Recently I read the book Regenerative Fashion: A Nature Based Approach to Fibres, Livelihoods, and Leadership*, by Safia Minney. And this book could not have come at a better time for me. I was feeling discouraged and overwhelmed by the weight of it all and the stories and changemakers highlighted throughout this book was the inspiration that I needed. 

So I am super grateful that I was able to have the author, Safia Minney — who has been a disruptor in the fashion space for decades — onto the show. You may know Safia Minney as the founder of fair fashion brand People Tree, or you may know her as an activist, consultant, thought-leader, or author of books like Slave to Fashion and Slow Fashion.  

In this episode, Safia Minney discusses the themes of her latest book on regenerative fashion. And what I loved about this book was that it wasn’t just about regeneratively grown fibers and decarbonization — though of course that was covered and that’s super important.

But Safia also discussed regenerative leadership and regenerative relationships, the importance of revitalizing artisan crafts and textile traditions, why living wages and a just transition are central to regenerative fashion, and how our current economic systems are completely at odds with a livable future.

So let’s dive in and explore both the challenges and solutions facing the fashion industry from one of its foremost sustainability advocates.

*Bookshop.org affiliate link

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Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Links From This Episode

• Organization: Fashion Declares!
• Book: Regenerative Fashion: A Nature Based Approach to Fibres, Livelihoods, and Leadership*
• Safia’s Fair Fashion Brand: People Tree*

*affiliate link

About Safia

Safia is an award-winning social entrepreneur & sustainability champion. Internationally recognised for the company she founded, People Tree, the pioneer of sustainable fashion & food. She led the business as Global CEO for 20+ years, leaving her operational role in 2015. She founded Fashion Declares, REAL Sustainability and is a Speaker, Author, Advisor and Executive Coach. Safia is a Trustee with The Countryside Charity (CPRE) and advisor with Business Declares.

Safia launched Fashion Declares in 2022, with leaders from FARFETCH, Reformation, Continental Clothing and other campaigning organisations to build a bottom-up, industry-wide movement bringing together people at all levels within the fashion industry to tackle the current climate, ecological and social emergency.

Safia is recognised by the World Economic Forum as an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur and is a leading influencer in Sustainability, Anti-Modern Slavery and ethical business.

‘The True Cost’ movie featured Safia’s work and she has made many documentaries and short films. Author of 7 books, including, Slave to Fashion campaigning to eradicate modern day slavery. By Hand, Naked Fashion – The Sustainable Revolution, and Slow Fashion – Aesthetics meets Ethics. Saf’s new book Regenerative Fashion was published 2022 in English, Spanish and Japanese.

This Episode Was Brought To You By:

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Each piece from Kotn is made ethically and transparently with natural materials — like long-staple Egyptian cotton, recycled cotton, and linen — by people earning living wages.

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The post What Is Regenerative Fashion? with Safia Minney appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

In this episode, we are going to explore all of the hidden — the true — costs of fast fashion.

This is the first episode of season 4, which will be focused on dramatically slowing down fashion and envisioning what a post-growth or degrowth future for fashion would look like. 

Before we get into all of the ways we can slow down fashion though, I wanted to talk about what is wrong with fast fashion. So hit play for a deep-dive into fast fashion’s environmental impacts and social impacts.

Our Season Sponsor:

This episode was brought to you by Green Eco Dream. This sustainably-minded marketplace has eco-conscious alternatives for your health, home, beauty, and on-the-go needs — including your conscious laundry routine!

Check out Green Eco Dream’s collection of low waste, low impact clothing care essentials.

Episode Links:

• What is Sustainable Fashion?
• What is Ethical Fashion?
• What is Slow Fashion?
• The Fashion Industry’s Environmental Impacts
• White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
• ‘Buy now, pay later’ is sending the TikTok generation spiraling into debt

Other episodes mentioned:

• Ep.1 What is Ethical Fashion?
• Ep. 2 What is Sustainable Fashion?
• Ep.3 What is Slow Fashion?
• Ep.29 Compostable Clothing, Natural Dyes, and Localizing Fashion Systems
• Ep.30 Regenerative Fashion & Building a Seed-to-Sew Supply Chain
• Ep.31 The Reality of the Secondhand Clothing Trade
• Ep.34: The Power of Style
• Ep.40 What It’s Really Like Working for Fast Fashion
• Ep.45 Are Better Brand-Supplier Relationships The Missing Link to Ethical Fashion?

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app

Read the Transcript:

ELIZABETH JOY:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. We are back after a short break and are getting into season four. As I hinted at a little bit in the season three finale, this upcoming season is all about dramatically slowing down fashion and envisioning what a post-growth or degrowth future for fashion would look like. 

In other words, we’re going to talk about how we can get away from fast fashion and big corporations and mass-produced clothing and start to truly embrace slow, small, localized fashion systems, both on an individual level and a more systemic level. 

So on an individual level that might look like buying less, prioritizing pre-loved, supporting small, slow fashion and artisan-made businesses if that is accessible to you, and participating in the cultural shift around fashion. Changing fashion to be about personal expression, creativity, and art, rather than it being about shopping hauls trends and supporting billionaire corporations. 

And on a systems level, which for the record is something that we can all absolutely get involved with as individuals, we can advocate for regulation that will reign in the speed and the production levels of these mass-produced fashion brands. 

