Bridge&Tunnel

We design society

Bridge&Tunnel stands for second chances. Since 2016, the social fashion label has been working with socially disadvantaged people and refugees in the heart of Hamburg. Both are united by their enormous manual skills beyond certificates and diplomas. And the realization that if you work, you get to know people. And those who work feel needed.

Our designs also tell of 2nd chances. Our denim designs are made from post & pre-consumer waste. The former means mainly old textiles or textiles that are too worn out even for distribution points. We have great material cooperations with the Kleiderkammer Wilhelmsburg or Hanseatic Help - and many private people send us their old favorite jeans. In the case of pre-consumer waste, we use material surpluses such as dyeing or weaving samples that already occur during production. From these textile resources, we produce high-quality denim accessories, home textiles, and selected fashion pieces. For the B2B sector, we also process other textile leftovers such as remnants, samples, or advertising materials for our customers.

In this way, we help valuable material resources to a new life in style and hopeful talents from all over the world to a fulfilling job with recognition.

Building bridges

Behind Bridge&Tunnel are passionate people. The label is run by us, Lotte and Conny. As founders of a social business, which in a way walks between the worlds, we have to be generalists as well as specialists. As a graduate textile designer, Lotte is an expert in design and production. Conny, as a Ph.D. in cultural studies, is concerned with communication, social media, fundraising, and collaborations. We call this interior and foreign ministry. But what connects us most is our rocket-like enthusiasm for making the world a little better with small steps.

Through many unique encounters in Wilhelmsburg, we quickly realized: testimonials are not everything in life. Often they help to learn something about the person behind them. But often they do not. Many of our employees either have no references or - due to their age, language, religion, deafness, or flight history - have had difficulty finding a job on the primary labor market. Yet many of them bring creative skills and abilities from their home countries or their family context that are of great benefit to textile production. We call this "talents over diploma".

Source: https://bridgeandtunnel.de/ueber-uns/, https://bridgeandtunnel.de/philosophie/