SEALAND GEAR: Discover New Paths
The Sealand Gear approach to business is as refreshing as the surf spray across Cape Town’s beautiful beaches. Commercial viability and strength underpinned by people and planet success, in a relationship where one cannot exist without the others, is the model deployed by this innovative, ambitious, and creative organisation that is becoming an example to follow.
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Interview with Jasper Eales, Founder and Chief Creative Officer
Fashion has never moved faster. Some of the world’s biggest brands can take a garment from design to shop floor in 15 days, but modern logistics planning has pushed the cycle down to 10. At the same time, the industry as a whole accounts for around 10% of global carbon emissions and sends roughly 85% of all textiles to the dump each year. It is a machine built for speed and volume, and above all profit, but into its path walked a surfer from Cape Town with a very different idea. Sealand Gear opened in 2015 to show that a premium brand could sustainable, built from the things that fashion throws away.
“Sealand is a result of my upbringing. I grew up in a creative and entrepreneurial family which spent a lot of time outdoors enjoying natural spaces. Cape Town is full of that, and I did a lot of surfing, hiking and camping with my family, mainly on the beaches of the area,” says Jasper Eales, Founder and Chief Creative Officer.
“I started a furniture design company and realised during that journey that one of my most successful products was one made of offcuts and waste material. This kicked off the mindset that you can create value from waste. Applying that learning, alongside the connection I had with my business partner, Adrian Hewlett, who was manufacturing bags from old yacht sails, saw us create the idea of a commercially viable product utilising waste material, and that is where Sealand was born.”
Eales and Hewlett have spent the years since turning that idea into a Cape Town fashion house that sells bags, travel gear and apparel for men and women, with its factory store and design studio at the Sealand Campus in Hout Bay.
In 2021, Eales told Enterprise Africa about building a business from nothing. Now, the foundations are strong, and impactful growth is the aim.
“We position ourselves as a premium lifestyle business, but we are ‘for good’. We focus on design and manufacturing and retail; however, the internal manufacturing component is something we made a decision not to scale,” Eales explains. “We own our retail chain, and we have 12 physical retail stores and an ecommerce business which services local and international markets.”
SCALING THE UNSCALABLE
In 2021, Sealand was already fighting the problem that every upcycler meets sooner or later – input supply. Poly twill, the tough polyester used in retail advertising banners, makes a handsome bag lining, yet nobody sells it by the tonne. Since 2015 the company has diverted more than 116 tonnes of waste from landfill, a figure it says has avoided more than 2,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, and each one of those tonnes had to be won. Even with strong partnerships in place, consistent quality supply was a challenge.
“We specialise in upcycling fabric and that is a very difficult thing to scale. We started with fully upcycled bags – both the inner lining and the outside layer. But as the business grew, that was extremely difficult to scale and that is when we started to utilise regenerative and recycled fabrics.
“Upcycled material is not something you can just buy from a supplier,” Eales continues. “We have moved to a much more contractual arrangement with some of the leading retailers on the continent and we now have a continuous supply of advertising fabric that makes our products unique. That is intercepted from going to landfill and creates value.”
Apparel has moved towards recycled fibres, with puffer jackets made from reclaimed fishing nets, and the outer fabric of the bags was a bigger project still.
“We have created our own fabric for the exterior of the bags, alongside a local mill, and it is a first of its kind in Africa, a 100% upcycled canvas. It was a two-year process and is something that we are really proud of. However, we realised we must always improve and so right now the yarn is imported and local mills manufacture the fabric. Our next goal is to localise the yarn creation and that will be very good. It’s all about making incremental progressive steps forward to improve the business.”
Around 90% of bag manufacturing stays in South Africa. The remainder goes to a partner in Indonesia, chosen for reasons that have little to do with the usual logic of offshore production.
“The reason for working with that factory was not price, it was sustainability credentials and technical ability to produce products that we just cannot produce locally,” says Eales.
“It’s difficult to find bag manufacturers in South Africa at our quality level. We have chosen the very best companies, including North Ridge, and worked with them closely to ensure that they achieve qualities and finishes that we need. It’s a true partnership and not just transaction – there has been an investment of time and energy to develop quality products,” he adds.
