Recycling Rags To Riches

ENDURTAKK is opening shop and shutting down textile waste

Anyone with a sharp eye for interesting textiles might have noticed ENDURTAKK’s clothes in the last year. They’ve been available in a few local design shops and also spotted on artists like John Grant and Viibra, Björk’s go-to flute ensemble. In collaboration with Marko Svart, they’ve even gone so far as to grace album covers and the stage of Harpa. But it all started with nothing but a big bag of cast-off hoodies and a desire not to let good stuff go to waste.

Reduce, recycle, repeat

“I mean, a whole bunch,” Rik McNair intones, spreading his hands wide to indicate the mountain of forgotten garments they’ve sourced, while his brother Ross chuckles beside him. “And then we had loads of dead stock fabric — just bits and bobs — so we just cut them up and put them together.”

The brothers recycled hoodies into unique pieces to sell at a pop-up market back in 2020, but they still needed a name. Rik was taking an Icelandic course at the time and his teacher would use one word over and over: endurtaka, or repeat. “And it was just stuck in my brain,” he explains. “So we decided to call this little project ENDURTAKK because everything was recycled.” Endur means again and taka means take. So by changing it to takk, meaning thanks, it creates a little play on the words for again, take, repeat, and thanks.

It’s a clever name for an ambitious goal: to reduce even a tiny bit of the 92 million tonnes of waste produced by the fashion industry every year. “That’s the whole point,” Rik says. “Because it doesn’t go to landfill here. There’s so much waste that leaves Iceland and just gets shipped abroad. I mean, let’s be honest. We’re not making a dent in it. It’s more about awareness and that people don’t really understand the scale of it.”

The brothers want to distance themselves from the cyclical process of the fashion industry by creating pieces that last for years. “Fashion is seasonal,” Rik explains. “You have your spring, summer, and so on. That just means ‘This is really cool and then next season, this is not really cool.’ That’s so shit for the environment. I’d rather just make you something that you fucking love.”

“There’s so much waste that leaves Iceland and just gets shipped abroad. I mean, let’s be honest. We’re not making a dent in it.”
The Super McNair Brothers

Rik studied Clothing Design and Manufacture in the pair’s native Glasgow, but Ross taught himself as he assisted his brother in his studio. “I had some t-shirts that I wasn’t using or wearing,” Ross explains. “So I took one of Rik’s original patterns and thought, ‘If I put a line here and a seam here and a line here, what would that look like? I made a t-shirt and I was like, ‘Actually, that looks pretty good!’”

Then he designed a button-up shirt from an old IKEA curtain. “It was better sewing than I had ever done in my life, and that was his first shirt!” Rik bursts out. “I was like, ‘Oh, I taught you well,’ but not really. He’s just really good at things.”

The project took off from there, with the duo contacting companies they thought might have “interesting waste.” As word got around, companies even reached out to them to offer them material.

The second-hand shops Red Cross and Verzlanahöllin have been their greatest supporters, meaning that ENDURTAKK offers these materials a third chance at life. Although they’ve made new garments from deadstock, sheets, and even a pile of airline blankets that were donated to them by Kex, denim is their bread and butter: “It’s something we really like and we’ll always use because there’s so much denim waste here. You can make it look smart but you can also make it look very casual. It’s just versatile.”

From pop-up to shop up

In 2024, ENDURTAKK’s pop-up at DesignMarch offered custom denim bags after consultations in which customers picked their own materials. “Normally, what happens is you go into a store or you see something and you’re like, I want that. And then you find a way of getting it,” Rik summarizes. “And it’s like the story begins when you see it. Whereas I think what’s really interesting is the story beginning before it’s made.”

Rik and Ross loved the experience so much that they decided to develop this idea for the next venture. Having secured a shop space on Klapparstígur, ENDURTAKK will be opening their studio doors to the world in 2025.

“We don’t just want to open a store, though,” Rik clarifies. They’ll put the studio front and center. “We want to have people walk by on the street, see us making stuff, come in and see what happens there.”

“Instead of ‘I want to buy this designer top because then I become that,’ I want to see more people finding their own expression of what it is to dress and to wear. “

They’ll offer workshops, consultations and events in addition to a “regeneration service,” where customers are invited to bring stuff they want to refresh, change, or have made into a new item.

“I’m a people person,” Rik insists. “So it’s great to interact with people, especially during creative stuff. I think there’ll be so much more opportunity for us as a project to grow by making more connections.” They hope to expand into furniture and collaborate with bigger businesses, too. “We would like to work closely with established companies and do projects with them on their waste.”

“We would just love to help facilitate some change in people’s perception,” Rik repeats. That’s what’s most important. “Instead of ‘I want to buy this designer top because then I become that,’ I want to see more people finding their own expression of what it is to dress and to wear. I want to see more of the inside out, and less of the outside in.”