We aim for every aspect of production, from the cotton growers in India to the manufacturing in UK to be traceable, tested and controlled for quality.

Thunderpants is a fun and creative business, but the realities of the garment industry can be harsh on both the people involved and the environment. We would like to ensure that we are doing all that we can to improve the lives of everyone involved, at the same time ensuring minimum impact on the environment. To do this we are constantly striving for the most sustainable options possible and regularly reviewing how we can improve or make changes to lessen our ecological and social footprint throughout the lifecycle of our garment.

People Before Profit
Empowering people, being fair and supporting communities are essential values of the Thunderpants culture. Maintaining open, honest, and respectful relationships with staff, suppliers, manufacturers and customers are key to our core values. We are passionate about the slow fashion movement - cheap prices almost always means someone along the supply chain is paying through losing quality of life and human rights. 

Organic Cotton
We use Fairtrade Certified Organic Cotton yarn to ensure that our fabric suppliers abide by the strict protocols required to achieve the certifications incorporating the International Labour Laws and Ethical Trading Initiative base code. This has an enormous social impact on those growers and workers in India where our yarn comes from, alongside minimising the ecological issues around cotton growing and production. Read all about Fairtrade cotton standards here.

We use Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified cotton. Grown without the use of any synthetic chemicals such as fertilisers or pesticides and never uses GMO seeds, azo dyes, heavy metals, formaldehyde or chlorine.

All the yarn for our cotton fabrics come from Vardhman textiles Chandigarh Road, Ludhiana, Punjab-141010, India. We don't deal directly with this supplier. This is a very large organisation with 10,000+ employees with strict protocols around HR, sustainability and women’s support, plus education for farmers and workers, building schools and being involved in the community that their workers and growers live in. They are members of the Better Cotton Initiative. We have not visited Vardhman, but would love to. Here is a link to Vardhman's awards and certification documents including current Fairtrade and GOTS certifications. Here is a link to Vardhman's policies 

UK Made
We want to keep as much of Thunderpants production in the UK as we possibly can, supporting small UK-based operators at every opportunity. We work with a small manufacturer in the North of England - June, Barbara and Anne-Marie make all your Thunderpants and we make all the cotton drill items.

Minimising Waste
We save all our fabric scraps created during the making of Thunderpants to keep them out of landfill and reuse or repurpose them into anything from cleaning cloths to craft projects. If you would like some please get in touch! We use unbleached brown card and water based black ink for our packaging and keep all printed promotional stuff to an absolute minimum. Our mail bags are made from kraft brown paper, are 100% biodegradable and can be reused several times.