Outerknown

Outerknown was founded in 2015 by eleven-time world champion surfer Kelly Slater together with designer John Moore. Slater has said the decision to start his own label came after he began asking his sponsors basic questions about who made their clothes and where, and found their answers unsatisfying — prompting him to step back from endorsement deals and build a company around those questions instead.

The brand organizes itself around what it calls the three P's — people, planet, and profit — aiming to prove a clothing company can run profitably while using fair labor practices and materials with reduced environmental impact. Its best-known product line, the S.E.A. Jeans, stands for Social and Environmental Accountability: the jeans use Fair Trade Certified organic cotton and are sewn at Saitex, a denim factory in Vietnam that has been described as one of the industry's lowest-impact large-scale facilities, recycling the great majority of its water and capturing sludge for reuse rather than discharge.

The brand has built its identity around this supply-chain transparency as much as its surf-inflected, California-rooted design sensibility, positioning itself within the broader wave of sustainability-focused apparel companies that emerged in the 2010s.