woman with camera

Sustainable & Social impact with the Bigger Picture

Published: 28th January 2022 Last updated: 28th January 2022

I am Freek van Litsenburg, a 23-year-old masters’ student at the Tilburg University and also the founder of the sustainable fashion brand ‘Bigger Picture Clothing’. With this start-up, I aim to disrupt the fashion industry. We do this by creating a 100% transparent supply chain, from the clothing we produce sustainably and ethically in Portugal, all the way up to the water facilities we build in Ethiopia & Tanzania.

At one hand there is the input-side of our business, in which we try to minimize the negative impact that we have on the planet, while maximizing our positive impact. On the other hand, there is the output-side, in other words what we do with our revenues. A significant amount (approximately 15%) of all revenues is directly reinvested into social projects all over the globe, so that also the humankind benefits from our existence. All of this comes with one massive requirement, namely that all operations are 100% transparent. In this way, our community can exactly see to what he/she is contributing.

Freek - Bigger Picture Clothing

Adopting rainforest with a clothing collection

6 months ago, we launched our first ever clothing collection. The feedback is very positive, both about the concept itself, as the high quality of our products. Besides a chunk of capital that we have been able to earn, we have also gathered a lot of knowledge and developed significant skillsets. We would love to apply all of this to a follow-up collection. The theme for this collection is already known, namely ‘sustain the beauty of the rainforest’. For every T-shirt we sell, we adopt 1 square meter of rainforest in Costa Rica, while we adopt 2 square meters for every sweater we sell. For this project we cooperate with the Dutch foundation ‘Adopteer Regenwoud’. With our support we can make sure that large fields of rainforest can acquire the protected status in the Costa Rican law. In this way, we make sure that the pure beauty of our planet can be sustained. In order to realize our second collection, we need to take a few more steps.

Tiu challenge - Freek - Bigger picture clothing

First investment already in

As transparent as we wish to be, I can honestly tell you that we are currently missing a final piece of the puzzle from a financial point of view. With an additional investment of €3.500 in total, we would be able to fully roll out our budget plan. We could both cover our production- and development costs, as well as our tacit marketing plan which we need, in order to make sure that the launch will be a success. So, I would say: “do you see the Bigger Picture? Then make sure to join us on our mission to establish the new world, by spreading joy & inspiring others.”