Karma Gear

It is run by partners Ellie and Jim who bought Karma Gear 13 years ago as a festival stall business. We soon created a website to sell online and continue to trade at many festivals during the summer, including Glastonbury. Over the years we have used our designs inspired by festival and hippy fashion, and feedback received at festivals, to develop a range of clothing and accessories that’s colourful and comfy, and environmentally and socially conscious.
Every year we take our design ideas and travel to Nepal to collaborate and create new lines with family cooperatives and artisans in and around Kathmandu. In our experience, the quality of Nepali clothing is much higher than other surrounding Asian markets. Over the last 13 years we have developed a close working relationship with many of our suppliers that has meant being able to realise our designs to create clothing and accessories that we, and our festival customers, love. It also means we see first hand where our products are made and can work to ensure working standards for the people who make them are kept high. We always pay a fair price and work hard to ensure that our products are beneficial to the people of Nepal. We work hard to minimise our environmental impact, constantly researching innovative, recycled and sustainable materials and making manufacturing improvements.
Our products include ethical adult and children’s clothing and accessories, home décor and instrument cases and bags. We use sustainable, natural and recycled materials, alongside environmentally friendly natural dyes and processes to make our products. Some may know our style of clothing as ‘hippy style’ in that we value comfort and colour in our clothes, as well as being sourced and created in an environmentally and socially conscious way. The drab tones of the high street are avoided when designing our lines and we instead go for deep, bright colours and bold prints. Our best sellers include cotton trousers, harem pants, grandad shirts, cosy fleece lined jackets, comfy jumpsuits and gorgeous cotton dresses.
We have a growing range of felt products and have great fun working alongside Nepali artisans in making bold, colourful gifts and accessories that appeal to all ages. Our felt products include purses, brooches, keyrings, bags and variously themed hanging mobiles. Themes so far include dinosaurs and jungle animals and enjoy dreaming up new themes each year. Hemp is also an important material to us as it is both sustainable (crop uses less water and processing energy than cotton) and hard wearing. At present we offer hemp backpacks, wallets, hats and instrument case although we hope to expand this range in future.
We are active members of the BAFTS – Fairtrade Network UK and publicly set ourselves environmental and fair trade goals each year. In this way, we are committed to the World Fair Trade Organisation’s Ten Principles of Fair Trade and continue to improve our sourcing and trading practices to ensure we are as sustainable and socially beneficial as possible. We are completely solar powered on all festival sites and use renewable energy at both our bases in the UK and Nepal. We use recycled and/or reusable packaging and storage solutions for our products. We do not give out plastic bags, and we offer electronic receipts to our customers to save on paper.