About Us

It started with a very ugly beach.

Not the Aruba in the postcards. Years ago, my husband and I were working in Venezuela and had to leave the country every 90 days because of our visas. One of those weekend trips took us to Aruba, where we wandered away from the beaches built for tourists and found another coastline entirely. Plastic was everywhere. Today, none of this is particularly shocking. We carry the entire world around on our phones. We have seen the rivers of plastic, the garbage patches, the turtles, the beaches buried under bottles. Back then, it was much easier not to know. If you lived in a wealthy country, you threw something away and it disappeared. We had managed to build an entire culture around the comforting fiction of away.

That beach stayed with me. 

Years later, I was living on Jeju Island in South Korea. I was outside constantly—hiking, biking, swimming, traveling—and I kept encountering the same objects in places they had no business being: bottles, caps, straws, takeout containers, plastic forks, the mundane debris of ordinary life. Somewhere along the way, I became fascinated not just by the waste, but by the material itself. Because here is the weird thing about PET: it’s really good stuff. Polyethylene terephthalate was engineered to be strong, lightweight, moisture-resistant and remarkably durable. Those are excellent qualities in a performance textile. They’re completely absurd qualities in something designed to hold your water for twenty minutes. We took a material that can last for generations and built an economic system around throwing it away before lunch.

That contradiction became Tu Tiki.

What if the bottle wasn’t finished?

PET bottles can be collected, cleaned, shredded, processed, spun into fiber and made into technical fabric. So that’s what we do. We take a material our economy has declared worthless and put its durability back to work in clothing made for hiking, paddling, swimming, cycling, surfing, yoga, travel and generally getting dirty somewhere interesting.

We call it SUPcycled™. Not because the world desperately needed another sustainability word, but because “recycled” doesn’t quite describe what interests us. A bottle is one of the lowest-value uses imaginable for an extraordinarily durable polymer. Turning that bottle into something designed to be worn for years isn’t simply recycling it. It’s giving the material a better job.

Then we put the trash back on it.

This is my favorite part. Tu Tiki prints are made from the garbage we find. The bottle caps, straws, cups and fragments of disposable life scattered across beaches become photographs. The photographs become shapes. The shapes become patterns. And those patterns end up back on clothing made from the same kind of material we were picking up in the first place.

From ten feet away, you might see a bright button-up, a pair of leggings or a swimsuit. Get closer. That’s garbage. Actual garbage. We don’t want to disguise where the idea came from. We want to make something so good out of it that you have to reconsider what “waste” means.

And then things got more complicated.

When I started Tu Tiki, I thought plastic pollution was largely a cleanup problem. It isn’t. It’s an economics problem.

We keep manufacturing virgin plastic because virgin plastic is cheap. We throw used plastic away because recovering, sorting and processing it costs money. Companies can profit from putting disposable packaging into a market while somebody else—municipalities, taxpayers, waste pickers, volunteers, or nobody at all—is left responsible for what happens after the drink is gone. Once you see that, beach cleanups start to look very different. They are necessary, but they are also people at the end of a very long economic chain picking up the bill.

Tu Tiki still cleans up plastic. We still turn bottles into clothing. But the question has gotten bigger: Why are we making new PET while we’re surrounded by PET we’ve already made?

That question led to No New PET. It isn’t anti-plastic. It’s resourceful… my favorite attribute about myself and anyone else. Use the material we’ve already extracted resources and energy to create. Build markets for recovered PET. Make collection economically worthwhile. Design products for long use. And stop treating virgin material as the automatic first choice simply because the economics currently make it convenient. PET’s durability isn’t the problem. Our insistence on using an extraordinarily durable material disposably is.

We also don’t make clothes just to see if someone might buy them.

Most Tu Tiki pieces are made when someone orders them. That means we’re not guessing what thousands of people might want six months from now, manufacturing it anyway, filling a warehouse with it and eventually pretending a 70% markdown was the plan all along. You order it. We make it.

It’s a slower and occasionally less convenient way to run an apparel company. Good. The world has had quite enough convenience.

And while we’re questioning the logic of disposable materials, we might as well question disposable fashion too. Making clothing from recovered material means very little if the clothing itself is treated as temporary. The goal isn’t to manufacture more sustainable things for people to cycle through more sustainably. The goal is to make fewer things worth keeping.

Tu Tiki has been around the block.

And up mountains. Into oceans. Across borders. Through airports. On bikes. On paddleboards. Into yoga studios. 

I’ve been wearing some of my original Tu Tiki pieces for years, and they’ve traveled with me across countries and continents. They’ve been hiked in, biked in, swum in, surfed in, practiced in and repeatedly stuffed into suitcases. That’s important to me because there is no environmental victory in turning a plastic bottle into a pair of leggings nobody likes wearing. The clothes have to be excellent. They have to fit. They have to perform. And they have to be interesting enough that three years later you still reach for them.

In 2026, Travel + Leisure gave Tu Tiki a Global Vision Award. That was lovely. But I still get more satisfaction from seeing someone trekking in the Tu Tiki that they bought three years ago.

Because old is the point.

So, what is Tu Tiki?

Tu Tiki is a clothing company, but that description has become increasingly incomplete. It’s an experiment in making waste valuable. It’s a collection of extremely cheerful prints made from some fairly depressing objects. It’s an attempt to connect the material we consume with the places that material eventually ends up. And increasingly, it’s an argument about what we call waste, who pays for it, and why we continue extracting resources to manufacture new material while enormous quantities of perfectly useful material already exist all around us.

The more I’ve learned about PET, the less interested I’ve become in simply condemning plastic. PET is an astonishing piece of materials science. Strong, lightweight, versatile and durable, it does exactly what we engineered it to do. The failure wasn’t creating it. The failure was taking those properties and applying them to a disposable economy.

That’s the idea at the center of Tu Tiki: the problem isn’t that PET lasts too long. The problem is that we don’t use it long enough.

We can do better than extracting petroleum, manufacturing an extraordinarily durable material, filling it with a drink, using it once and throwing it away. We can recover what we’ve already made. We can design systems that give that material value. We can turn yesterday’s bottle into something worth keeping for years.

We already have the raw material. It’s all around us.