By Kirsten Mowrey

“How’s the fit?”

The hiking pants swished as I walked, hugging my legs as I squatted, lunged, and brought my knees to my chest. Not as tight as a legging but not as loose as a typical hiking pant, they ghosted over my skin, covering it, but not hampering movement a bit. I pushed my hands in the front pockets, felt the tug at the elastic waist, and checked out the zippered back pockets. A barely-there logo of an elephant shimmered near my left hip on the black fabric. I found the fit comfortable. I could wear these pants all day.

I sampled these pants courtesy of John Ames, co-founder of local activewear company Joob activewear. Located off Jackson Road, I drove down a short gravel driveway that ended at four buildings surrounded by mature trees and a green lawn perfect for concerts or picnics. It was early on a Friday and the setback made the area surprisingly quiet, even though traffic rushed past. I was in the retail area, directly off the entrance, a space lined with professional photographs of beautiful people in outdoor settings, and racks with displays of pants, jackets, shirts, and a table covered with caps and beanies.

As I walked around, Ames’ craggy kind face was knitted up with concern, as he was looking for feedback on this new design. A request from a customer, these pants were designed to meet the needs of outdoorswomen whose bodies have changed, whether through pregnancy, age, or other life experiences, and he is eager to find out how they work for me. When I gave him the thumbs up, a big grin cracked his face.

Joobwear—“Joob” is Thai for kiss—has a small line of well-designed, sustainably-sourced, and climate-friendly clothing. Their name speaks to their vision of “kissing” the earth, living with a smaller environmental footprint, and blending the founders’ love of nature with a thorough, thoughtful dedication, shifting fashion (one of the most polluting industries in the world) toward a more sustainable enterprise.

When you go to the mall or online to purchase clothing, what are your primary priorities? Fit? Style? Fabric? Attire appropriate for an event? In the documentary The True Cost: Secrets behind the Fashion Industry, designer Orsola de Castro calls clothing “our chosen skin.” Yet most of us have no idea what goes into making our fashion: we don’t know the processes behind dying, creating, and sewing the fabric; we don’t know how much water is used, who sewed the garment and how well they were treated or paid, and we don’t know the environmental impact. How would we choose differently if we did know?

Joobwear is asking these questions. Ames is an avid fly fisherman and Chicago native with a background in marketing, management, and strategy and organizational behavior. He moved to Ann Arbor to join Llamasoft, a tech company focused on supply chain optimization and simulation software. Llamasoft helps companies redefine how they manage their supply chain from suppliers to customers. While there, Ames met his wife, Nicha Sangiampornpanit. A Thai native, Sangiampornpani has a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research, and is the other co-founder of Joobwear. Ames explains, “I’m more the soft skills and she’s more the detail person, so it’s a good mix.” It was a work trip that sent them into the fashion world.

Ames said, “My last job with Llamasoft was building the Japan office. My wife and I spent two years in Japan. That’s where we started to notice [activewear]. We ski and we hike--we’re pretty active: we do yoga and we used to run. We noticed the Japanese people look like everyone’s wearing tailored clothes. They look fabulous when they’re hiking or skiing or they’re going out to the mall. When I think about fly fishing gear, a lot of times their fit isn’t that great. And we started thinking, if you’re doing all these different activities, why do you need to have clothes dedicated to [only] one activity? That’s where the ideas started.”

Returning to the States, Ames and Sangiampornpanit pulled from their work life to pursue their passion project. Ames explained, “One of the early investors to Llamasoft was Nike Green Ventures. From working with them, I learned the importance of quantifying carbon emissions. software actually optimized around cost and efficiency. For example, say you want to optimize your total supply chain cost, but you also have high emitting suppliers or facilities. You want to look at the trade-offs of going to lower emissions. Sometimes it means a higher cost, but a lot of times it just means looking at different suppliers that are more efficient.”

Where do you start building a vertically-sustainable apparel business from the ground up? With his expertise at Llamasoft, Ames thought, “Okay, I can piece together the supply chain.” He began with fabric, the base material. The couple wanted it to be sustainable, but what is sustainable? Ames said, “I started doing, and I still do, this search for fabrics and cut and sew facilities. I found KenDor textiles (kendortextiles.com) out of Vancouver and the founder there, Paul King, has been working on finding sustainable mills for brands for several years now. I learned a lot from him and his team about what sustainable means from a fabric perspective. Take super fine Merino. Some people say sheep emit methane. That’s true, but this is a completely biodegradable product. You have to look at the life cycle emissions and it’s really hard to find that calculation of life cycle emissions for a particular fabric.

