At Deborah WACE our vision is to inspire a love of wild Tasmanian flora through beauty and design. We continually aim to create a unique and luxurious range of products and provide a valuable design consultancy service which expands the botanical narrative of Tasmania’s wild and threatened botany. This speaks to our business ethos of care for the environment, and informs every area of our decision-making processes and production.
We embrace all aspects of slow fashion and sustainable design practices, creating bespoke and individual pieces that encourage consumers to invest in a unique piece of quality clothing or a fashion accessory. Our repeat pattern fabrics and homeware products are made to last. Our entire range has been produced with less impact on the environment – whilst harnessing ethical business networks, and the skills of local creatives and consultants to execute bold projects.
We are constantly evaluating ways to further reduce our environmental footprint.
From ‘the ground up’, preserving nature is at the heart of every Deborah WACE design. Deborah’s work often takes her to botanical gardens, research herbaria and wild places. All wild material collection is conducted with minimal impact, sustainably, and with the appropriate permissions including collecting flora specimens from private land. After being collected, the specimens are digitised and added to a botanical element library for future reference – negating the need to re-collect specimens and disturb fragile ecologies. Once inked, specimens can often be reused, and each piece is an ambassador for its species.
Inspiration is drawn from her extensive botanical element library and her passion for protecting the natural environment. She combines pressed plant images with drypoint (scribing onto an acrylic printmaking plate) and mono-print original artwork and etchings, which she digitally layers to create rich, complex botanical designs onto fine fabric, wallpaper and a range of architectural substrates.
Deborah WACE uses premium quality fabrics which further enhance and extend the lifespan of wearable items. Our fabrics are sourced from world-leading businesses that pride themselves on their sustainability credentials. When you buy a Deborah WACE piece you are buying a product that has both ethical processes, and a robust supply chain with sustainable practices built in at every stage.
Think Positive Prints is an internationally renowned pioneer in digital fabric printing. They print by the metre onto sustainable natural fabrics using non-toxic reactive dyes, creating unsurpassed print quality with perfect colour balance and exquisite detail. Their fashion prints extend to silks, wools and nylon lycras. They are world leaders in soft furnishing and upholstery prints with consistent colour reproduction using quality organic linens and Australian wool and cottons, achieving commercial grade colour and rub-fastness.
Think Positive is passionate about the environment and has always shunned polyesters.
STSC (Sustainable Textile Supply Chain)supply one of the world’s most sustainable and ethical eco-blend fabrics for the premium luxury market. Deborah WACE uses their newly developed luxury yarn, TENCEL™ LUXE, when producing signature Deborah WACE repeat pattern fabrics for garments.
TENCEL™ LUXE is a brand new textile that is created by blending with the world’s most sustainable and ethical silk; a GOTS organic Peace Silk made by an incredible rural Indian sericulture Co-op. It is made from sustainably sourced wood pulp, and produced using a ‘closed loop’ production process. This process ensures minimal environmental impact thanks to low-process water and energy use, raw material and chemical consumption. STSC partnered TENCEL™ LUXE with their other Mill’s sustainable, organic Peace Silk.
HeapsGood Packaging Hex Wrap is used as a sustainable bubble wrap alternative for product packaging and mailing. It’s 100% recyclable and compostable, using kraft FSC-certified paper, in an expandable honeycomb structure which interlocks without needing tape. It reduces our reliance on plastic, and HeapsGood has teamed up with the Ecologi initiative to plant a tree with every order!
Every effort is made to reduce our footprint on the planet. We focus where we can on utilising a gentler electronic footprint which includes embracing print-free digital marketing and communications as part of our commitment to reduce printing and the associated supply chain environmental impacts.
Breaking the cycle of fast fashion requires timelessness, and nature-themed fashion is an embodiment of what ‘slow fashion’ is about. Plants and humans have always been deeply connected. Our society relies on healthy ecologies. The plant iconography in Deborah WACE designs feature specimens which have existed for thousands of years, and many of these Tasmanian species are endemic or endangered.
When you open a package from the Deborah WACE collection, you’ll immediately be acquainted with the plant species featured in the designs. Packaging features environmental and botanical information about the plants and their status. The message details information about the species, its Latin name, what threats it is under, where it can be found and how it was collected.
Deborah believes that luxury and social responsibility can go hand-in-hand. She strives to use the designs that she creates from her printmaking and from the wild flora of Tasmania, to enliven people to the wonder and vulnerability of the complex ecology of which we are a part. She creates real conversations and stories about habitat loss and biodiversity, inviting a deeper and sustainable connection into the natural world.
Deborah has actively volunteered her personal time with conservation projects and causes to protect threatened natural environments, and to inspire people’s appreciation of these exquisite assets. One of these is the pioneering Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens orchid conservation project.
The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.
Deborah WACE has committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals by embedding sustainable, environmental and socially responsible practices into all elements of our work practices and believes we have an important role in contributing to this universal call to action to tend poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere.
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A fabric designer, ecological activist, plant advocate and professional printmaker from Hobart, Tasmania.
Deborah WACE acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work
