From plastic bottles to blazers: Mumbai retailer rethinks corporate uniforms

Mumbai: A question from his eight-year-old son after online school stuck with Mumbai retailer Kapil Bhatia. “Today we learnt that by 2050, there will be a lot of plastic waste in the ocean. Why is no one doing anything about this?” the boy asked.

Bhatia, a commerce graduate and veteran of the retail industry, is director of Cambridge Textiles. The venture manufactures and retails readymade garments and supplies uniforms, corporate wear and accessories to various service industries and government organisations.

“He was clearly upset at the sorry state of affairs,” Bhatia said of his son. The question lingered. In 2019, while participating in exhibitions to expand his apparel business, an incident caused Bhatia to revisit his son’s worries regarding plastic waste in the ocean.

While at the exhibition, Bhatia was approached by a customer with a request to make garments from recycled plastic bottles. “The gentleman was from a multinational corporation and looking for uniforms for his team. It was thought-provoking,” said Bhatia, who told the gentleman he would get back and went on to research the idea.

Making garments from plastic, he found, was prevalent in Europe and a well-established industry. While in India too there are companies that are engaged in producing garments from plastic, there weren’t many focused on corporate garments. This would be a first, thought Bhatia.

“He wanted me to make shirts, blazers, and trousers, which made the task daunting, but I decided to give it a try, and thus Unirec was conceptualised in Mumbai in 2021,” he said.

Bhatia, the founder of Unirec, a sustainable fashion brand that manufactures garments out of plastic bottles, added that his belief in the model was cemented when they completed their first order for a bank, comprising 500 T-shirts made out of plastic.

The success of this led to numerous orders pouring in from corporates around India, said Bhatia.

He shares his thought process behind establishing Unirec was simple: why restrict when you can explore?“Recycled polyester can be used to produce shirts, jackets and T-shirts, then why not formal suits and trousers too? We decided to build Unirec into a comprehensive market whose end goal would be to reduce the plastic waste finding its way to landfills.”