In this episode of the Green Element Podcast, host Will Richardson interviews Adam Robertson, co‑founder of the Kalopsia Collective, a short‑run textile batch manufacturer based in Scotland. Adam explains the company’s business model: a catalogue‑driven service where clients select a base product, send fabric, and receive a finished, ready‑to‑sell item, reducing development time and waste. He describes the collective’s “superpower” as an obsessive focus on incremental, lean improvements—optimising everything from zip placement to kitchen bin location. Staff, suppliers and customers are engaged through transparent information sharing, daily shared lunches, and a Scandinavian “fika” culture that encourages open dialogue. The biggest challenge highlighted is textile waste, with limited local recycling pathways; the team mitigates this by precise pattern construction, upfront fabric requirements, and donating excess to schools and charities. Adam offers practical advice: start imperfectly, continuously experiment, and seek small, cost‑saving environmental wins such as recycled‑plastic packaging and locally sourced tape. Their environmental management approach links ergonomics, energy‑efficient machinery, and waste reduction to both carbon‑footprint reduction and cost savings, though a formal carbon accounting process is still being refined. Throughout, Adam stresses a mindset of experimentation, learning from failures, and sharing knowledge via their website and social media. The episode closes with contact details and a call to action for listeners to join the Green Element community.
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Hi Adam, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for coming on to the Green Element Podcast. Tell us a bit about your business and really who you are.
Sure, so I'm Adam from Calopsia Collective. We are a textiles batch manufacturer, so essentially we make short-run product runs of womenswear and accessories. Primarily like sort of accessory bags and a bit of homeware, sort of cushions, details, things like that as well. Really, we were set up to kind of improve the way manufacturing within textiles was done on a small scale. We just really kind of refined that system and kind of offer things up to smaller and medium clients in a way that's much more effective for them. So if you go on our website, there's kind of catalogues of the base products that we produce. So rather than going through a lot of that product development for basic products, you can kind of go on the website, Pick what you want, send us the fabric, and what you get is a complete finished product that's ready for sale, really. And we found that just makes things a lot simpler, a lot more environmentally friendly, and a lot better for our staff and things like that as well.
Brilliant, brilliant. So could you tell us what your business superpower is?
Oh gosh, it's always such a hard question to answer. I think really it's We've always been kind of about looking at incremental change, kind of that kind of really looking at how we can kind of keep moving things forward, lean development. So that's kind of— it's that obsessive nature is probably our superpower, that kind of always wanting to make something slightly better every time. And that's kind of what's driven us through this process, really. I think that's kind of our main superpower, as boring as it sounds.
That is not a boring superpower. That sounds Really, really good. I would say probably one of our more worthwhile— I shouldn't say more, but one of the worthwhile superpowers.
It's weird how much fun it becomes after a while when you kind of get into these things of where do we put the zips on the wall so they're in the optimum space for things, and you get so fiddly. How can we save another 0.5 of a second?
Brilliant. Do you like your puzzles?
Oh yes, yeah, it's just—
you can't spend your whole life like it though, that's the thing.
After a while, where have we got the bin in the kitchen? Is this the optimum place for the bin?
And then add feng shui into the whole matter.
Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the design aspect of it all as well. It's a nightmare.
Can you tell us how you engage your staff, suppliers, customers with your mission and purpose, please?
Sure. I mean, we try and ingrain it in everything we do and have as much information out there as possible. We found often that the more engaged our clients are with the message, the more positive our relationships with them are anyway. So it's kind of in our best interest to do that. Sorry about that.
You are a working office. There is no— We're not talking to people that don't run businesses.
Oh, completely. It's actually quite quiet in here today. You caught us on a good day for that. But yes, so engaging them has always been very, very important to us. So kind of just offering that information out, that data has always been a good way because the more informed they are, the kind of usually the more positive that relationship is. And we're quite a small team, so we try and engage our staff all the time with what we're doing. We always find they're the ones that know best what the challenges are with what they're doing, often where things can be improved. So, you know, we try to even down to little things, we eat lunch together every day, everyone stops at the same time. So it gives us, yeah, exactly, you know, half an hour to an hour just to talk about things, and people can raise issues, and it just keeps everyone engaged, really. It's a nice thing to do.
Yeah, I have heard that before, but I don't hear it enough, I think.
Yes, definitely. So Nina, my business partner, is from Sweden as well, so there's a lot of that kind of Scandinavian way of doing things. So So that's sitting down and talking to people and kind of fika, if you like, that concept of just taking that time out is very important to us.
Yeah, brilliant. So when it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business, what's been your biggest struggle so far, and can you tell us a bit about how you've overcome it?
Sure, the biggest challenge for us is always the textiles waste itself, because there's still not kind of a good embedded system in Scotland for what we do with that. But it's always been a challenge to kind of minimize that as much as possible and then find routes to use it where we can. So that's kind of an ongoing thing. So all of our pattern construction, everything we do is really refined. We give kind of fabric requirements and things to clients up front, so then you're not over-ordering. But there's still waste we're left with at the end, and we still don't know quite what we need to do with all of that. We give away as much as we can, but after a point you've saturated all the local schools and charity shops and things. So there's a lot of work still to be done on kind of how we kind of use the smallest kind of bits of fabric.
