Opposite Sports Club is
a fashion label sourcing apparel from spare garments of Caritas Austria by curating and recreating.
All winnings go back to Caritas Austria, supporting projects for those in need.
We are a club providing resource friendly apparel that looks and is good. Every O.S.C. item is screen printed and curated in Vienna, Austria.
All winnings from our sales go to Caritas Austria, a non-profit aid organization in Austria. To indicate how money spent on O.S.C. items is used, we show our percentages for each piece of garment. You will find those percentages on hangtags, in lookbooks, in the shop section of our website, as well as more detailed information here in the club section.
How does it work?
We always try to donate an as large as possible part of our income to the non-profit aid organization Caritas Austria. The donations are invested in social projects. But nevertheless we need to use a part of the retail price for O.S.C. to keep the label going. Here we tell you more in detail, exactly how the sale percentages are used in the different categories.
Sale percentage categories
→ Funds donated to Caritas Austria
Usually, with each item around 50-60% of the retail price is donated directly to Caritas Austria. These numbers can vary for each item, but we try to keep the funds part as large as possible. The donations are invested in social projects.
A common misconception of people donating clothes to charity, is that those clothes will get handed out freely to those in need. But mostly, those charity organizations need funds to keep their social projects going. They much more need financial resources for medical aid or food, then tons of “new” old clothes to wear. So most of the donated clothes are sold, either in own second hand shops or to larger traders. Only a fraction of charity garment can be sold as second hand in Austria, and reselling old clothes to international traders usually has serious negative impacts on the local economy and clothing industry in the countries the clothes end up in. Adding the waste-reducing and sustainable aspect, we decided to use these unwanted second hand garments as a resource to create new, more sustainable fashion with a positive social impact.
→ Tools
These share is used to pay for the tools to make O.S.C. happen. It can be acquisitions of printers, laptops or screen printing materials, as well as digital tools like Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud or typeface licenses.
→ Brand management
We try to keep brand management at a minimum. For example we don’t spend any money on paid advertising. Nonetheless we need to spend some money on website maintenance, organizational work or public relations. Furthermore brand management also covers the expenditure for smaller launch events or other interesting O.S.C. activities.
→ Production
Sale percentages in this category are used to finance the production of the O.S.C. apparel. While we never produce completely new garment for clothes, we still need to collect, curate and wash textiles, as well as designing, sewing and printing those items afterwards. We source our garments from Caritas Austria in Vienna. Here, we are also doing all the production steps. We try to keep things as local as possible, while thinking internationally. Amongst other things this means, not buying any new garment, but instead using existing clothes as a resource for recreating and curating. O.S.C. garment is always cleaned eco-friendly and mostly screen printed by hand.
→ Collaboration
Sometimes we collaborate with other designers. Percentages in this category pay the guest designers for their work.
By creating new clothes out of old garment we don’t only try to be resource saving and sustainable. Through donating all our winnings to non-profit social work we also try to make an even more positive social impact in the world. We also only produce all of our items locally in Vienna and use CO2 neutral shipping.
You can donate good-condition textiles for us to create new O.S.C. items. Read the details on the Submit item page. If you want to collaborate, support the label or have other inquiries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via mail.