After getting the details nailed down on the fabric, then there was production. “The first partner we had for cut and sew was in Cleveland, it was a husband-and-wife team. Then, I found this company called MCM (mcmenterprise.net) out of Brooklyn. Joanne Young is their lead design person for us. I showed her our beanie.” Ames grabs a classic knit beanie from the table in the middle of the retail space, the type you see everywhere, but this one is of merino yarn in a shade of old bronze. “You think like an item like this, building something like this would be easy, but the first one was way too big. The next one looked like a swim cap. I got on the phone with Joanne and right away she got it. And then, when the first prototype was nailed, I said, ‘this is gonna be one of our partners’.”

But the couple wanted to do more than just use sustainable fabric. They had gotten married in Dexter and had a second ceremony in Thailand. Ames said, “We were driving in an area of rundown buildings. Nicha said “God, I wish I could do something to help my country.” And so, the couple decided to make their brand fair trade as well. Sangiampornpanit’s connections built this component, Ames explained. “One of Nicha’s friends from University of Michigan, her father did cut and sew for Nike in Bangkok, and he has a zero-waste facility. He had adopted Toyota’s small batch production and quality management practices. He utilizes automotive practices to cut and sew, which I thought was really amazing.” The couple toured the factory while in Thailand and have worked with them for some products.

After their time in Japan, their lives changed: Llamasoft was purchased by a private equity firm and Ames, as an early employee, gained a level of financial freedom. He chose to put more time and energy into Joobwear. He explained, “I like to build stuff. I wanted to do something that I could touch and feel. We like active wear but there’s certain things with the fit. There’s things with the sustainability and with the fair trade that I really don’t like about apparel. Apparel’s really a crappy industry, really crappy.”

For example, that facility in Bangkok? Ames said, “Nike stopped using them because he paid his employees a living wage and educated his employees to do more than what they were doing for that job, which I thought was really cool. And this is typical of apparel. They’re not transparent. They treat employees really badly and they’re completely focused on the lowest cost. H & M, Zara, and fast fashion just drives me crazy. Why do you need to have new stuff every season?”

I suggested to Ames that fashion is where food was forty years ago, when we just ate what was at the grocery store, never asking about what chemicals had been used, who was exposed to those chemicals to pick the produce, how far had it been transported. While small food co-ops had begun to ask these questions in the 1970’s, it wasn’t until the success of bigger stores, such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Fresh Market that more consumers and then corporations became interested in organic and fair-trade practices.

Ames agreed. “I think the apparel industry is that far behind [40 years]. Absolutely. It’s not just about the material, but it’s about water usage, water waste, labor practices, things like cotton. People don’t realize that a cotton t-shirt takes a tremendous amount of water. It uses dyes that pollute the water, usually the labor practices are—unless it’s organic or there’s some certification on how they source it—really bad in terms of their production. What type of power do they use? They have no clue. It’s true with a lot of apparel manufacturers. Then I asked, “Are you guys doing anything with measuring your [carbon] footprint or looking at innovative materials? They replied, “Nah.”

Unlike his Ohio producers, Ames does know about his carbon footprint. Working with consulting firm South Pole (southpole.com), Joobwear did an end-to-end analysis of their carbon footprint in 2018 before selling any product. They also invested in their rented building. Solar panels face south, and the couple is installing electric heaters to run off the solar, replacing the gas furnace. The interior is painted deep gray with orange and plywood accents. You enter into the aforementioned retail space, below a beautiful mural with a happy elephant proclaiming, “Every day is Earth day.” Beyond it and past a bathroom, you go up two steps to Ames’ workspace, where a laptop in a frame seems to hover over a keyboard, and the room is backed by a small kitchen. To the right are two chairs, a table, and a doorway that leads to the processing room, where orders are fulfilled and packed for shipping. Everything compactly located, keeping the footprint small and efficient, but with space for expansion. “I wanted to be the anti big company,” said Ames. “That’s why I like this small place. I want to make really good quality stuff. I want to make it technically competent, but wrapped around sustainability, fair trade, closed loop. I try to be zero waste as much as possible, and to use innovative materials as much as possible. I feel like apparel needs to get back to small, sustainable, and then scale from there.”