Okay, so if you could offer one piece of advice to our listeners to help them with their purpose, what would that be?
Don't be put off if you can't do it perfectly to begin with, if you can't get everything to where you want it to be. Becoming an ethical and sustainable business is a journey, and you need to be okay with the fact that to begin with, there's still going to be things that you can't get spot on, and you just need to keep plugging away at that and finding better options. And we're still doing that constantly, even down to the, you know, the bags that we send products out in. We managed to source recycled plastic for all those now. Do that, or the tape we use is now made in the UK, so it's not being shipped halfway around the world to get to us. It's just all those little constantly searching, constantly finding ways to do it. And yeah, don't worry if you've not got it perfect at the beginning.
No, that's really good advice, really good advice, and I totally, totally agree with that. I think there's too many times that we try and reach perfection, and by trying to reach perfection We end up reaching nothing.
Exactly. It's so easy to get disheartened and put off or just give up completely if you can't get there. I think we often hold things to a very, very high standard, and then rather than doing anything at all, we do nothing. And it's that thing, it's just, it's a process. And then we're quite lucky in a way that we're in a time where we don't know what a lot of the best practices will be. So there's a lot of going to experiment and trying things out, and a lot of them won't work, but the ones that do are going to be the things that take us forward, and that's quite exciting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So can you tell us a bit about how you approach environmental management and your carbon footprints?
Yeah, it's— for us, it's really always just been about looking at the ergonomics of what we do. We find that a lot of the things that are best for the environment and reduce our carbon footprint also save us money. You know, if we're using less electricity, we're saving money.
They often go hand in hand.
Exactly. And I think that's often, often the way to think about it is these things often will benefit you as a business. So it becomes— it's not just about all the great you're doing for something that's kind of abstract and far away. It's about all the things that you can do for your business to make things better, more effective, even down to, again, the legal management stuff, making sure that you're getting the most out of that as well. That's great. It also means you're not wasting stuff and damaging the environment that way. Fabric was always a big thing for that. We had a lot of clients that were over-ordering because they were ordering the fabric and then ordering with us rather than asking us what they needed before they started.
Right.
So on its head and going, look, ask us how much you need before you order. It's just a simple way of knocking out a huge amount of waste before you even started.
Makes a lot of sense, makes a huge amount of sense. And so have you actually done the carbon footprint of the process at all?
We have, we haven't done one for a while. It's something again that's ongoing and we need to be refining that even further. A lot of the things again, the machinery we've brought in is a lot more energy efficient than the Things like that recently as well. So that's been great. It's just all those little savings.
And it's actually giving the time to do it as well.
Well, that is the thing. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of the time as well, yeah.
You can compare— since you've done it before, you can compare it to now. And it's just, I guess it's just, yeah, but I don't have the time of doing my normal. I guess that's so normal amongst— yeah, we see it a lot.
Completely, completely. And it's knowing how and when to measure things as well. And I think what I hope that we know the things we need to be doing to be reducing that anyway. So we're definitely still focused on those, and we do, but we do need to start measuring it so we can hopefully show it continuing to go down.
That's a good sign, really good sign. So is there any advice, learning that you'd like to share with everyone listening to this podcast?
Oh gosh, um, where do I start? Yes, I mean, yeah, I could talk to you for hours about this. I think that again, going back to that thing of being very mindful about what you do with all these processes and being ready to shift what you do and listen to the way things can be done and kind of pick through a lot of the advice that's there is very important. You've got to be that sponge and at the same time evaluate a lot of stuff. There's a lot of people with a lot of opinions on how these things should be done, but a lot of the time you just don't know, so you've got to just experiment and try And as long as you're always pushing for that goal, I think some good things are going to happen. You know, it's all about that journey. There's no right answer again with a lot of this stuff, so it's just— it's a time for experimenting and really sort of pushing things as far as they can go, really.
Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for all of this. It's been brilliant talking to you. Where's the best way that we can connect with you, we can learn more about what it is that you're doing? I mean, is there, you know, what, what, how do we know more about you?
Sure.
So there's the website, which is just colopsiacollective.com. There's also social media is a big one for us. Instagram, there's constant updates about all the clients that we're working with, all the new products we're bringing out, all that sort of stuff as well. It's a really good place to kind of see day to day exactly what we're working on. And then kind of just basically all the social media, Facebook, Tumblr, even Twitter, all those things. We like to keep really involved with what's going on and promoting our clients as best we can.
Brilliant, brilliant. Well, thank you very much for your time today. That's been really, really interesting talking to you, and I look forward to carrying on finding out how, how your journey evolves and how your impact lessens, I guess. Thank you very much.
Yeah, we're excited about that too.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
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