BEYOND THE SALE
For most brands, responsibility ends at the till. Sealand treats a sale as the start of a second life.
“We offer a 10-year evergreen warranty where we will service the product every year,” details Eales. “We have an incentivised return programme where we will take that product and repair it and resell it again. We are integrating an additional product passport for all products which will offer further traceability across the entire value chain pre purchase.”
That passport went live in October 2026, built with ITL Intelligent Label Solutions. A durable label on each eligible bag opens a digital record of materials and origin, and registering the bag in its owner’s name unlocks 10 years of free repairs. The launch puts Sealand ahead of the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which is expected to bring textiles under a similar framework.
The returns scheme, Second Wave, is growing into something larger. A single cotton shirt can use around 700 gallons of water in manufacturing, so keeping gear in use is the greener choice.
“We take responsibility for the used gear, and we take it through a servicing process before putting it back into the retail environment but with stories attached to it,” says Eales. “The aim is to change the mindset of using something a few times and then buying something new. If people understand more about repairing and customising, that offers the chance to keep things working for longer,” he says, adding that the company regularly hosts workshops and educations sessions around how to work with fashion items to extend life while creating new value.
“We are B-Corp certified and that is very important in Africa,” he continues, highlighting just how far the company goes to showcase what is possible. “We are a 1% for the Planet Member where we donate a minimum of 1% of our total revenues to different organisations of which we now have our own formalised foundation called Protect our Paths which has a mandate to keep natural spaces clear of litter. We create employment through a custodian programme where we fund the maintenance of key natural spaces to ensure they are clean and we educate people in that space.”
Sealand is in its third consecutive year as a partner of the Pondo Trail Run on the Wild Coast, where upcycled beach cleaning bags made mostly from post-consumer PVC are now a permanent part of the route, in use on every guided hike, 52 weeks a year.
“We are very transparent in everything that we do, and our design and aesthetic is a differentiator but living our core values is what truly separates us,” Eales confirms.
THE NEXT CHAPTER
Sealand intends to treble its revenue in three years on a journey to becoming a more international lifestyle brand, and the first lever is the shop floor.
“Our immediate plan is to continue our store rollout in South Africa with the intention to double our footprint in the next three years. At the same time, we are focusing on international e-commerce. We do already service global markets through ecommerce, our focus has remained on the local market,” says Eales.
Corporate partners are part of the engine. Symbiotic work with a number of recognised brands – including the Kaizer Chiefs, DHL Stormers, NSRI, VWS, ARMS and more – continue to showcase the possibility of working with a for good business.
“We have a B2B component of the business which services a variety of corporate businesses with cobranded products,” Eales says. “We are very focused on our values and quality, and that means we don’t compete on price.”
Online, where competition is ruthless, the aim is to learn before committing. The aim is to gauge traffic and discover where key markets are internationally before looking at the potential for popup outlets in larger retailers in high-potential countries. “As part of the rollout of new stores, we have the idea to build our first truly flagship outlet, a real experiential site that will be an exciting component in the growth of the business,” Eales reveals.
The company’s tagline, Discover New Paths, has never been a slogan alone. The mantra that underpins daily activity is shared by all in the business, from machinist to CEO. “The business is now much bigger, but the values remain, and it is visible daily in the way we treat people. We are not naïve, we know we must aim for financial success, but the underlying values are equally as important for us, and we don’t compromise one for the other. A sustainable business is not worth it if it is not financially sustainable, but a financially stable business is not worth it if it is negatively impacting the environment or the people it employs.
“Sealand Gear is a market leader in South Africa, with global aspirations to be recognised as a business that is truly changing the retail landscape in terms of responsible operation. Doing business differently; proving that responsible business can be a commercially viable option; while valuing people, planet, and shareholders – that is what we stand for.”
A brand that began with old yacht sails, advertising banners, and optimism now has 12 stores, a passport on every bag and a plan to triple in size, and it is still working out how fast a company can grow while keeping the planet first.