The 5 R’s, what are they? Pick an answer: 

A. Radical, Revolutionary, Responsible, Reasonable & Regenerative 

B. Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Rent & Recycle 

It’s B. We can use the adjectives of answer A to describe our commitment to the 5 R’s. The 5 R’s are the core of our 2nd value: Protect. This program embraces reduce, reuse, repair, rent & recycle. It’s an organizational scheme for our sustainability initiatives – our actions to make sobriety the new cool. 

Let’s see what’s underneath them. 

Reduce

There are 2 sides to this story in our tinier outdoor apparel world and the larger textile industry – on one side, consumers need to lower their consumption and on the other side, companies need to lower their production. Both are heavily intertwined and feedback into one another. On Picture’s side, our starting point are the following questions: 

1. How do we make a product that is of the highest quality and durability, physical and emotional durability? 

2. How many products do we need to make? 

On your side, we aren’t here to sell you a product you don’t need and sell you a trend that doesn’t last. We stay away from marketing practices that encourage you to buy, buy, buy. Don’t want to contribute to the “All the gear, no idea” concept. What we want to encourage is care, caring for your product so that it lasts forever, and you can have many adventures with it. 

Need examples? Our lifetime repair warranty. Our high product quality. Our collection size. Our sober marketing practices. Our experimentation in new business models. 

Reuse

Imagine you’re given an item, and you are asked to think about ‘how many uses can this item have or be?’ You have to get creative. That’s how we like to think about our products. There are multiple wears from our products, in multiple places. That jacket is worn cycling home from work, worn on a walk around a lake, worn on an intense alpine tour or even wrapped around freshly baked goods to protect them from the rain. And then, if another person gets that jacket from a reseller or a donation, it can be reused again. Think about how many memories this 1 item carries because of all the reuses. 

Reuse isn’t only about wearing again and again… and again. It’s also about reusing potentially wasted fabric scraps to make a collection. Again, we have to get creative. Take a look at our patchwork collection, a great example. 

We want you to get creative, too. And we try to create the space for you to do so. We host upcycling workshops. In them, we bring a whole bunch of old Picture gear, gear that maybe didn’t get the life it deserved. Then, together with partners such as Good Loop, we cut and sew it into a new product like a toiletry bag. 

Repair

Copy & paste from another article but that doesn’t make it any less important nor true! Broke your zipper? Had a little tear? Happens to the best of us. Repair it with us. It doesn’t matter if it happened 2 years in, 20 years in, or 60 years in, we really mean lifetime repair guarantee. The more you care for your gear, the more we achieve this statistic: “Wearing a garment twice as long would lower greenhouse gas emissions from clothing by 44%”. This is crucial to slowing the loop and reducing consumption. If something is broken, the logical answer isn’t buy new – it’s to go repair. We have hit over ~1000 repairs worldwide since winter 2019. Picture has our own after-sales service and are connected to repair centers across Europe and North America. 

Here’s more info on this R here. 

Rent

Rental is an important and fun R! Skiing, snowboarding, surfing, etc. are joyful activities …but they seem to require a lot to do them. If we follow the ownership model, then we fill our closets, garage, and basements with hard & soft equipment. And unless we are full addicts, many of us don’t get the complete usage out of them. Buying a jacket for 1 week of skiing a year isn’t sufficient for your wallet or the planet. Renting is.

We have a lot to say about this topic, it’s one of our favorites, so read more about it directly on our rental website. 

Recycle

Recycling is the 5th of the 5 R’s. It’s additionally seen as the last resort, the last option. If we can’t reduce, reuse, repair and or rent and we tried our hardest, then we recycle. Why? Recycling is commonly labeled as least effective as well as it doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of stuff this world has in circulation.

However, it’s still crucial. This has been on the Picture agenda since day 1. Plastic bottles into jackets, that’s almost old news for us. We believe in it because it reduces fossil fuel usage. We’ve developed and expanded what it means to recycle in the textile world. Now, we turn pre- and post-consumer (fabric scraps and used clothing in common language) into our jackets. That the whole practice behind our _Circular Program, read about that here. 

These 5 R’s will keep growing and flowing while Picture continues to innovate on what our three main values (Ride, Protect, Share) mean to us. We can’t help but be excited to see what comes next!