DESIGN:As climate concern becomes cool and people seek to demonstrate their green credentials, a new industry is evolving, turning waste into high fashion desirable goods

THE HISTORY of Freitag is also the recent history of design, fashion and grunge; the fashion that questions what fashion is all about and which periodically challenges our ideas about the label and the brand.

Freitag is important because its main sources of raw materials are recycled products, making it the place where fashion meets our conscience. But that is only the beginning.

Freitag has hit on a formula for making repurposed goods beautiful, fashionable and exceedingly profitable. Recycled but premium, a Freitag handbag, made from truck tarpaulin and seat belts, could set you back over €200; proving that recycled products incorporating buzz-worthy design need not just be worthy. That too, however, is far from the whole story.

Zurich-based Freitag, managed by the Freitag brothers Markus and Daniel, has succeeded without advertising its products. Nor does it engage in sponsorship or other activities that "build the brand".

While it is modish to talk about the importance of brand values and brand integrity, the new fashion geekiness might be to disown branding altogether, in favour of something else - originality, uniqueness, product as art.

Freitag and companies like them are succeeding in persuading people to rethink the values they attach to fashionable products. That is producing an emerging market where design borders art, where products embrace or espouse a conceptual approach that is different from everyday business but very close to the way an artist works.

When products emerge from that border between design, conscience and art, hip urbanites are like cats around catnip, going gooey around bags and benches that are distinct from what the rest of the market offers, because they demonstrably embody principles such as uniqueness and integrity.

To understand that, take a look also at Scrapile, a New York furniture company, run by designers Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado.

Scrapile designs products from waste wood - but not just from any old wood. Carlos Salgado's conceptual integrity forces him to recycle all the wood he can find, regardless of what type. "We don't really have a choice of what we want to collect," says Salgado. "It's very important to us that we keep all this material." So hardwood and softwood, as well as ply and fibre, all go into the haute design mix.

The two designers have developed a way to composite that waste material which they then work into desks, tables and seats, that are remarkable to look at if you get what the company is about.

Their sources are potentially vast. Large scale furniture manufacturers in the New York area can waste over 60 cubic metres of wood in a day and Scrapile's mission is to intervene in that process in a way that espouses integrity - hence they allow themselves no choice.

This conceptual drive is what makes the Scrapile mission more akin to an artistic intervention than a simple recycling project.

But back to Freitag. The success of Freitag, and it is clearly not alone in breaking free of modern brand logic, is as much conceptual as it is design-led.

"To Freitag" could one day mean to be clever enough to develop concepts dressed up as bags, stools, accessories, whatever. This cerebral component makes their mission imitable by anyone with a curious mind.

The idea for the "tarp bag" began when the two brothers were sitting in their Zurich apartment thinking where to get a bag that would be tough and durable and, in not so sunny Zurich, waterproof.

"Let's make our own," they said. So they sewed together a messenger bag from a piece of old truck tarpaulin that was leftover from a dozen years on Europe's highways, turned old seat belts into straps, and stitched a spare bicycle inner tube into the bag to keep the edges from fraying.

What the brothers hit upon was a major marketing success. They now have 60 employees, a number of affiliates around Europe making products on their behalf, and a global distribution network serving 350 retail outlets.

In 2006 the brothers opened a recycled shop. The Freitag Individual Recycled Freeway Shop is made entirely of used transport containers bolted horizontally and vertically. Imagine a container park at the Dublin dock stacked full of transport containers. Now imagine 10 of those containers in the High Street.

The brothers have spoken recently about a possible co-operation with Hilton, Hyatt or Four Season's Hotels to take the recycled concept into the travel industry, giving those of us who city-hop an opportunity to sleep and breathe the recycling ethos.

Their products, like their shop, are made only from recycled materials - the only processing that takes place, apart from cutting and stitching, is a good wash. But while their bags can be beautiful, their shop is plain ugly, whichever way you view it. Ugly, defiant in the face of retail branding logic, and successful.

In the window of Gallery Number One in Frances St, Dublin you can some days see an old music cassette tape. Except it isn't a tape cassette, it's a wallet.

Designed by a young Italian, Marcella Foschi, the wallet uses an old music cassette tape as its outer border, enclosing a zip and fabric inner wallet. Cassette tapes are more or less redundant so Foschi is finding new uses for them. Here in Ireland they sell for €40.

"Marcella is a young Italian designer who studied product design at the University of Florence," says Dave Douglas, who runs Galley Number One alongside web design firm Ebow Design in Francis St. "She specialises in making hand crafted objects by re-using components and we're extending our range of Marcella's goods to include her acrylic jewellery range and her recycled 'So Solid Stool'."

Gallery Number One's range of recycled designer products is growing and may soon include Freitag bags. There is "a huge avenue for ebow design and Gallery Number One to explore the link between music, popular culture, and art and design," says Douglas, whose first run of tape wallets has sold out.

Designs incorporating recycled products tend to be one of a kind - the piece of old tarpaulin, the tape and the wood waste cannot be produced to order in standardised batches - and the uniqueness of each object is a large part of its popularity.

However, the success of a business like Freitag isn't without its skeptics. "It has always been very difficult to find nice tarpaulins, because the tarp suppliers were very sceptical. And it's still not easy for us today," says Marcel Freitag.

In fact it is the art world that has been most responsive. Freitag's products found their way into the Museum of Modern Art in the 2003 design collection and Foschi's goods are popular at major design fairs.

It is fitting that recycled products make their way into art galleries. Like Foschi's tape wallets and Scrapile's benches, Freitag is regarded by many as an art fashion object, blurring the lines between product and gallery exhibit. The brothers have won several arts-related awards, including a distinction from the Trade Competition for Applied Arts, in Switzerland.

"Art and design are coming together," says Douglas, "but I also think that they have always been together. It's just been a little slower to show itself in Ireland."

Unlike the majority of entrepreneurial projects, though, it seems the anti-brand art product can exist without the trappings of the business plan, the marketing plan and the pricing strategy, making it an ideal area for creative people who want to wear their conscience and integrity out there on their sleeve, bag or shirt.