ABOUT US

MALABO

We are Tiziana Lamonaca - production manager, and Federico Nistri - sales manager, and we have over twenty years of experience in the vintage clothing sector.

We have created Malabo, a brand born from a passion for vintage and a love for the environment.

With our years of experience in the industry, we have decided to reinvent ourselves to respond to the growing attention towards sustainability and the environment. The production side of Malabo is done in partnership with the team of Noell Maggini, an Italian stylist and designer, a prominent figure in the Italian Haute Couture sector.

We have built the first completely vertical artisanal upcycling laboratory, with zero impact.

We produce patchwork fabrics for home accessories and fashion collections, using entirely unsellable used garments and discontinued fabric stocks.

Born and raised in Prato, we have embraced its unique art of fabric recycling, for which the city has been famous since the post-war period.

Indeed, Prato is considered the largest textile center in Europe and one of the most important hubs globally for yarn and wool fabric production.

There are approximately 2000 textile businesses in Prato, producing fabrics for clothing, furnishings, yarns for knitwear production, as well as specialized fabrics for industrial applications.

The textile district of Prato has always combined creativity with technological innovation, pioneering technical textiles suitable for industrial use. Prato has thus advanced significantly beyond traditional fiber uses, developing important technological advancements.

Within this context, given the increasing focus on green and eco-sustainability in recent years, we at Malabo have decided to reinvent ourselves: we have started producing reworked clothing items, Pet lines, and Home Design collections, thereby pushing the Prato textile industry even further forward.

Today, in a world that strongly emphasizes sustainability and Italian craftsmanship, Malabo aims to make its contribution.

OUR BACKGROUND

Our processes are handmade, yet we operate on a large scale by forging partnerships with the most important and influential figures in today's fashion industry.

Thanks to our network of suppliers who embrace the upcycling philosophy, we have direct access to large quantities of raw materials.

This allows us to keep our research and development department fully operational, where we experiment with increasingly efficient material recovery methods and create original upcycling design patterns that are always in line with current trends.

HOW WE WORK

At Malabo, we are dedicated to creating reworked products, not simply recycled ones. Recycling is a noble art that benefits and respects the environment; however, it is not without environmental consequences and therefore cannot be defined as "zero impact."

While recycling transforms used materials into new raw materials, reworking (or upcycling) directly reinvents existing garments and fabrics. Recycling yarn or any recycled fabric requires numerous steps to be reusable: mechanical and chemical processes that consume energy and produce other highly polluting substances. It takes tens of liters of water to recycle just one kilogram of fabric.

At Malabo, we do not recycle; we reinvent, deconstruct, and modify the natural state of products through exclusively artisanal processes within our workshops. This allows us to breathe new life into worn-out raw materials without impacting the ecosystem.

We follow the philosophy of upcycling (or reworking), which, in synergy with the most creative minds in fashion and home design, creates a new concept of sustainable production: Eco-Design.