse our fabric scraps?

For our solid, timeless materials

We reuse them in our collections over time. We have chosen to work with timeless materials to be able to use them from collection to collection. This is the case, for example, with cotton gauze, crepe, linen...

For our prints

A collection is often carried by one or more prints, and we have chosen to offer you different prints with each collection. To reuse them, we found the idea of a capsule composed entirely of fabrics already in stock (Edma capsule in March 2021), otherwise we reintegrate them into collections with 1 or 2 pieces.

OUR FUTURE ACTIONS

As you will have understood, Our Promise is already a reality of the present, but also many resolutions for the future. We do not claim to become a perfectly eco-responsible Brand overnight, but we promise to do our utmost to get as close as possible.
In this regard, we present to you all the other actions that we plan to do tomorrow and for which we are eagerly awaiting your feedback:

- Use more recycled materials: we started with polyester in the spring of 2021, but we want to use others, because a recycled material requires fewer resources than a new material and thus corresponds to our value and our responsible approach;

- Better sourcing of our accessories to offer you buttons, elastics, fasteners that are as eco-responsible as possible;

- Offer you a sewing box with coupons of our remaining fabrics to allow you to create beautiful pieces yourself in our prints;

- Rethink our packaging so that it is recycled recyclable (and why not reusable?);

- Increased control of our partners and subcontractors to ensure that working conditions and remuneration are fair throughout the production chain;

- Even more certifications, go further in the search for our raw materials to offer you pieces with certifications on the origin of the materials, their manufacture, etc;

- To compensate for our CO2 emissions, linked to the transport of our pieces, to production, we want to create a partnership with an association. The time is still for research, but we know that there are many projects to compensate for carbon emissions, and we want to be sure to participate in the project that makes the most sense for us;

- Offer a second-hand solution: to be able to offer you to resell your SAAJ pieces to participate in a circular economy. The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry... offering an action that allows your pieces to be refurbished and resold is for us the best alternative to sustainable and responsible fashion;

- And finally a project that we have been thinking about for several months and that is close to our hearts, the creation of an association. Through this association, we will be able to make donations of clothing, participate in humanitarian actions that are dear to us...


These are only vague ideas for the moment but we would like to bring them to life. We would also like to have your feedback and, if our actions inspire you and you wish to share your ideas with us, do not hesitate to write to us at hello@saajparis.fr. We would be delighted to read you!