dabl offers products from four categories: vintage, upcycled, handmade, and made in the USA.

VINTAGE

Vintage garments and accessories are sourced from thrift stores and estate sales.  These pieces are cleaned, sanitized, and repaired (if necessary) before tagged and added to the shop.  We use the term vintage loosely. At dabl, we refer to anything from around the early 2000s and earlier to be vintage.  Every so ofter, we will sell something from the past few years on our site.  In those cases the item will be marked as 'second hand' and not 'vintage.

UPCYCLED

Upcycled pieces refer to anything we have majorly altered using second hand or vintage pieces.  An example would be cutting up a blouse and sewing it back together in a way that reflects a more contemporary trend.

HANDMADE

Handmade is just what it sounds like!  Items marked handmade are sew or assembled my dabl right here in Columbus.  Our goal when making this handmade is to use as many second had materials (like jewelry chain and fabric) as possible.

MADE IN THE USA

We have just recently expanded to offer new apparel items in small releases.  These itemes are bought wholesale from garment manufacturers (similar to boutiques, who buy wholesale from a variety of labels).  We made this decision to 1) help grow our business and 2) To offer basics and pieces we have a hard time finding vintage/second hand in good condition.  In regards to growing dabl, it is very overwhelming and time consuming to go out and source each piece individually, clean it, repair it, photograph it and add it to our website when the end result is one sale.  Being able to buy multiples of the same item means that all the effort that goes into preparing a style to be sold online will result in several sales, not just one. 

Our goal is to make ethical and responsible shopping accessible and affordable so that consumers see it as a viable alternative to shopping from fast fashion brands.  While researching the ethics behind garment production in the USA, we learned a lot.  Not all products made overseas are made unethically, and not all products made in the US are made ethically.  It's a complicated industry.  

In the U.S., there are national, state and local laws in place that regulate how workers are treated (i.e. minimum wages, overtime, safety) and how resources are used (i.e. water usage and recycling, waste processing, use of chemicals) that keep things in check.  While we recognize that there are manufacturers that try to cut corners, we have done our due diligence to reach out to wholesale brand we choose to carry to learn more about their labor practices.  We wanted to make sure that by expanding to carry non-vintage clothing that we do our best to only offer pieces that are Made in the USA by wholesale brands we trust.

Sustainability

One of dabl's main goals if to make fashion a sustainable experience. As we already know, shopping clothing that has already has a past life is the most sustainable option (right next to not buying anything new at all of course).  We want to carry that sustain ability into how we package our goods as well.  We use Ecoenclose paper mailers (made of recycled paper) to send out our orders*.  Our tissue paper and thank you notes are also 100% recyclable. 

*We still have a pack of plastic bubble mailers that were given to us to use when we first started out that are sometimes used to ship jewelry only orders.  Once we go through them, they will be replaced with 100% recyclable packaging.