Democratize Fashion
Today profit calculations don’t account for how many natural resources have been used, nor what impact products have on society. Today it’s hard for consumers to really know what’s going on under the hood of a textile supply chain. With no incentives for corporations to lead the change in clothing manufacturing — what if we democratized fashion?
Let’s start at the beginning:
I have been spending most of my past 6 months reading and learning anything there is about fashion.
I read about what it is, what it means, who makes it, who buys it and how we got to where we are in the industry today.
Why?
Because 6 months ago I tried buying a simple black tee.
One that was:
1. affordable
2. fashionable
3. ethically made
4. eco-consciously produced.
After common e-commerce marketplaces had failed me, I hired help to do the online research for me.
It took me an entire week and about $200 in hourly rates for a virtual assistant to find a tee I liked!
I, the sustainable fashion noob, felt frustrated and I said to myself “really?! is this the way conscious consumers, <preacher-voice> those who take on a mission and are holding up the torch </preacher-voice>, are shopping fashion? Is this the best we can do get people to join us?
I felt like I was being punished for taking a stand. I felt like had to give up my passion for fashion and only focus on its impact from now on. I looove infinite product feeds. I looove spending hours on a site and creating a new outfit. I looove browsing dozens of options of the one kind of dress I am looking for. It’s meditative! A fashionista’s zen.
It seemed like none of that was in my future as a sustainable fashion shopper. I felt like I had to prove really extra super duper hard that I mean it, that I am committed to making a change by giving up the joy of a new fashion haul.
That’s when I started working on Tomaeto Tomahto. We match passionate fashionistas to conscious fashion brands. We are basing matches on individual preferences for style, ethics and eco-friendliness.
This way, we are able to see how much more complex your fashion choices get. If you take values beyond style into account, finding clothes you like gets tricky. Think about it: the average add-to-cart rate for e-commerce shops is already only about 10%. That’s after an ad conversation rate of 1–2% and before 69% of that 10 % abandon their cart at the end. If add facts of ethical and ecological values (we have identified 17 of these in our Conscious Guide), these rates would even be lower.
Some of these conscious values lead to very different sustainable shopping types. One example of a persona is: “I only want to wear clothes made from organic fibers”. Another one is: “No virgin fibers for me, I only wear recycled stuff”. Then for each persona add preferences of the country of origin, colors, styles, budgets. Then apply these to every type of clothing.
You can see: for a multi-retailer trying to manage so many SKU’s would be an operational nightmare. That is why we have so many small brands focusing on one persona of conscious fashion shopper. They are selling directly to consumers on their own websites. On the other side are customers clicking through conscious fashion directories. Looking at shop after shop hoping to find what they are looking for.
The most obvious thing to do is to bring all these brands onto one platform. Each with their own inventory with their own inventory and order fulfillment. The goal is to create an enjoyable shopping experience, based on easy-to-use personalization. Got it. We’re on it.
Dealing with so many fashion brands got me thinking.
I asked myself: what role do fashion brands play in the textile supply chain?
There are the design and the manufacturing. Both equally important but done with different value sets. Brands excel in creating thoughtful designs. Designers love to hone their craft. When I talk to my friends, who are fashion designers, and ask about manufacturing though, I get an “ugh *rolls eyes* THAT!” in response. It’s an evil necessary.
None of them particularly want to deal with sourcing fabric and manufacturing the clothes. It’s not creative. It’s time-consuming and costly. They can’t win. So many things can go wrong. And if you’re new to the industry — who are you even going to talk to for that?
As a new fashion designer, you either end up joining a brand or start producing yourself. The former comes with a working supply chain and stakeholders pushing for profit. The latter means you’re on a tiny budget using whatever resources available to you. Either way, a fast product launch is more important than people or planet. Unless sustainability is part of your core mission.
Trends are moving fast in the fashion industry. Fast fashion brands like H&M and Zara are releasing new styles every 4 weeks. Thus, consumers are seeking fashion fixes often. But where do these trends actually come from? Where do fashion trends initiate?
Paris, sure. London, sure. In the early 20th century, editors of fashion magazines went to Paris on a regular basis. They met with haute-couture fashion brands, then come back and tell their readers “what to wear”. Then the movie stars and celebrities came. Today we’re on Instagram following fashion bloggers from all over the globe. No more local boundaries!
We have moved away from the top-down principle of the past century. Today, it’s an interconnected, multi-directional grid of individuals sharing styles on social media. It’s individuals inspiring imitation after imitation, each with their own metamorphosis. These, in turn, result in innovation — new trends.
That means, at the heart of fashion, it’s people dressing like the people we identify with.
One could also say, we are making a point to dress differently from the group of people we don’t identify with. Each imitation, a little different each time, creates it’s own, pure difference at some point. As such this resonates well with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His notion is that ‘fashion is the latest difference’.
Where am I going with this?
I am saying:
Fashion is inspired and created by people but people are not the focus of the industry.
We have no agency over how clothes are being made, what fabrics are being used and heck, even what styles we want to wear. Brands are pushing products onto the market, hoping to land a great match. They are trying to create a big enough cult following on social media so consumers end up wearing whatever is being released in the future.
I know, ‘you vote with your wallet’ is a fundamental pillar of conscious consumerism. I certainly support that as well. Demand creates supply and all that. But my question is, who asks me why I didn’t ‘vote’ for a brand? I can only vote ‘yes’ when I find a brand that matches what I am looking for. Especially in fashion choices, I oftentimes compromise for the lack of better options/time/budget. I do that because I have already spent significant effort to find something I love out of thousands of garments I don’t.
My purchase oftentimes doesn’t truly reflect what I think about your business.
