Sewing together heritage and hope
From Ikea rails to the wonderful everyday of watching her Welsh businesses thrive, Samantha Eastcott is bringing sustainable fashion back to the heart of the Valleys.
This week I spoke with Sam about her journey in sustainable fashion, and how she grew her businesses from a personal frustration into a community-led mission.
At just 18, unable to find jeans that fit properly, Sam began experimenting with making her own. Today, she not only runs a bespoke denim label using recycled materials but has also launched a sister company focused on affordability, empowerment, and community: The Circular Studio.
Starting a creative business in South Wales is no easy task. Limited transport links, scarce resources, and a slower cultural shift towards sustainability make it a tough environment for entrepreneurs. Wales has lost more than 20% of its bus passengers since before the pandemic, while train reliability remains patchy - leaving many communities disconnected and making access to creative opportunities more difficult (Nation.Cymru, 2023).
Yet Sam has rooted her work firmly in her heritage. In Treorchy, the former Burberry factory which once employed more than 300 workers and was considered the “heartbeat of the Valleys” closed in 2007, dealing a huge economic and emotional blow to the community (WalesOnline, 2022). Sam now employs former seamstresses from that very factory to produce her designs under the label SCND-HND, breathing new life into local skills while preventing denim waste.
After a turbulent year in Newbury where Sam moved through four jobs and three flats, she returned home reluctantly, setting up her first shop from her bedroom in a cabin at her mum’s house.
What began as a small-scale project soon grew into what we now know as The Circular Studio, a hub for community, second-hand fashion and sustainable living. Starting with a growing number of boxes of clothes on the floor, Sam quickly outgrew the space and moved into a storage unit sporting Ikea rails. Sam is now running weekly events in Caerphilly and is only growing further.
Despite working 12-hour days consisting of labelling, reworking, sorting, and donating clothes to Welsh refugee and women’s shelters — Sam has yet to pay herself a salary. It is clear that she embodies the motto ‘if you enjoy what you do, you will never work a day in your life.’ She is already preparing to launch an apprenticeship scheme for the girls doing work experience with her, determined to give them the qualifications they need to move forward in the field.
“I want them to be able to go out into the world of work with not only this experience, but with real qualifications.”
For Sam, her greatest achievement has not been award nominations, though she has twice been shortlisted for the Wales Start-Up Awards as well as being shortlisted for “The Grammys of Entrepreneurship”. Fulfilling her lifelong dream of owning her own business is what she seems most proud of, recognising that an older version of herself would be happy with the choices she has made along her journey so far.
Of course with success comes setbacks and it was refreshing to see Sam open up so freely about her biggest barrier being herself; aside from not having the financial backing to launch her clothing line worldwide it was her own self-doubt and struggling motivation after some deeply affecting personal losses that set Sam back.
But despite this, Sam rose to the occasion with the impact of her hard work already being measurable. Over seven years, Sam has redistributed thousands of garments, issued more than £7,500 in store credit in just one month, and helped reduce the staggering 350,000 tonnes of clothing that the UK sends to landfill every year (WasteManaged, 2024).
Through initiatives like “Second-Hand Saturday” where customers trade clothes for £1 store credit per item, and “Fill-a-Bag” events, where shoppers can pay £5 for a bag and fill it with unsold stock, Sam encourages people to buy only what they will truly wear, rather than treating clothing as disposable.
The results speak for themselves: in just 11 events, The Circular Studio has saved more than 21,000 items of clothing from landfill (The Circular Studio, 2024). One customer brought in 200 items over two weeks and received £200 in store credit — a testament to how the system incentivises people to rethink what “value” means in fashion. If a shopper is unsure about an item, Sam even suggests leaving it behind: better to keep it in circulation than risk it going unworn.
Now, with expansion plans underway for two new units in Caerphilly and more events across South Wales, the mission remains unchanged with championing sustainability without compromising style at the forefront of the studios mind.
For updates on events or to shop sustainably, follow @thecircularstudio on Instagram. To explore Sam’s reworked denim creations, visit @scndhnduk.