A Challenge to Be Met: Ethical Hive finally pitched

The 26th of January marked the day our project, Ethical Hive by A Challenge to Be Met, was pitched. Today, approximately a month later, it is worth taking a look back to that experience.

The challenge of ethical fashion

The basis of Ethical Hive is the challenge of ethical fashion, as a counter-action against fast fashion. Fast fashion is the process of inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to local trends. It is an industry with an enormous impact on the environment, because of the textile waste, the CO2 emissions and the water pollution it causes, to name a few of its effects. At the same time, fast fashion counts innumerous human rights violations, with most of its workers being in poverty and exploited on a daily basis. It goes against many if not all sustainability goals, via the immense energy waste and fast production. Therefore, fast fashion is a problem. But, more importantly, it poses a challenge; to find an ethical alternative.

The tricky thing here, is that the ethical alternative has already been found. Ethical fashion exists and it is gaining more and more ground every day, through social and mainstream media. Physical second-hand stores and ethical small businesses establish themselves, while Instagram e-shops multiply. The problem lies elsewhere. This spread of ethical fashion is nowhere near enough to cause social innovation. The information is not yet enough, or hasn’t reached and touched the right people, while all these ethical businesses are not being promoted enough either. So, A Challenge to Be Met decided to create a media start-up. Our goal is simple. We want to inform on ethical fashion and promote ethical shops and brands.

A journey with many stops: The oases

Once we realised ethical fashion concerned us as young women and residents of planet Earth (asking ourselves why), once we decided to act on that concern, the first stop was information. We did thorough research on fast fashion, as well as on ways to combat it, not to mention the research we conducted on social innovation and human-centered design thinking.

• UN Sustainability Goals: One of the first steps we took was to see whether our project aligned with the UN Sustainability Goals, which, in fact, it did). Three main goals that are common between Ethical Hive and the 17 Goals are climate action, no inequality and sustainability.
• UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Week: We continued by participating in MIL week, via visual social media posts and a TedTalk, in an attempt to raise awareness over misinformation in ethical fashion.
• First Steps: After shaping a concrete information background, we defined our project, Ethical Hive.
• Interviews: A crucial step in our journey was defining our audience, finding possible allies, as well as sceptics, and the topics which we care to discuss with them. We went into the field (as much as Covid-19 allows) and talked to people with all kinds of different opinions. Interviews and other human-centered methods, such us post-it notes and drawing allowed us to find out about their perspective and use it in our implementation of the project.

Ethical Hive: The fruit of our labor

All this work brings us to the final stages: the actual project. A Challenge to Be Met began by building a website on WordPress. The main idea was to fill it with interviews of people withing the ethical fashion “industry”, as well as supporters and sceptics. Alongside the interviews, visitors can find fun articles about thrifting and informative ones. There are, also, pages within the website that provide more specific information:

• Thrift Store Guide: A detailed, step-by-step guide on how to create and sustain an Instagram e-shop.
• Ethical Spots: A highly detailed guide (with images and addresses, as well as a map) of physical thrift stores all over neighbourhoods in Attica, Patras, Thessaloniki and Crete, covering most major cities in Greece.

Informative videos and a widget leading to our Instagram are also featured.

We have also created an Instagram account, with a very similar aesthetic to our website, where we try to connect to other accounts with similar contect, people within our target group, as well as e-shop accounts. The content is also based on our website.

What’s our business plan?

Ethical Hive is planning to take its first steps for free, run by volunteers. As we acquire followers and people start using our website as a guide, we will begin reaching out to both physical stores and e-shops to advertise them with a fee, which will vary based on the frequency and types of advertisement through both our website and Instagram profile.

Takeaway

We, A Challenge to Be Met, hope that our Ethical Hive will serve as a place of information, a safe haven for all thrift stores and a source of food for thought.

Where you can find us:

Our website | Our Instagram

Sources and useful links:

• What Is Fast Fashion, Anyway?
• Fast fashion, explained
• Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World
• UNESCO | Building peace in the minds of men and women
• The 17 Goals | Sustainable Development
• 5 Whys — Getting to the Root of a Problem Quickly
• Introduction: Dimensions of Social Innovation
• What Is Human-Centered Design?
• What’s the difference between human-centered design and design thinking?

The rest of the team: Glykeria Demetra Savvaidi, Ioanna Poliou