How Sundried is making sustainable sportswear from plastic bottles and coffee grounds

There’s nothing new about the idea of staying hydrated during exercise. But how about wearing the remains of your pre-workout coffee or energy drink?

The performance of eco-friendly brand Sundried suggests the latter is increasingly popular for those concerned with the environmental cost of training gear.

Sundried’s range, which includes clothes made from recycled coffee grounds and plastic bottles, has grown from six product styles to more than 100 within four years. Having initially predicted revenues of £3m for 2020, CEO Daniel Puddick claims his company could have doubled that figure if it had been possible to meet demand during the pandemic.

The 43-year-old runs the business from Shoeburyness in Essex, the town he grew up in. But when he launched Sundried in 2016, Puddick’s goals were global.

Before selling a single T-shirt, he’d spent more than £10,000 securing website domains and social media accounts and started to register international trademarks.  

“I believed in what I was going to do,” says Puddick, who spent two years researching and preparing to enter the multibillion-pound sportswear sector.

“If you launch your brand in any market, people say it’s a crowded market. I was quite heavily involved in triathlon and cycling, so I was going to events, seeing what people were wearing, looking at trends.

“The ethical side came from becoming a parent, and thinking if I’m creating a company, I don't want my children to turn around in 15 years’ time and say: ‘Why did you do that when you knew it was bad?’

“I want to be accountable for my actions. As you get older, and have children, you stop to think about the bigger picture more.”

A focus on sustainability helped Puddick secure £75,000 from the Low Carbon Innovation Fund as part of an initial £175,000 Crowdcube effort.

Sundried’s production was based in Portugal for the first year, but costs meant manufacturing has since taken place in China, where Sundried staff have visited the two small factories involved and had them audited for worker conditions.

The process of converting cappuccinos into clothing, where used coffee grounds are processed under low temperatures and high pressure so they can be woven into yarn and combined with recycled plastic fibres, also takes place in China.

“If you manufacture in Portugal and ship here by road, the carbon footprint of making in China and it coming over on a boat is about the same anyway,” says Puddick.

He outlines a similar balancing act over textile choices, weighing the biodegradability of silk and wool against the animal processes involved and the fabrics’ suitability for sport.

About 40 per cent of Sundried’s current range comes from fully recycled materials, though Puddick stresses that all new pieces for 2021 will fall into this category, bringing the total above 50 per cent.

Currently, it takes about nine plastic bottles to produce a T-shirt, but Sundried staff are also looking at discarded fishing nets for new products and reissuing designs such as gloves made from bamboo offcuts.

For all this, performance remains a priority. “We're not just an ethical brand, we want to be technically superior as well,” says Puddick. He describes some 100 per cent biodegradable T-shirts – tested in his compost bin – as “lovely to wear” but unsuitable for vigorous exercise.

Other options have stayed solid throughout 2020. While competition triathlon suits dipped as races were cancelled across the US, this was offset by demand for home training and cycling gear, with the latter especially popular in Sundried’s top export market, Italy.

That said, manufacturing has remained a challenge in the pandemic. “There's knock-on effects with the fabric; the factories; the shipping channels; the logistics,” Puddick says. “We could have doubled our revenue this year if we had the product.”

The demographic calling for those products is mostly aged between 25 and 40, with a near-equal balance of male and female customers. Puddick’s next plan to boost engagement is a Sundried app, where he ultimately wants 1,000 personal trainers to offer advice and exercise plans – paid and for free – to customers.

The app is set to launch in 2021, though using technology to involve fitness professionals as “ambassadors” unites two longstanding points on Puddick’s CV.

While studying design at Central St Martins in the late 1990s he taught himself to build websites, then did so for firms involved in everything from knee supports to nightclub architecture.

Having sold his share in a web business when he graduated, Puddick founded Sunglasses Shop as an e-commerce proposition in 2001. When he sold the company a decade later, it boasted revenues of £5m and 50 staff.  

And plenty of employees have been impacted by the other key theme in Puddick’s approach. His strong belief in the value of physical activity meant he regularly took Sunglasses Shop workers running on more than 100 steps at Southend seafront.

“It was voluntary,” he hastens to add of a practice that eventually saw “rows of people” charging up and down the cliff.

A similar approach is evident at Sundried, where Puddick has used the idea of “every hour on the hour” to encourage staff to move during their working day.

“It really sparks your thinking – no one can sit there and concentrate properly for six hours,” he says.

“You get up, run up a flight of stairs, and it just resets you. You're fresh. Get up, do some press-ups, have a drink [...] It makes you more productive.”

Puddick himself hits an exercise bike at 5am six days a week and works out on gymnastics rings, though he’s still recovering from a broken hip sustained in unlikely circumstances in November 2019.

After handing a coat to his now-five-year-old son, Puddick was zipping back to the car on his kids’ scooter when he crashed off a kerb. (A track record of triathlons and punishing cycle races arguably makes his good-humoured recollection of the incident more impressive.)

Less hazardous pastimes include practising piano with his nine-year-old daughter; Puddick names 1990s jazz-funk outfit Jamiroquai as his favourite artist. Given his enthusiasm on the benefits of staircase running, a low-energy choice would perhaps have been a surprise.