Will Wholesale be a part of the Future of Fashion?
The wholesale model of fashion sales and distribution is crumbling. For larger brands, full vertical integration is the way to make brick-and-mortar stores work (think Uniqlo, Zara/Mango etc), while for smaller or newer labels, thin margins are pushing many brands to go online-only and often aggressively push new types of marketing or business models (eg. Everlane, Warby Parker).
Slow Factory has been making NASA print silk scarves and other accessories and apparel for 4 years now, with a mix of wholesale and online direct to consumer sales.
We will now be stopping all wholesale for a number of reasons, and want to be vocal and clear about why.
Pricing is of course a consideration, but perhaps surprisingly not the main one. When you sell to stores or distributors, you essentially sell at half the price that you would sell directly to a person. This is due to ‘markup’ and the overhead of “middlemen”, and is a big part of what makes consumer goods cost so many times more than it takes to produce them. Payment schedules also mean that small designers have to pay up front to produce goods, then wait many months to get paid back which can be hard for small businesses. But all this financial stuff has known solutions.
The main reasons Slow Factory is going to sell online-only are about our philosophy of sustainability, and working against the disposable concept of fashion.
Selling through stores and distributors tends to perpetuate things that Slow Factory is actively fighting against. A really big gain we get from staying online only is to set our own timeline, to avoid the Fashion Calendar.
The Fashion Calendar
The so-called Fashion Calendar is the rigorous schedule that fashion stores and distributors buy and sell to (Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter), in which collections are designed, purchased and produced months or years ahead of time, only to go “out of style” months later. This encourages a few really bad behaviours in fashion producers:
- It pushes the idea of constant change, “planned obsolescence” and literal disposability of clothing and accessories. The constant over-consumerism mindset.
- At the height of “fresh” clothes, prices need to be very high to absorb all the costs of middlemen. Pricing is also set knowing that stores give deep discounts as things go off-season, a phenomenon which encourages distrust between brands and consumers. If we see a major pendulum swing from high prices to massive discounts, buyers feel that “only suckers pay full price”, and don’t trust the value and cost of goods produced with more ethical practices.
- Cheap materials and production: there are clear environmental costs of using cheap materials and production methods; notwithstanding the very expensive Green Washing Marketing campaigns from H&M to Uniqlo, Fast Fashion is still the second most polluting industry right after Big Oil.
- Cheap production through cheap labour: let’s not forget about the very real human costs of using exploitative labour practices; sweatshop and industrial labour in the “developing” world are still major issues, often hitting women the hardest.
When advocating for a slow fashion movement and more sustainable industry one has to walk the talk and stand with integrity with their vision. For our 2017 plan we will be revisiting or pricing structure, removing the wholesale markup we will be offering our customers our wholesale prices directly online.
We are putting in place a closing the loop model to collect damaged scarves and offer a discount to customers who chose to become a member of that program. We will be moving slowly into apparel with a few selections for the spring and the fall of 2017.
We are excited for what’s coming, always looking forward and grounded in the vision that slow and steady wins the race, we are in this for centuries to come and our fashion house will continue to create meaningful pieces, collectable items that are made to last.
If you want to learn more about sustainable fashion, tune in to our podcast: weareslow.co. To join the movement, sign up at slowfactory.com/signup.
