Yulex®: Growing Different

On the 30th of April, 1975, the city of Saigon in Southern Vietnam fell to the military forces of the North. It marked the end of the Vietnam war and led to the evacuation of thousands of US personnel. On the same day, in the southern port village of Dong Xuyen, Liz Bui and her siblings made their escape from the country in a small boat, alone and without their parents. With a father who was fighting for the southern forces, and the fear of retribution a very real prospect, remaining was not an option and they were picked up by American forces, before being sent to the US as refugees.

“Adopted” by a family in Lincoln, Nebraska, a predominantly White community in the geographical centre of the US, Liz excelled at school – obtaining a PhD from UCLA and eventually a JD from Pepperdine, specialising in Intellectual Property Law and carving out an impressive career in California.

In 2022, on the anniversary of her escape, Liz returned to Vietnam as CBO of Yulex LLC with a mission – to create a brand new, transparent supply chain for Yulex’s natural rubber products, and provide fair and equitable remuneration for the farmers growing it.

For the uninitiated, Yulex® Natural Rubber products are plant-derived alternatives to traditional fossil-fuel based rubber products. Neoprene in particular is incredibly toxic to produce, creating pollution that damages the environment and the lives of those living within the vicinity of its production facilities. Natural rubber, by contrast, is sourced from renewable and responsibly managed Hevea trees which not only significantly cut the carbon emissions from the production process, but also sequester a huge amount of carbon over their lifetimes. At Finisterre, we switched our entire wetsuit range to Yulex® in 2021 and since then have used nothing else.

In an effort to consolidate and create a more transparent supply chain, in 2022 Liz and Yulex’s Founder Jeff Martin relocated to live in Vietnam for over a year, working closely with small scale farmers or “smallholders”, NGOs and forestry consultants, as well as government and private groups to learn and get a better understanding of natural rubber production on the ground in Vietnam.

For Liz, the experience was profound. “I didn't really have an intrinsic sense of what it was to be Vietnamese,” she explained, “I was only 5 or 6 when I came to America. So, I didn’t have the context I needed growing up in Nebraska, being educated and living amongst a monoculture that did not look like me.”

But returning to Vietnam was different, she said. “By my dress, my walk and everything else, they saw me as being American, but they also saw me as uniquely one of them - or ‘a returning Vietnamese’. During my time immersed in the country, there were so many little things that I did or could relate to that were ‘Vietnamese’. The longer I was there, the more I realized, oh, my God, I really am Vietnamese!”

When meeting the rubber farmers, this connection proved invaluable not just for business relationships but on a visceral human level. “I couldn't meet these smallholders without thinking, ‘wow, this could also be my family, me’” she remembers. After the war, the country experienced deep poverty for over a decade, and one of the programmes instigated by the new regime was to give people land so that they could survive and provide for themselves through subsistence farming. Particularly in the south, this was one of the only ways for people to survive.

“I’ve always been passionate about giving back,” Liz explained, having spent almost three decades working and volunteering for nonprofit orgs in the US, “But in Vietnam, it was a little bit more poignant. I had the ability and the power to give back in a different way. It really hit home.”

Over the year they spent in Vietnam, Liz and Jeff completely remapped their supply chain – bringing thousands of small scale growers into cooperatives and setting up a distribution network that compensates these growers fairly for their product.

Rubber farmers tap their trees, and collect it to transport it to their local collection centres or sell it to traders who do the same. In rural Vietnam, this transport is usually by bicycle or moped. The latex is weighed, tested and recorded, before being further transported to the processing plants to be refined and processed into different grades of commercial natural rubber or latex – including Yulex Prime and Yulex Pure latex. The resulting natural rubber is traceable right back to these smallholders, ensuring transparency and accountability.

At Finisterre, we’re proud to have supported and been part of this journey. As a brand built from a love of the sea, our wetsuits are a crucial piece of kit needed to connect people to this wild, elemental space. With this new supply chain, our Yulex® wetsuits are not just better for the planet, but also for the people producing the materials to make them. Continuing our founding commitments to product, environment and people.