Bamboo is one of the first things that comes to mind when you think of this part of the world. But, apart from the ubiquitous scaffolding one sees, my next thought is how little you actually see it in other contexts.

One person who is out to change this is ‘bamboo warrior’, Julia Washbourne. She’s positively crazy about the stuff and is leading the charge to transform bamboo’s underdog standing since 2008.

“Twenty years ago, I came across bamboo and it just gripped me”, she shares. “Many people think cotton is so amazing, but a lot of pesticides go into maintaining the crop versus bamboo not requiring this at all,” she explains, adding that the virtues of bamboo are little sung, because they’re little known.

“Bamboo’s like hemp but so much cooler because you can make more from it. I wanted to do something with meaning and, with bamboo, I can promote a sustainable resource. And the places that make the fabric from the fibres are usually female-run workshops in Vietnam and southern China.”

Washbourne is German-English and was born in the UK and moved to Germany aged 12. She credits the move to Germany to a place called Freiberg on the edge of Switzerland and France with instilling in her the importance of being environmentally friendly. “It was unconsciously environmentally forward, becoming Europe’s most prominent solar city in the mid-eighties; recycling was already well in place there.”

A student of Chinese and business studies, her language skills (English, German, French and Putonghua) netted her a series of jobs that brought her east and laid the foundation for what she’s doing now. “Just like bamboo, which lays a foundation under the earth and then just takes off,” she laughs.

Her experience in purchasing and product design in homeware and the huge excesses and wastage she witnessed, make an indelible impression, and, once she’d discovered bamboo, she set about establishing Bamboa, making some of the same homeware products from bamboo. Her idea was to introduce it to a new generation of uber-conscious consumers who wish to spend mindfully and tread lightly upon Planet earth.