Materials and Practices

Bamboo
Our founder is a hot sleeper who couldn't sleep in cotton or linen, so she spent years developing her own bamboo fabric with our mill.

Almost all bamboo fabric is a type of rayon. Ours is viscose, the most common kind. Bamboo is tough and woody, so it's broken down into pulp with chemicals, spun into fibre, then woven into cloth. We weave it with a percale technique, not a silky finish, because silky fabric clings when you sleep hot. Percale stays cool and crisp like cotton, just softer, and it gets better with every wash. Our bamboo fabric is OEKO-TEX® certified, tested to be free from harmful substances.

Cotton
Our cotton bedding is 100% cotton, pre-washed for a soft, lived-in feel from the first night. It isn't certified organic. Like everything we make, it's produced in small batches.

Our Dyeing Process
We started SUKU with plant-based dyes. As the brand grew, their consistency became harder to control. Colours shifted from batch to batch, and pieces that didn't match ended up as waste.

So we moved to reactive dyes, the same type used by batik makers across Indonesia today. Batik is a centuries-old technique of hand-dyeing cloth used across the Indonesian archipelago, added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2009.

Reactive dyes bond with the fibre itself, so colours stay rich and won't bleed as easily in the wash. It also means we can get each batch right the first time, which means less waste.

Sustainability, for us
Means producing less, with intention. Each year, we upcycle our excess production into new pieces, like our kids' collection made from archive flannelette, rather than letting it go to waste.

For more on our Studio and the artisans who make every SUKU piece, head here.