Mark+Fold for Community Clothing
Since Autumn 2024 we have been working with pioneering British brand Community Clothing to turn fabric offcuts into high quality sustainable stationery. Shop the Mark+Fold for Community Clothing collection, or read on to find out more about what's behind it all.
Patrick Grant, British designer and founder of Community Clothing
About Community Clothing
Community Clothing was founded in 2016 by Patrick Grant, British designer and Great British Sewing Bee judge. The social enterprise was set up to support British craftsmanship and create skilled jobs in the UK. Their premium quality clothes are a fraction of the price of other brands, thanks to their business model — low margins allow them to keep quality high and production local.
In October 2024 we launched the Mark+Fold for Community Clothing stationery range, using a special custom-made paper, produced by Paper Foundation, using denim offcuts from the Community Clothing jeans factory in Lancashire.
Paper Foundation hand-made paper workshop, Cumbria UK
Our shared values
Community Clothing and Mark+Fold share an unwavering commitment to transparency, craft and sustainability. Since 2015, Mark+Fold has always been about transparency and sustainability, and we proudly share every last detail of every material and process we use. We believe it's important to champion craft and keep skills alive, whilst equipping people with the information they need to make more informed choices about the products we buy and the businesses we choose to support.
Paper-making in Cumbria at Paper Foundation
Paper made in Cumbria from 100% denim offcuts
Linen 'rag' was traditionally used in paper-making, as the garment industry sent their waste to paper mills to be turned into paper. The Levi's factory in the US famously supplied a lot of raw material to Crane's, whose cotton paper is still in production today. But this practice has fallen out of fashion.
Meanwhile, the fashion industry has a major issue with its waste. Even the most efficient pattern-cutting process will use only 90% of the fabric, so 10% goes to waste and most companies simply send this to landfill. But Community Clothing wanted to do something different, and this is where the idea for our collaboration was born.
Denim offcuts are collected in the cutting room in Lancashire, and sorted by colour (black, indigo and blue). This is sent just a few hundred miles up the road to Burneside in Cumbria where the hand-made paper atelier Paper Foundation transforms it into a beautiful tactile paper.
Singer-sewn binding at Hipwells Bindery in Suffolk
Printed and bound in Suffolk
We work with a family-run bookbinders in Suffolk called Hipwells. Now run by David and Vicki, who took over when their father retired, specialising in small batch specialist bindings and Singer-sewing. Vicki learned to use the sewing machine from her grandfather who was an upholsterer, and his portrait hangs proudly over her sewing machine in the bindery.
The books are blind debossed, to keep things simple (and recyclable), and to allow the paper to speak for itself.
Mark+Fold for Community Clothing notebooks
The Mark+Fold for Community Clothing range
In October 2024 we launched our first stationery range for Community Clothing, all made with covers in the 100% denim paper we had made at Paper Foundation. The range consists of 3 A5 Singer-sewn Notebooks and 3 A6 Singer-sewn Notebooks, each featuring a different denim colour. The denim offcuts are sorted in the cutting room, so we can make a pure black, indigo and blue to match the jeans. We have even colour-matched the thread on the notebooks to match the jeans!
Shop the Mark+Fold for Community Clothing range
Learn more:
Paper-making in Cumbria
Printing & Binding in Suffolk
