Meet Sammy, Awamaki’s Sustainable Design Intern

At Awamaki, we are committed to ensuring our products not only offer our artisan partners a better life, but care for our planet too. We recently shifted our yearly design residency to focus on helping us create and improve climate-friendly production practices. This year, we have hosted our first sustainable design intern–Meet Sammy!

Sammy, lovingly referred to as Sammicha by our Peruvian team members, has been hunkering down and putting in the work during her six months at Awamaki. As our sustainable design intern, she disappears into her workshop every morning and re-emerges hours later, new concepts to share or new products in hand. 

For her internship, we charged Sammy with a tall order: Review our supply chain and help us identify leftover materials; design and sample products that use these leftovers; identify alternatives to any plastic used in our products; oh, and also please help us brainstorm products that use coarse alpaca wool so we can begin to rely less on fine alpaca, which may be more scarce in a changing climate. 

That’s not too much to tackle in six months, right?

Sammy has risen to the challenge! Most recently, she’s impressed the office with her bucket hats, made from leftover scraps of woven textile. They’re patchworks of intricate patterns: multi-colored, exciting, and each hand sewn by Sammy. She started with garbage bags of fabric fragments, carefully sifting through, color matching, and piecing together each hat. Although she is technically working with “scraps,” the leftover textile is exquisite on its own and she is proud to make use of material that was crafted with such care and skill.  

When she brings the finished hats out for the office to see, we gather round the kitchen table and pick our favorites. Some are drawn to the brighter ones, the pinks and yellows. Others prefer the duller but complicated and contrasting greens and reds. The black and white one is a crowd favorite, not as flashy as the others but undeniable in its cohesion. Sammy’s projects, ideas, and ability to create are always a source of wonder among the volunteers and employees, and we love her eye for color combinations! She is now teaching our sewer, Sr. Tomas, to produce the hats so they can be an ongoing part of our zero-waste production. 

Sammy graduated from the School of Art Institute of Chicago with a degree in fashion and arrived at Awamaki with a vast array of technical and creative skills. While she is a member of the design team and assisted tremendously in the launching of our 2024 collection, her real specialty is the intersection of fashion and sustainability. She innovates. She repurposes. She sees ways to make more from less. 

The design process at Awamaki rarely leaves much waste, but Sammy looks out for all of it. The woven fabric is, as much as it can be, made to size, so excess is infrequent. When it comes to leather however, “it’s the shape of a cow so it has a lot of edges and a lot of things we make are square,” Sammy says. The irregularity causes leather scraps to pile up, but Sammy recognizes that the leather was part of a once living animal and she is committed to helping Awamaki use it in its totality.

She explains the game plan: “I’m making a woven bag where I’m cutting the scraps into strips and gluing those strips together to give them more weight and then weaving them together. What’s good about that is it takes these tiny pieces and makes a bigger pattern piece that you can use. You can have more space to make something bigger rather than just making tiny things out of scraps.” This bag, born from leather remnants, has more to give. The inside will be lined with textile scraps, increasing its sustainable material use and, of course, its aesthetic value. Sammy is excited to see the ornate patterns peaking through. “This will use a lot of smaller scraps that I wasn’t able to use in the bucket hats,” she explains. With the bucket hats, the pieces had to be big enough to fit the pattern. With interior lining on the other hand, the patch-working opportunities are endless. 

Sammy’s ability to see purpose in potential waste is also seemingly endless. When creating any woven textile there’s a fringe, which is trimmed, creating a pile of short pieces of thread in the finishing. These appear to be scraps in the truest sense of the word. The average person might perceive them as totally useless. That is until Sammy breaks apart the fibers using a ‘carder’ to create stuffing. “Right now we use a polyfill, which is a plastic stuffing,” she explains of the knit baby toys that Awamaki sells. Under Sammy’s purview, that will be replaced. “It's not only reusing, it’s fully plastic free,” she says proudly. 

And she doesn’t just deal with shreds of fiber and fabric left to her from past production. Sammy looks into the future for sustainability. Fine alpaca wool is the foundation of most of Awamaki’s products, but the changing climate is beginning to put pressure on its supply. Sammy wants to account for potential shifts in accessibility. “I want to start using a coarser alpaca. Mostly, I need to get my hands on it,” she announced. 

Coarser alpaca wool is grown by alpacas living at lower, warmer altitudes. This fiber may have to replace fine alpaca fiber as high altitude pasturing grows more difficult, given unpredictable water supplies and unprecedented cold snaps. Although the reason for the potential material shift is bleak, Sammy is ready for the challenge. “It’s a lot of seeing what the fiber can do. I’d try felting it. It’s just a lot of hands-on experimentation. What can this do? What does this lead me to idea wise? Just trying a bunch of things.” 

Her exploratory nature and inquisitive attitude is essential to her work as a sustainable design intern. It’s a field defined by unknowns, by trial and error. But, the challenge doesn’t shut her down, it invigorates her. “[Awamaki] gives me a lot of control and a lot of room to create and be creative in my own projects. It’s really fun as an intern in a company where they really trust me a lot to be doing my own thing.”  

It makes sense why we have confidence in her. Sammy continuously makes Awamaki, its processes, and its products better.