Roxane Uzureau

Roxane Uzureau, barePack CEO & Co-founder, specialises in staying ahead of consumer trends, innovative applications and user experience. After years of designing for the fashion industry, the waste she started to notice combined with her love for wildlife stirred her. From questioning the take-use-waste lifestyle began her new-found mission to redefine how we go about everyday events in ways that can have the least impact on the environment.

Roxane has always had a passion for creating products that had meaning and served a purpose: she researched and made the world’s first hand-crafted baby shoes that could adjust through to lengthen so as to reduce waste and save parents costs. Following weekend courses in shoemaking, she crafted the original patterns herself and went on to source small Spanish manufacturers. Later she started an illustration business from home, selling cards from recycled paper which she hoped to scale so as to provide funds for feline conservation programs. Neither took off, but they grew her understanding of product to market fit, marketing, and consumer behaviour.

Having lived or worked in London, Paris, New York, Sydney and Guangzhou, Roxane observed the growing demand for convenience in a fast-paced world. Every corner of the world she lived in the observation echoed the same search for comfortable lifestyles that too often put sustainability on the backseat. Her interest peaked when China refused to accept plastics for recycling in Jan 2018, and ever since then she has questioned how we live and how much waste we generate – how much of it could be avoided?

When she arrived in Singapore, she initially spent time and learnt a lot from volunteering for the local registered charity ZerowasteSG who focus on public education. An opportunity in fashion – one that would align with her growing interest and adherence to low-waste lifestyles – wasn’t available and as she presented on behalf of Zerowaste SG and grew familiar with the day to day of life in Singapore, it became apparent that there was an unmet need to make BYO more convenient in order to encourage the practice of reuse and make it appealing for the demographics of the country. Armed with newly found knowledge on the vast problem caused by disposable packaging and also the possible solutions Roxane enjoys using her expertise to involve herself in local initiatives and events, such as the National Environment Agency (NEA)’s citizen workshop to reduce single-use plastics, the Singapore Manufacturing Federation’s industry workshops, and supporting various hackathons on sustainability. Her textile passion is still here, and as such Roxane has the pleasure to teach sustainable fashion at Singapore’s Textile and Fashion Industry Training Centre (TaF.tc) and support individuals and small businesses who are aiming to reshape the fashion industry.

Roxane’s hobbies include hiking, horse riding, yoga, art and she is known for being the one to come up with random stories such as saving a bunch of bats over the weekend you were fortunate enough to land on her balcony. Sustainability is not a job, or a hobby, it’s a way of life. As part of her journey, Roxane, who was until now pescatarian, moved to a plant-based diet, genuinely concerned for the health of the oceans and home to a myriad of ecosystems that we all depend on.