GIVING BACK

Local communities we are supporting through art and craft projects

Terény Village Ceramic

We continue to create employment opportunities for women in the Hungarian village of Terény, through the production of ceramic items and buttons for Nanushka, an ongoing community project we have committed to since the start of our partnership in 2019. The motivation of this project is two-fold: to support and empower this community, while increasing the ratio of preferred fibers and materials in our collections by phasing out plastic detailing and replacing it with organic, handcrafted finishes.

Ukraine Refugees Program

Hungary, where our brand is headquartered, shares a border with Ukraine, and when the war started, Nanushka decided to use the company’s infrastructure and communications platform to support Ukrainian refugees. We partnered with the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta to provide food, accommodation, clothing and transport in Budapest for those seeking shelter. We have also worked with Budapest’s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) to create a Help Pack scheme, supplying care packages that provide people with basic necessities, and we have teamed up with Maverick Lodges to continually provide additional shelter for anyone displaced.

Conscious Textile Group

In September 2022, Nanushka and Budapest’s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME)’s Innovation Center launched the Conscious Textile Group, a material R&D Hub designed to explore innovative ways to use post- production textiles in a circular manner.

The Conscious Textile Group comprises international researchers, academics, students, and industry experts, all dedicated to advancing sustainable efforts in textile production and usage within the fashion industry. As part of this initiative, MOME and Nanushka created a research fellowship program with an open call in ‘Down to the fiber’ recycling, aiming to provide meaningful results for textile circularity.

The 12-month research fellowship, during which fellows will receive financial and operational support to conduct their research, should aim to contribute to textile waste recycling and should capitalize on the design expertise available in the University’s community and industrial perspective from the Nanushka team. The Conscious Textile Development Program was also launched as a part of the collaboration, where MOME applicants have been tasked to develop innovative ways to reduce deadstock materials on an industrial scale. Participants of the development program will carry out the research phase, the feasibility study to then work with Nanushka on the potential industrialization of their innovation.

Volunteering Days

To encourage employees to give back to our communities, we launched our volunteering program to provide all of our team members with the opportunity to spend one paid working day a year helping at a range of charitable organizations while team building outside of the office space. In 2022, a total of 58 colleagues have participated in different volunteering activities: in Budapest, one day has been dedicated to supporting our community by renovating a kindergarten while two days were dedicated to the creation of a herbal garden through permaculture, whereas in London, we supported a city farm in their daily activities for a day.