Sustainable is a complicated definition in fabric. One of the main items Joobwear uses a lot is recycled plastic, from all of those plastic bottles we put in our recycling. It’s environmentally friendly because it’s using these petroleum products again, giving them a longer life cycle then the original use they had and decreasing our pumping oil from the planet. But, they also wear and disintegrate, which means they shed plastic, called micro-plastic. Micro-plastics are a huge concern, as they float and they concentrate in the organs of all beings that ingest them, such as seabirds, turtles, fish, and humans. It’s for this reason I’m a fan of natural fabrics such as wool, linen, and cotton. And yet, we have a vast amount of plastic waste that we need to find a use for other than concentrating it in our water supply.

Ames agreed with me. “’Better beats perfect’ is a saying that we say a lot in tech.

I don’t know where the answer is with micro-plastics. I do know that we have a ton of single use plastic out there that we need to do something with. We need to recycle it for sure, the recycling rate here is just horrendous. When we lived in Japan, I had like six garbage cans in our apartment. Their recycling rates are in the eighty to ninety percent. For the United States, last I checked, it was like 7%.”

But as Ames pointed out, “How is a consumer going to know what’s good? Bamboo is supposedly great, but it uses a ton of chemicals in the dye process. Cotton is organic and biodegradable, but it uses a ton of water, you know? How do you pick and choose? It’s really hard. I mean, if it’s hard for someone in the business to be able to pick what’s the best material to use, how is the consumer going to know? There’s no standard. It’s a wild west now about what people communicate. And really how, how are you certifying it? I think the next big innovation is going to be on closed loop supply chains. Things like micro-plastics are going to be addressed. Everybody that produces a single use container has to be responsible for recycling and reusing it. It makes sense. If you’re producing something, and it has a package, you should do something about it.”

Ames gestured to the grey t-shirt he was wearing. Like all of Joobwear’s products, the material is soft, and the fit is close but not tight. “This is actually a prototype shirt with a material called Naya Acetate, which is made from recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic used in both fiber and bottle production) garment waste and sustainable, transparent, traceable, wood pulp. This is half biodegradable, because the recycled PET cannot be, but this one doesn’t use any water or dyes.”

I touched clothing swatches of a hundred percent recycled fleece that Ames is prototyping for a vest which will have a partially recycled nylon exterior, providing water repellency without PFC’s. Joobwear has also partnered with Mako, a manufacturer of fly-fishing reels, to produce apparel. They offer a long sleeve silky feeling 100% recycled shirt treated with Chitosante. As any outdoors person knows, while poly fiber is great for wicking and durability, it stinks if you sweat in it a lot. I have old poly shirts that are only fit for solo hikes at this point. Chitosante takes care of that by using crushed shrimp and crab shells in the creation of the fiber to help with odor. Ames smiles proudly when he shows me the shirt, “[Mako] said they searched Patagonia and Sims and said our shirt was the best fit and comfort.” To out-design such established brands is a huge endorsement of what Joobwear is doing.

Besides their collaboration with Mako, Joobwear is maintaining their retail and online spaces. After leaving Llamasoft and building Joobwear through attending pop-up shops in 2018 and 2019, Covid shut down everything and Ames started working on a new start-up with his old collaborators. Sangiampornpanit has remained at Llamasoft and gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Jaya, last year. Joobwear has moved to being more of a passion project for the couple, as they focus on raising their daughter. When asked about the future, Ames replies, “I just want to continue to innovate and spread the word about sustainability, get better at what we can do, help people make decisions and still have cool, sustainable, stylish stuff.” Given how their pants feel and knowing the thought behind their creation, I can say he’s well on the way to his vision.

Kirsten Mowrey is a somatic educator who enjoys getting out in nature, whatever the weather, whenever possible. You can find her on the web at kirstenmowrey.com.

Joob activewear is located at 5007 West Jackson Road, Suite A in

Ann Arbor, MI 48103. You can contact them at 734-277-2510, or by email at Hello@JoobWear.com, or check out their website joobwear.com. Currently retail hours are by appointment only.

Author's note: Between finishing this article and publication, the Center for Environmental Health in California published its test results of women's sports bras and athletic wear. The results showed high levels of BPA, a known hormone disruptor. BPA was found in polyester based clothing containing spandex from brands such as Athleta, PINK, Asics, Brooks, Nike, and FILA. These results emphasize the importance of supply chain integrity and doing the due diligence that companies such as JOOBwear have done. For more information, check out: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/business/bpa-sports-bras and here: https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-08/sccs_o_240.pdf