In the mid-2000s when Craig von Schroeder traded his soccer cleats for dress shoes, he underwent the first of his career changes. Leaving behind his professional soccer playing days, he entered the legal field which indirectly led him to the industry he was destined for: fashion. In the nearly 15 years since, he has launched bespoke menswear concept Commonwealth Proper, and this July Green Suit, a sustainably focused ready-to-wear brand.
Fashion wasn’t an immediately apparent choice for von Schroeder, but he became more aware of men’s apparel after becoming a lawyer and working at Philadelphia firms Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young, and then Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall and Furman. Frustrated with the loose fit of suiting popular at the time, he began working with a tailor to create a slimmer silhouette.
It wasn’t long before his interests were firmly in fashion, so he gave up practicing law to pursue entrepreneurship. He launched Commonwealth Proper in Philadelphia in 2008 and has since expanded to Pittsburgh and Atlanta. A decade later, the idea for Green Suit came to him.
Sustainable practices are the foundation of Green Suit. The idea occurred to him around 2018 when he was participating in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at the Community College of Philadelphia, which helps entrepreneurs by providing business resources. “It really retools you for the next level,” von Schroeder said, likening it to a “mini-MBA.”
Von Schroeder was inspired to seek green alternatives after reading a study from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that same year about the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas production. It found that the global fashion industry produced 2.1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, or 4% of the global total. Though large-scale emissions didn’t directly apply to his business, he saw room for improvement. “I still felt responsible and saw an opportunity to make a difference through the lane of suiting that wasn't being voiced and doing it in a sustainable way from the ground up,” he said.
As such, traceability from crop to yarn became a cornerstone. It took nearly four years for von Schroeder to fully develop and source products. He works with U.S. cotton farmers and a South Carolina company called Unifi that uses recycled plastic bottles and turns them into thread.
Green Suit, which retails for $995, is made of a 65% blend of USDA cotton and 35% Repreeve Reflexx fabric which he’s dubbed GreenFlex. Each suit contains 30 recycled bottles and that fabric gives it “great recovery, great mobility, great durability,” von Schroeder said adding that the suits are meant to “be lived in and worn hard, because that's how I live.”
To ensure the fabric met his standards, von Schroeder spent six months biking to and from work in the suit. His goal is for it be “something that's elegant, refined, that you can wear as an investment banker, as an attorney, at a wedding,” he said.
To fund Green Suit, von Schroeder tapped friends and family for an undisclosed amount of seed funding and more recently turned to Kickstarter, where he raised over $21,000 from 47 backers in a campaign that ended May 26. Looking ahead, he expects to raise another friends and family round, with a goal of vastly growing before potentially seeking outside investment.
Green Suit sales are direct to consumer and von Schroeder anticipates maintaining a low inventory as part of his strategy to cut down on waste.
In that same vein, he has teamed up with a company, also in South Carolina, to turn unusable scraps into meditation pillows, a nod to his own growing mindfulness practices and the way many such practices have been adopted amid Covid-19.
Larger pieces of excess material are being turned into ties, which retail for $95, and totes, which are $85. Down the line, von Schroeder plans to initiate a program that will allow customers to purchase gently used Green Suits as a way to further divert waste. That would also allow for a more accessible entry purchase point, von Schroeder said.
Furthering the commitment to sustainability, Green Suit is partnering with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Fund which seeks to support sustainable development globally. “It feels like a really holistic way to approach sustainability,” he said.
What is it about suiting that helped your businesses persist through two economic downturns?
We started [Commonwealth Proper] during a huge recession in 2008, but I think when the recession hit, and I also think as we're emerging now, there's a kind of return to normalcy, if you will, a return to things that are tried and true and a man's suit really hasn't changed much for 200 years. … Our business for Commonwealth has doubled over the last year from pre-pandemic [levels] so things are really getting back [to normal]. People are wearing suits more, people are going back to work, and I think there's also that idea that the sweatpant can only get you so far. … I think the modern man revels in this idea of taking the style quotient up a bit.
Why Kickstarter?
This is a global issue. Climate change is global, workers’ rights are global, so my idea was to present this to the global audience. And to me, the best way of doing that was through Kickstarter, because they have a global reach. … It's a great way to introduce to the global community a suit that hopefully can address a global problem.
What other products are you considering?
I'm thinking about doing a vest. I think we'll stay in the wheelhouse of the suiting and then potentially shirts, but I need to develop that fabric.
