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• Protect the places we love most.
• Help the people we love most.
• Inspire others.
The places we love most are the saltwater flats we’ve traveled to and fished. As the ocean’s nurseries, they’re vitally important to the future of our oceans and fisheries. They face threats from extractive industries, pollution, global warming, and over-harvesting.
The people we love most are those in the communities surrounding saltwater flats—indigenous people who rely on the flats to make a living and take care of their families.
Through our work, we want to inspire young people into action. We admire their energy and optimism, and their passion for making the earth a better, more equitable place for all. Many are struggling to find purpose, and ways to meaningfully connect with the world around them—like every generation, they want to adventure and explore.
Our challenge with Bajío is to help the saltwater flats, and in doing so, help the indigenous people who call them home, all the while inspiring the young people who are the future of the earth.
When you’re a non-profit, everything depends on your ability to drum up support, generally through donations. Bajío is a privately held, for-profit company. We care deeply about building Bajío so that we can support our mission. The better the business does, the better we can fund our social and environmental causes.
A few years ago we started a foundation called Indifly. The purpose of Indifly was to help indigenous peoples around the world build sustainable fly fishing businesses. The idea came out of a program we’d started in Guyana. We want to build on that success.
The initial idea for Bajío and the decision to start a new sunglass company came from me, Al Perkinson, with a strong assist from my wife, Marguerite Meyer. We felt that if we could pull it off, it would give our community a much-needed new force for good.
Many of our frames are 100% plant-derived. Instead of petroleum-based plastics, we make frames from castor plants. The material is lighter than aluminum, carbon fiber, and glass composites, yet 10 times stronger than polycarbonate, and 13 times stronger than other common bioplastics.
When we first learned that we could create sunglass frames from discarded coconut husks—a by-product of food production—we jumped for joy. What’s more Bajío than frames made of coconuts? We have dedicated a lot of time to perfecting our newest material, and our first coconut-based style will arrive in 2021.
While you might think there’s plenty of sand available to make glass, humans use more of it than we do oil. Thankfully, glass is 100% recyclable—it has an unlimited life and can be recycled endlessly. Recycle it!
Thanks to the way we casually dispose of plastics, our oceans and landfills have become choked with it. We recycle plastic into many of the products we make, including our poly-blend t-shirts.
We never wanted a traditional plastic case; instead, we sought materials that fit our brand ethos. We sampled faux leathers made from mango skins, apple skins. even cactus. Unfortunately, these were thin and delicate, and needed a polyurethane backing to hold together, negating much of the benefit.
So we took a closer look at real leather. We hadn’t initially considered leather because we thought it had a poor ecological impact—but we were wrong. Like mango and apple leathers, real leather makes use of a by-product of food production. We use leathers that are tanned using eco-friendly processes. Leather also lasts a very long time—properly cared for, it never needs to be replaced. If it does end up in a landfill? It’s biodegradable.
Why wouldn’t we use recycled paper? It’s a no-brainer. Using 100% recycled instead of 100% virgin fiber paper saves 100% of the trees, uses 69% less energy, uses 47% less water, and creates 39% less solid waste.
If you don't recycle paper, it goes to the landfill. The US EPA cites landfills as the single largest source of methane emissions and identified the decomposition of paper among the most significant sources of landfill methane. A potent gas with 21 times the heat-trapping power of CO2, methane is a major contributor to global climate change.
We use bamboo instead of wood or plastic whenever we can, because it’s a strong, fast-growing, renewable, and sustainable building material. We are currently using it in the construction of our sunglass display cases.
