My name is not Franky Dune.  I am not from France, yet that is where the brand Franky Dune was born. I am not Portuguese, yet that is the country in which I live. My name is Karen Yakymishen, and I am from Canada.

Franky Dune is the name of my second slow, sustainable fashion brand that I started on the SW coast of France, selling only one design. The Franky Dune Wrap Pants.

How did the Franky Dune Directory come to be?

Moving to Portugal just weeks before the first lockdown, the opportunity to register my slow fashion business was on pause. Government offices closed, my residency appointments cancelled, and an endless amount of homeschooling caused me to shift, to pivot (Word of the Year 2020?) like so many of us had to do. I moved from designing and creating products to agency and consulting services.

I began to notice a theme amongst designers in online forums and social media: More and more designers were searching for sustainable fabric from suppliers that offered low minimum order quantities (MOQs), meaning they would sell 50 metres wholesale instead of thousands of metres.

Designers were turning to made-to-order models. E-commerce exploded since physical shops were closed, and more people had time to realise their dreams of starting their own conscious fashion brands.

Yet sourcing fabric online can often feel frustrating. Out of date manufacturer/suppliers websites, vague information on sustainability. I saw everyday in facebook groups fashion designers asking where they could source fabric. But the comments were always from the same people: agencies understandably wanting to sell their services, or a manufacturer that seemed to “specialise” in anything any one was asking for (that is a large red flag!).

Everyday, I would hop on and offer a link, or a contact and saw quickly how much that helped designers. Private DMs thanking me, new social media followers, and overtime, a new community of designers that supports each other as we all grow our businesses and brands.

At this point, I decided to turn my own personal contacts, my little black book if you will, that I have grown and curated over the years to create Franky Dune Directories as a way to help fashion designers find and source fabric suppliers quickly and easily. With a heavy focus on fabrics that aren’t choking out the planet (why are we still making virgin polyester??)

With this shiny new website, sustainable, eco, slow, conscious, made-to-order fashion designers will have a whole lot of time back with a single place to go to effortlessly source low MOQ materials for their brand. The directory has grown 5x in the last year alone! New categories are added as the network expands.

Also available in the Directory? 

• Certified fabric suppliers

• Ethical manufacturers

• Sustainable white-label garments for your merch (I’m looking at you YouTubers)

When the world opened up again, I kept access to my resources available at a low price for designers wanting to source for themselves and build up their own resource list while my agency continues to offer sourcing of fabric & trims and product manufacturing for clients.

If you are a manufacturer wanting to become part of the directory, please head to contact page to let us know what you offer.