Why I started LAINE HILL

Who founded LAINE HILL?

LAINE HILL was founded by Ilse, a Dutch Marketing Management graduate who became deeply interested in what we put in and on our bodies. LAINE HILL makes polyester-free activewear from 92% organic cotton.

The short version is that I could not find the thing I wanted to wear, aesthatic sportwear that is not made from plastic, so I made it myself. The longer version starts with cosmetics.

It started with an internship in 2021

In 2021, during my Marketing Management degree, I interned at Indisha, a small shop that only stocked natural cosmetics brands. It was the corona period, when a lot of us were paying closer attention to our health, and the timing changed how I looked at everything.

At that internship I learned how many ingredients in ordinary cosmetics are there for texture, shelf life, or cost, not for your long-term health. What struck me most was not that this brand was special. It was that it felt like a niche, when a brand using only ingredients that are good for you should be the normal thing.

A lot of that understanding came from Jeanine, my mentor during the internship, and it genuinely opened my eyes. I switched my own cosmetics to natural brands and never switched back. I will write about the ones I actually use in a separate blog, because that list has barely changed since 2021.

From cosmetics to food to what I train in

The strange thing about reading one label is that you cannot stop. Skincare led to food, food led to my kitchen cupboards, and none of it happened overnight. It began during my studies and kept going for years after.

My choices shifted slowly. I moved to less processed food and cooked as clean as I could. I stopped buying supermarket meat, and now only eat meat when I know it comes from a farmer who actually cares about animal welfare, where the animal had a good life. I started paying attention to what I brought into my home.

Activewear stayed a blind spot for a long time. It was only once I had graduated, was working, and started training more that it became obvious. I train a lot now: running, strength work, pilates. And I was doing all of it in polyester. At first it was just a feeling that something was off. Then it got physical. My skin would feel more irritated after a workout and start to itch, and I wanted to get out of my gym clothes the moment I got home.

Why does sweating in polyester matter?

Polyester is a synthetic fibre, essentially plastic spun into thread, and it behaves like plastic against the skin. It traps heat and does not absorb sweat, which is part of why synthetic activewear starts to smell and why some skin reacts to it. When I trained in it, I got the kind of irritation and itch that faded the moment I switched to natural fabrics. That is not a scientific paper. It is just my own skin, telling me something over and over until I listened.

Why is natural-material activewear so hard to find?

Because the whole industry runs on synthetics, and once I started looking at the numbers, the empty shelves made sense. Polyester was 59% of global fibre production in 2024, and synthetics together made up 69%, while cotton had slipped to 19% (Textile Exchange, Materials Market Report 2025). Organic cotton is still only around 1% of all the cotton grown worldwide (Textile Exchange).

When I went looking for natural activewear at the end of 2024, that scarcity was obvious. There were a few brands in the United States, and a handful of others that were natural but not something I wanted to wear: shapeless, dated, clearly not made by anyone who cared how it looked. I care how clothes fit and how they photograph, and I was not willing to choose between my skin and my style. Nobody was offering both.

Why I decided to make it myself

At some point the search just ended. Another tab, another brand that was either natural or good-looking but never both, and I stopped waiting for someone else to make the thing I wanted. That was the end of 2024, by which point I had finished my degree and was working at a marketing agency.

So I built LAINE HILL in the hours around that job. I am writing this in August 2026, still at the agency, still building it on weeknights and weekends, because I am convinced this is where activewear has to go.

I keep landing on the same thing: you buy sportswear to look after your body, and then almost every brand hands you far more plastic to sweat in than any of it needs. That got normal over a few decades, quietly. I would like to be part of why it stops.

Where does the name LAINE HILL come from?

LAINE HILL is not a name I invented in a branding session. My second name is Hillaine, the feminine version of my grandfather Hil, who passed away ten days before I was born. Split and reversed, Hillaine becomes Hill and Laine. LAINE HILL.

So the name was never a marketing choice. It is his, and it is mine to carry now.

What LAINE HILL actually is

LAINE HILL is 92% organic cotton with 8% spandex. The cotton breathes, absorbs sweat, and stays soft against the skin. The 8% spandex is there for stretch and recovery, the minimum I needed so a legging moves with you and holds its shape through a squat.

Spandex is synthetic, a plastic in chemistry terms, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. That is why I say polyester-free and not something the fabric isn't. There is 8% synthetic content in every piece, and I would rather explain it than hide it behind a natural-sounding claim.

Buying something new is still consumption

I am not going to tell you this is better for the planet, because mostly it is not. Every new legging is a thing that got made, dyed, and shipped, and buying anything at all has a footprint. Natural does not erase that. By some measures it is even worse: growing cotton drinks water and takes land, and in those terms it can be harder on the environment than polyester.

So I am careful about the claim I make. LAINE HILL is a better choice for you, not for the earth. For your skin, for your health, for what you are breathing in while you sweat, for wearing something you understand. It is a more honest product than most of what hangs on the rack, and it is not a way to shop your conscience clean. I would rather say that out loud than dress it up as saving the world.

If you want to see what came out of all of this, see the set. If you care about what goes on your skin while you move, then this was made with you in mind.

Ilse, founder of LAINE HILL