"What is SUAY?"

and I, now at this point, only can answer

that SUAY is radical positive change.

(upbeat music)

My name is Lindsay Rose Medoff

and I'm the CEO of SUAY Sew Shop.

We are a production sewing shop

and we specialize in upcycling,

meaning we cut up old post-consumer product

and turn it into new, desirable product.

Growing up, fashion was a true way to express myself

and I remember the first time I went to a thrift store.

This was the 7th grade and I walked in and it hit me,

this is the mother load, this is the mecca,

this is who I am.

The textures, the colors, the history, the opportunities

that I saw in that thrift store as a young 7th grader

has driven me for the rest of my life

to take all of this old stuff that no one wanted anymore

and turn it into new product.

Fashion is one of the biggest polluters on the planet

yet it's one of the most celebrated ways

of expressing yourself.

So how did we get here as an industry?

The textiles that don't get thrown in the trash

are being baled up.

Some of those bales are being buried in landfills

or being shipped into other countries

where we're selling it off by the pound.

But the stuff that does keep sitting

and does keep staying, we keep collecting and saving

and it really has nowhere to go.

And that's where Remade can really step in.

(upbeat music)

And so, what we're doing is we're basically

take a bale of old flannel shirts and cut them up

and turn them into entirely new product.

We're able to cut up hundreds of thousands of pounds

of old textiles that were deemed for landfills

and that's what makes us so powerful.

(upbeat music)

So sustainability is not just a word

that's attached to a product, it's a way of life, I think,

that we all really have to embrace.

I mean the way it's gonna work is if everyone becomes

the everyday hero in their own community.

And speaking up for what they know

is actually gonna have an effect

on whether we have a sustainable future.

So we have a store of post-consumer product,

a beautiful sewing shop and we're all kind of like

busy little bees running around cutting up garbage

and sewing it back together for the world.

It's cool. (chuckling)

And then when COVID hit, it changed everything.

We actually quite quickly jumped to our feet

and started raising money to start producing masks

and give them away to front liners and community members

and people that were immuno compromised.

And we've given away over 75000 masks to date

and are still giving away masks every week.

SUAY is also now half store half food bank.

We recently started a food bank for garment workers

and now each week we're feeding up to 250 garment worker

families a week.

I really urge people that are involved in fashion,

if you're wearing clothes then you should care about this

because these are the same people that are sewing

the clothes that you have on your back every single day.

'Cause change is habitual, right?

What we have to do from a personal level

is to make shifts to create the kind of change

that the world desperately needs.

We're here to show the world

that you do have the opportunity to live every day

doing a little bit better than the day before.

Change is here and we just have to keep trying

to get more people on board.