European Commission's Safe and Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) framework is a premarket approach that aims to integrate safety and sustainability early in the innovation cycle. The framework consists of 8-design principles and 5-assessment steps. Apart from briefly presenting the SSbD framework in its entirety, this work showcases the results from a co-creation session organized during the Ecosystex Conference 2023 organized by the Textile ETP. During this co-creation session, product designers and developers from the textile industry worked together with academic researchers to theoretically develop functional sportswear using the SSbD design principles. The final SSbD functional sportswear design included the use of laser-cut recycled PET fabric, applying the concept of pattern efficiency, utilizing renewable energy during production, and minimizing the diversity of materials to facilitate recycling at the end of life. Nevertheless, some functional requirements such as those pertaining to water repellency could not be sufficiently addressed using the SSbD principles. Overall, we identify the opportunities of the SSbD framework and the challenges of applying the same during product development. Finally, we recommend further exploring practices and alternative business models that would be conducive to the SSbD functional sportswear.