Brand Profile
AYA Eco Fashion was founded in 2022 by siblings Meli and Rensso Hinostroza. The pair grew up in a Peruvian family in Los Angeles and operate their own production studio in Lima, Peru. The brand sells organic Pima cotton and alpaca wool basics directly to consumers worldwide via ecoaya.com and ecoaya.eu. Modest in scale, with between 11 and 50 employees and no retail presence, AYA has staked everything on one promise: that it has eliminated plastic from fashion entirely.
The brand states its position without qualification. ‘This isn’t a slogan or a marketing claim — it’s our reality,’ AYA writes on its homepage, claiming to be ‘the first and only brand to remove all plastics.’ The garments ‘do not shed a single micro or nano fiber.’ Products are ‘100% Non-toxic.’ The Pima cotton is ‘regenerative organic,’ grown ‘on regenerative soils.’ A materials page states the brand saves ‘46% of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) compared to conventional cotton.’ No study is linked to support the figure. Co-founder Meli Hinostroza told LiveFrankly in June 2024: ‘Sustainability is the driving force behind everything we do.’ What follows is an examination of what the evidence shows.
The zero-shedding claim is the place to begin. Richard Venditti, Ellis-Signe Olsson Professor of Pulp and Paper Science at NC State University, has spent years studying how textile treatments affect microfibre release. His findings are directly relevant to AYA. ‘Some of the dyes and finishes actually increase the amount of microfibers generated,’ Venditti told NC State News in 2022. ‘I don’t think we really want microfibers no matter what; whether it’s polyester or cotton. We’d prefer to have them stay in our clothes.’ Every woven and knitted textile sheds fibres during wear and washing — cotton included. AYA’s zero-shedding claim is not an ambitious target. It describes something that does not exist.
AYA’s own materials page makes this harder to defend. The brand admits it ‘currently still use[s] low-impact reactive fabric dyes and silicones’ on the majority of its products. Venditti’s research is clear: chemical finishes, softeners included, increase the rate at which fibres are released. A brand asserting zero shedding while applying silicone finishing to most of what it sells is making two claims that cannot both be true. AYA’s own sustainability page acknowledges this gap directly — listing ‘find a natural substitute for silicone fabric finishing’ among its future goals, confirming the problem remains unsolved.
The contradictions become more specific when individual products are examined. AYA’s Baby’s Cap product page lists its ingredients under the heading ‘Plastic-Free Ingredients.’ That list includes ‘Fabric Finishing: Silicone (OEKO-TEX)’ and ‘Label Ink: Synthetic (GOTS).’ Silicone is a petroleum-derived polymer. The brand that defines itself through the elimination of plastic is labelling products as plastic-free while disclosing petroleum-based ingredients in the same line of text.
The ‘100% Non-toxic’ headline contains the same pattern of contradiction. AYA operates a small sub-catalogue it describes as genuinely petrochemical-free — acknowledged on the homepage as ‘currently small’ and ‘growing.’ By creating a separate category for products that actually meet the non-toxic standard, AYA has implicitly confirmed that its main catalogue does not. The headline claim, presented as a brand-wide reality, applies in practice to a fraction of what the brand sells.
The certification picture raises further questions. AYA lists Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certification for its fabric and OEKO-TEX Standard 100 — the international certification body’s testing framework — for threads and finishing. Neither is listed as a whole-product certification. OEKO-TEX’s own guidance is explicit: if a garment is described as OEKO-TEX certified, every component must carry that certification. Listing certifications component by component is precisely the practice the standard-setter warns against in consumer communications. Neither GOTS nor OEKO-TEX certificate numbers appear anywhere on AYA’s website, making independent verification through public databases impossible.
Associate Professor and Global Programme Director of the School of Textiles at Heriot-Watt University, Dr. Lisa Macintyre developed the world’s first visual fibre fragmentation grading scale for fashion in 2024 — the kind of independent testing that a zero-shedding claim would need to survive scrutiny. AYA has commissioned no such testing, nor published any equivalent.
The science, however, supports AYA’s direction. Dr. Audrey Gaskins, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Emory University, has documented the health risks linked to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in synthetic textiles. ‘If you have the financial capability and choice to buy clothing made from natural fibers rather than synthetic ones, this is recommended,’ Gaskins told Cotton Incorporated’s Lifestyle Monitor in 2025. The science supports the shift away from synthetics. What it does not support — and what AYA’s own website does not support — is the claim that the shift is already complete.
