By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now
Who’d have thought that silk skirts could change lives?
Fans of Ecoquette
Marianne Tyrrell suspected they could. A life coach and former delegate to the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, she’s always known that when women feel visually transformed they often feel mentally changed. Add to that the knowledge that, by looking and feeling good, they are creating jobs for other women across the globe. Then add that they’re helping the environment — and saving gorgeous vintage silks from certain doom.
That’s a win-win-win-win for most women. And ditto for the men who care for them!
Two years ago, Tyrrell, an entrepreneur and former attorney in Harrisburg, PA (now based in Boston), founded a line of exotic skirts made from vintage silk saris from India, called EcoQuette . The idea could have been a one-off for Tyrrell, who bought a vintage sari-cum-skirt while in Puerto Rico a few years ago. But once back on the mainland, based on responses from friends and strangers alike, she realized that something about the skirt had a powerful impact on those who saw her wearing it. When people continued to comment, a light bulb flicked on: Why not find someone to help her fashion a line of skirts from gently-worn saris — items that might otherwise end up in an Indian landfill.
It all happened organically, the wife and mother of five grown children says, explaining what’s become a “festival” phenomenon, as EcoQuette skirts seem to fly off the racks every time she sells them at events. (Her debut event was Earth Day of 2008).
“I am a lawyer, and I was clerking for a 1st Circuit Court judge,” she says, reflecting on EcoQuette’s fast evolution, “and since Puerto Rico is in the 1st Circuit, we would go down sometimes and help that court when they were too busy.”
During one of those trips, Tyrrell bought a striking, multi-colored sari-skirt and wore it as often as she could. She noticed people staring (in a good way), smiling, or simply approaching her to ask where she’d bought it.
EcoQuette sells its recycled and refashioned saris at fairs in the MidAtlantic and also online
“Everywhere I went, people would just flip out! They’d say, ‘That’s so beautiful, where did you get it?’ When I’d tell them that I bought it in Puerto Rico, their faces would just drop, because they probably weren’t going to go to Puerto Rico and buy one. This kept happening, and finally I said, ‘I’m just going to go into business and sell them.’”
In short order, Tyrrell researched online-sales business models, found a supplier of vintage sari based in Jaipur, India – “a woman who gave me assurances of Fair Trade practices that I was comfortable with” — and launched the site. Now EcoQuette is a family affair; both her adult daughters and her husband help with website management and client orders.
By the time she launched her line in ‘08, Tyrrell had left the Circuit Court clerking business, and had gone back to climate-change consulting.
“My work has always revolved around environmental things, and I decided I was going to do this as part of that. I was only going to do it as a sustainable practice, and only using natural fabrics and vintage fabrics, so that I wasn’t contributing to the production of new material.”
After intensive research, she found a woman in Jaipur who manufactures them for EcoQuette. Tyrrell’s goal, ultimately, is to encourage women in other regions of the United States (and possibly beyond) to handle certain territories, such as in California, the Pacific Northwest and the Austin/Central Texas area, and spread the EcoQuette phenom. By doing so, she will help other women start businesses, thereby creating a trickle-down system of good will, good Earth practice, and hopefully, good income.
In “high season” — May through September, when Tyrrell and company hit a lot of eco/sustainability festivals — EcoQuette earns about $50,000 a month in sales. And when it’s not festival season in the Mid-Atlantic and New England, where she is based, her online sales move at a nice clip. Word is traveling and sales are growing.
“In many ways, these skirts have the power to transform lives. You’re helping women — with income, and to feel better. I really find that when women put on something beautiful, they look at themselves in the mirror and their breath is just taken away. Not typical for American women. They say, ‘That’s me?!’”
Perhaps most gratifying to Tyrrell is that on some elemental level (clothing is definitely elemental), the women who inherit these lush fabrics can find a deep connection to their feminine side, as well as to humanity at large. Because whether you’re buying a vintage dress in a big-city boutique, wearing your late grandmother’s hand-me-down 1940’s hat, or purchasing a skirt made from antique saris, you are donning something that once covered another person’s skin — and very possibly it’s someone with whom you may have thought you had nothing in common.
Men don’t tend to find this notion very moving (often-times, to the contrary!). But for women, Tyrrell says, there is something universally feminizing about it. Call it the Family of Woman.
“The ‘gift,’ ” she adds, lies in realizing what unites us as women. We may think we’re extremely different because we come from different backgrounds, religions or income brackets. But “when they buy this skirt that some other woman has worn, they find a gift in it. It may be a small bloodstain from a finger prick, but somehow they’re connecting to other women,” Tyrrell says.
In discussing how she launched EcoQuette, Tyrrell doesn’t mention the details of her impressive eco dossier. So we’ll do it for her:
While working for ICF International, a consulting firm in Virginia, she was project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Smart Growth Implementation Assistance” projects and also helped integrate ICF’s Smart Growth and Climate Change groups. She also has worked for the Center for Climate Change Strategies and the Environmental Law Institute. And while working for 1st Circuit Court Judge J. Michael Deasy (U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Hampshire), she published an article — “Clarifying the Limits of Lucas: Reasserting the Value of Government Police Power through Land Planning over Property Rights Interests” — which appeared in the Widener Law Journal in 2003. Also in 2003, Tyrrell was a delegate to the 2003 U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. She also is a Vice Chair of the American Bar Association’s subcommittee on Sustainable Development, Ecosystems and Climate Change.
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