SUSTAINABILITY
Designed in Lapland, Finland. Made in Europe.
Design like nothing else.
From the cool side of the world.
“Hálo’s sustainability is based on high quality materials, finished workmanship, timeless design and slow fashion cycle.”
Hálo shares eight seasons of Lapland through different series. "We want to show the beauty of Nordics through every product - people to experience, feel and sense the soul of hálo".
Depending of the time of the year the collection is inspired by the vividness of the northern lights, the delicateness of the midnight sun, various colors of the fall foliage and the dark shades of polar nights.
The design process of each item begins in Lapland, northern Finland, at the brand’s roots. The same place where the collections get their inspiration from and where hálo’s designer, Jukka Puljujärvi, is originated.
One of the key elements in hálo’s sustainability is its timeless design with high quality workmanship. The clothes themselves are designed to be in style from season to season and from year to another. Hálo believes in versatility where the fundamental thing is to style your clothes up or down, depending on the occasion and the season. The fashion industry changes and so do trends, but by combining timeless pieces, you’ll achieve something much more stylish.
Hálo offers timeless treasures, everyday silks, life-long investment pieces and exclusive collections. All prints are exclusively designed by hálo in which the value always remains due to its timeless design.
In addition, hálo also has an exclusivity to use Lappish painter Reidar Särestöniemi’s art in their collections. Paintings chosen for the collaboration are “the most inspiring pieces of art”, clarifies Jukka Puljujärvi. The exclusive collaboration collection, hálo x Reidar Särestöniemi, is a recognition to the famous Finnish painter, a way to keep his legacy and the art alive. From every sold item, a percentage is donated to the foundation of Reidar Särestöniemi.
When the clothes are timeless and long lasting – there is no need to always start over
Hálo follows a slow fashion cycle, which in this case means the collections are permanent. Even though each season hálo introduces new styles and drops of collections – many of the items are carryovers from previous seasons. New styles and collections are introduced to the selection regularly, but without always replacing the pieces already in the collection.
We want to sustain the value of our products and the trust of our customers. Small production series and avoiding over-production allows us to keep selling the items without a warehouse clearance when the season changes. We believe you should never buy anything less but your favorite pieces, which you know you will use for years to come.
When it comes to the choice of yarns and fabrics – we seek for the best ones
All our fabrics come from Europe. We try to find the best quality from near-by. At this moment, our GOTS, Oeko-TEX 100, Global recycled standard and Vegan certificated fabrics come from Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Lithuania and Turkey.
- Italy is well-known for their luxurious silk, high-quality cashmere and wool fabrics.
- American-grown, extra-long staple supima cotton fiber knitted into fabric in Portugal is the finest there is.
- French traditional workmanship in laces and jacquard fabrics are most famous in the world.
- Turkey offers innovative solutions for technical fabrics and great selection of recycled materials.
We want to guarantee the garment has a long and happy life.
In an industry this consumptive, we think the least we can do is to prefer recycled, environment-friendly and unrefined natural materials. Sometimes when it is crucial for the design, we have to choose a manmade material, which in some cases might make the product last even longer. For this reason, we tend to prefer 100% pure materials so they are totally recyclable.
Among natural materials like cotton, linen and silk we also use environment-friendly tencel, recycled viscose, recycled cashmere and ethical reindeer leather, to mention a few. We are constantly looking for new, even more sustainable ideas and materials to produce our garments from. However, there is still a limited amount of those on the table. Compromises are still to be made when it comes to the best possible combination of design, quality and price.
In early 2020, we were happy to be the first ones to use V-certificate labelled 100% vegan fabric and from every sold vegan product a percentage is donated to protecting the Arctic areas.
“V-label certificated (as in 100% vegan) fabric means there is no animal supplement used in any product nor process. Our European manufacturer is the first and for now the only one with a certificate to produce vegan fabric.”, explained the designer Jukka Puljujärvi when launching hálo’s SS20 collection.
Hálo is using 
icon to indicate which products have recycled material in them.
Finding the best makers in the industry
All our pieces are produced by carefully and responsibly hand-picked manufacturers inside Europe. We seek for the small businesses, who we can relate to and trust their work ethics and quality of work. We are weekly if not daily in contact with our factories.
“It’s important to us to keep the chain of production as ecological and transparent as possible. We want to show an example as leading the Nordic fashion industry towards what it should be.” notes Marta Valtovirta, co-founder and CEO of hálo.
Some places do things better than others. We need to find the strengths of each manufacturer to accomplish the quality and design we are going for and stand behind what we want to provide. Our signature jacquards are woven to fabric in France, the exclusive artist collaboration prints are printed to fabric in Germany and Italy, our shoes are made in Portugal and the most of our knits are handknitted in Italy by the best ones in business.
Since the beginning the focus in our production has been in the Baltic countries, especially in the Northern Estonia, only 80 kilometers away, from where the products are delivered to us by road and ferry transportation.
Our small family owned factory in Turkey on the other hand provides bigger production capacity with special technics. We have achieved long-term relationship with all our manufacturers to ensure the best quality for our products.
We want that our factory workers are getting paid well and it is important to us that they do reasonable hours enabling them to spend time with their families too.
Spreading the love – shipping and packaging
The goods arrive to our warehouse in a few plastic bags and cardboard boxes which we always aim to reuse.
In our packaging to the customers, the pieces are wrapped in silk paper and then put to our signature cardboard boxes and delivered to our customers with the best environmental option of shipping there is at that moment by foot, bike, road transport or air.
However, the eco-friendliest option for our customers when making a purchase is to visit our hálo store in the heart of Helsinki, Finland or to pick-up the webstore order from the store.