The Honest Version
Our Commitment
Materials, carbon, community, trails, and take-back — the work we do because the trails we love require it, not because it polls well.
Materials That Last
Mountain gear lives a hard life. A jacket that pills after two seasons is a jacket that ends up in a landfill — and another reason to drive to a store and buy another one. We design every piece to outlast the trend cycle, with technical fabrics rated for hundreds of wash cycles and finishes that don't strip after the first deep clean.
Our base layers use a recycled-poly + Tencel-modal blend spun at a single mill in North Carolina, where we can audit water and dye chemistry directly. Outerwear shells use 100% recycled face fabric with PFC-free DWR. Insulation is recycled-content synthetic or RDS-certified down — never new petroleum-fill polyester.
Every garment ships with a care card that, followed honestly, doubles its useful life. We test it ourselves. If a piece fails before it should, write to us — repair or replace is on us, no receipt required.
Carbon-Neutral From Mill to Door
Every order placed on apresstudio.com ships carbon-neutral. We measure the full lifecycle impact of each item — fiber production, dyeing, knitting, cut-and-sew, freight, last-mile delivery — and purchase verified Gold Standard or Verra-certified carbon removals to cover the gap until the operational footprint is genuinely zero.
Logistics-wise, we consolidate inbound shipments by sea (not air) wherever lead times allow, route domestic orders out of a single Salt Lake City fulfillment center to minimize ground miles, and pay for ground (not air) on every standard order. Express and overnight options are available when customers need them; for those we offset the marginal aviation footprint at 1.5× the verified emissions to be conservative.
We publish the year's carbon report each February as part of the annual letter. The same auditors who confirm the offsets review the report; we don't grade our own homework.
Women on the Mountain
Our flagship community partnership is with SheJumps, a nonprofit that introduces women and girls to outdoor sports — backcountry travel, climbing, mountain biking, avalanche education — at a price they can actually afford. 2% of every order on apresstudio.com goes directly to SheJumps program scholarships, not to overhead.
Beyond the dollars: every quarter we underwrite a free intro-to-backcountry weekend in a different mountain region, full gear loan included. Registration opens on our Journal; spots are first-come, no purchase required, and travel stipends are available for participants who need them.
We don't market the partnership as charity. It's a return on the trails we depend on, and on the women who built the sports our brand sits inside of.
The Trails We Love
1% of every product sold goes to local trail conservation, split across the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, the Aspen-Snowmass Wilderness Workshop, and the Tahoe Rim Trail Association. These are the trails the team actually runs, climbs, and skis, and the funding goes to wildfire mitigation, erosion repair, and pit-toilet sanitation that keeps backcountry corridors usable year after year.
Customers can vote on the funding split at checkout. We publish the quarterly disbursements on the Journal so you can see exactly which projects each contribution went to — bridge replacements, signage, volunteer-day catering, you name it.
If there's a trail you'd like us to consider for the next quarter, write to us through the Contact page. We read every suggestion.
Wear, Repair, Return
We'd rather repair than replace. Any Après Studio piece, regardless of age, can be sent back to our Salt Lake City shop for repair — torn seams, broken zippers, snagged knits — and we'll fix it in-house at no cost. Pay shipping one way; we cover the return.
When a piece is truly beyond repair, send it back through our take-back program. We sort by material: recyclable fibers go into our next-generation recycled-content yarn (we partner with the same NC mill that spins our base layers), and pieces that can be cleaned and re-worn are donated to gear-library nonprofits that loan kit to underfunded outdoor programs.
Every take-back is logged. You'll receive a credit toward your next order proportional to the original purchase value, and a note describing what happened to the piece. Nothing about the program is a green-marketing fig leaf — the goal is genuine circularity, and we report on the recycling-vs-donation split annually.
Where Honesty Sits
A lot of this sounds nice. The hard part is keeping it honest as the brand grows. So we publish, every February, an annual transparency report — total emissions, offset portfolio, community-partnership disbursements, take-back tonnage, repairs completed, the gap between what we wanted to do and what we actually did. The same independent auditor reviews it.
If we screw up — and at some point we will — we'd rather you read about it from us than catch it later. The report includes a 'where we missed' section by design.
Sustainability isn't a marketing program. It's part of the cost of being a brand that sells things to people who care about the places those things get used. We're not perfect. We'd rather be honest about where we are than write a glossy claim we can't back up.