I am sure if you ask customers of H&M if they appreciate the fact that people who are making their clothes don’t even earn a living wage and that fibers used to make the fabrics are literally striping our planet of its natural resources, they’d probably say that they are not. People are nice like that.
The alternative is not to buy from a brand you’re not 100% aligned with, which is at the core of conscious fashion. In terms of clothing though, it is just that much harder to find that one brand for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Also, who want’s to wear stuff from just one brand? I don’t. So I end up not buying at all (and I can’t do that forever) or I compromise which sends a not-so-true signal to the brand.
I call this the ‘conscious fashion shopper’s dilemma’.
This has led to this incredible new stream of small, mission-driven brands into the market. They are out there to change this industry, focusing on the kind of ethical and/or eco-friendly values they believe in most. This companies then again, push products and some of them will stick, the rest will go to waste.
I am not a big believer in turning sustainability nerds into fashion designers as a useful approach to solve fashion. I am sifting through fashion directories every day, 8/10 times it’s really not fashionable.
Because these small companies produce for themselves, volumes are low. With an industry built on economies of scale, this results in higher prices for end consumers.
We are simply not used to prices reflecting the true cost of a garment.
Currently, this means going from AVG $6.66 (from H&M) to AVG $30 (cheapest tee we have in our database) for a single plain tee. This is not everyone’s cup of tea (or not even a possibility).
I have a friend who used to own an ethical garment factory in Bangladesh. She’s paid salaries 3x the industry standard (which equals a regular living wage in this country, that’s how f*cked up the standard is). In addition to paying for health care benefits, a super modern building etc. The whole package.
She had to sell her factory this past January. She couldn’t find clients with big enough order volumes on a regular basis (we’re talking about 11 lines here, so it wasn’t huge). The timing saddened me even more. *bubble-burst* I would have thought that by now, there’d be conscious brands with enough volume to sustain small factories like that. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough clients, but again, they all had their own small volume.
She even sat down with buyers from H&M, who were looking into working with new factories. They have recently been promoting ‘Conscious Collections’ and what not. She was hopeful. She said she was willing to compromise in price (i mean, her factory was about to close). But the pricing offered by the buyers was so low she would not have been able to pay a single bill. H&M’s argument? ‘well, that’s what we offer because that’s what every other factory gets’.
So much for wanting to improve living standards for factory workers, H&M. Seems like it’s all green-washed marketing after all.
Another trend I am seeing in the sustainable fashion space is targeting the elite first. Making sustainable -’susty’ as the cool kids say- fashion desirable. Brands like Maggie Marilyn and Laura Siegel are attracting all kinds of customers, eco-conscious or not. This is what you want as a brand. Style first.
I just don’t see how this is going to help the other 99% to shop more consciously. The theory -the Elon-Musk-Tesla-approach if you will- is that these high paying customers enable the company to finance a series of innovation. Then you make these innovations available to other companies in the space. Thus you are transforming the industry as a whole.
This might be working in the car industry but I don’t see this happening with these conscious luxury brands. To my knowledge, none of the brands mentioned have invented a new way to make fashion. They have simply found customers who’d pay for the higher production cost by creating elite designs and products.
In fact, all big brands, luxurious or not, could afford to pay living wages and produce eco-consciously.
Margins are crazy in this industry. It’s all about that scale. That’s the most frustrating thing to me. We’re not in a situation where we have to re-invent the wheel. But, given our current way of how profit is being calculated, I don’t see businesses leading the change. Profit calculations don’t account for how many natural resources have been used. Profit calculations don’t account for the impact made on society. It’s all depended on the ethos of the company.
Patagonia has set a marvelous example of how to create a profitable, ethical and eco-conscious apparel company at scale. The one failure they admit though is to not having convinced more businesses to follow. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia has said in his book ‘The Responsible Company’ that there is now this ‘buzz around sustainability’. Companies are streaming into this space without an actual agenda to do anything.
If big brands like H&M were serious about ‘becoming green’ they could stop using regular cotton for example. Not only for a ‘limited edition’ once a year, no, for all their lines. They would increase wages to living wages (different from minimum wages!) and be 100% transparent about what is going on in their supply chain.
All these different approaches focus on fashion brands to solve fashion — So I am thinking:
What if we changed the way fashion brands work?
What if we found a way to co-design fashion with people and the people decide how to make them.
What if we let fashion designers be designers without having them to produce garments.
What if we find a way to create a feedback loop between fashion designers and customers. Something similar how Glossier is launching new beauty products based on user requests.
What if we could batch similar manufacturing requests into bigger purchase orders. We could dispatch them to independent, ethically run factories and benefit from economies of scale as a community.
What if we found a way to open source manufacturing. We could track back who designed what piece, who, when and where made it. Much like you know who and where your Uber driver is.
What if we used blockchain technology to enable radical supply chain transparency.
Many industries have been transformed by opening up the processes of creation to the user.
Google democratized information. Airbnb democratized hotel/accommodation. Uber/Lyft democratized taxi services. Instagram democratized photography, E-bay democratized trading, Facebook democratized advertising, Medium democratized publishing.
What if we built an app where fashion designers can upload designs, users purchase a design and then get to choose how it’s made. The user chooses what fabric (natural vs. technical), where to produce it (local or ethically overseas), preferred colors, size, style.
What if we got users pre-buying designs of an entire collection. They would do it because we can write algorithms predicting trends based on what is being shared on social media. We can help designers creating winning styles for the next season.
What if we open sourced patterns on how to make a certain type of clothing instead of heaving each designer and manufacturer deal with it on their own. What if we sourced alternative fabric like hemp, linen, organic cotton as a community and let the designers create pieces for it.
What if we democratized fashion.