We can push for incentives like funding opportunities or tax breaks that encourage small artisan fashion businesses and social enterprises, as well as mending and repair businesses. This might sound a bit overwhelming, but there are examples of this happening. For instance, Sweden has recently reduced the sales tax on repair businesses by 50%, which can help make repair more affordable than buying new. 

And there are many more examples, but we are going to get into the nitty-gritty into all the specifics throughout the season. So make sure you are subscribed to the Conscious Style Podcast so you don’t miss those episodes, we will have a new episode every Tuesday as usual as we have been doing with the previous seasons. 

Okay, so that is a bit about what to expect moving forward. But before we get into all of that with slow fashion and post-growth fashion, I thought it would be important to establish or re-establish some foundations on why fast fashion and mass-produced fashion, big fashion is so harmful in the first place. 

Of course, just to put that out there, this is not about shaming anyone who is reliant on fast fashion due to sizing, access, affordability, or whatever it may be. This is talking about fast fashion as a system. 

And I think that there is always a very tough balance between not shaming individuals, but also empowering individuals to be part of the change. Like, I believe that you can make a difference, your steps do matter. But also, it’s a waste of time to attack each other, other individuals. And we should rather use that energy to advocate to the brands themselves. And in some cases, perhaps very large influencers and celebrities who are profiting potentially hundreds of 1000s of dollars, millions of dollars off of this exploitative system as well. 

In short, my message that I hope to communicate to you is that I firmly believe everybody can be part of the slow fashion movement, no matter in which way that is accessible to you. And I think that it’s a lot more effective to welcome people in and, you know, share about the joys of slow fashion and the beauty of slow fashion rather than shame them to convince them. Obviously easier said than done. But I hope that sort of nuance is coming across somewhat clear. 

And I do believe that awareness is one step towards change. It’s not the whole package, obviously. But I think that the more we can educate and make people aware and clarify these things that we can also start to drive more change. 

So with that said, let’s get into what is so wrong with fast fashion. And if you need to go back to anything that I share in this episode, you can head to the transcript in the show notes over at consciouslifeandstyle.com. Okay, let’s get started. 

***

So, before we get into what is wrong with fast fashion, it probably would help for me to clarify what I mean exactly when I say fast fashion. 

Fast fashion is essentially cheap, mass-produced, and quickly produced fashion. 

Fast fashion copies from the runway, from celebrities and influencers, or even independent artists and brands. And these days fast fashion also copies, vintage finds, or upcycle reworked pieces that have gone viral on social media. 

Everything about fast fashion is, well fast. Designs are produced quickly, which is why they copy instead of creating designs from scratch. Garments are produced very quickly, trends come in and out very quickly. And unfortunately, garments are often viewed as disposable and are discarded quickly as well. 

And this is like the fast fashion mindset as well. It’s not just fast fashion brands. But the fast fashion mindset is what leads to like this disposability culture as well. 

And then also fast fashion brands, instead of having two or four or maybe six collections every year, fast fashion releases new clothing weekly, or for ultra-fast fashion brands, even daily. And we’re talking like 1000s of new arrivals. I’m really hoping we don’t reach a day of like ultra ultra-fast fashion where there’s new arrivals hourly, but it wouldn’t surprise me. 

And these garments are typically priced quite low. And the brands have frequent sales to push overconsumption. You know, you see sales like 85% Off, 90% Off, I think was a Boohoo I forget which brand had like 99% off sale. So they really want to get people to buy a lot of clothes for cheap prices. 

And to be clear, all of fashion has sped up, right, especially if we compare what fashion was like 100 years ago. And we’re gonna get more into the history of fast fashion with a fashion historian and a future episode. So keep your eyes peeled for that, because that will, I think be super interesting. 

But fast fashion takes it to a whole new level. It’s like the fastest fashion you can find in the industry. And I’m going to be talking a little bit more about this later, but there also has been like a fast-fashionification of the entire industry where even mid-tier, and maybe even some higher tier, like in terms of pricing brands are speeding up their production and their new arrivals and all that kind of stuff. 

So yeah, fast fashion, I think can be summed up by speed and cheap prices. So with that said, let’s talk about the harms of fast fashion.

Okay, so the first sort of victim, so to speak of the fast fashion system that we’re going to talk about is the planet, because this, in fact, impacts all of us and every other living thing on earth. 

That said, the climate crisis and other ecological damage impacts some (i.e. the global south, communities of color, low-income communities, and women) far more than others. 

But getting into fast fashion and the planet, I think that the most important element to start with is the sheer production of volumes, and then how that sort of trickles into everything, including emissions and fashions’ role in the climate crisis. 

So the fashion industry has a serious lack of reputable data, but various sources estimate that the world produces somewhere around 100 billion to 150 billion garments per year. The former status from McKinsey and the letters from World Economic Forum. 

It’s obviously a huge variance but either number is absolutely crazy to think about. Especially because that is just an article of clothing, that is not even jewelry, handbags, shoes, accessories. I mean, I can’t even imagine what that number would be if we counted all that. 

Also worth noting, most of this is being consumed by rich countries in the Global North. 70% of the world lives on less than $10 per day. So these are not the people consuming all these clothes, does not the entire world consuming insane level of clothing. And I think that’s really, really key to acknowledge. 

It also makes these numbers even scarier, like when you think about who has the money to regularly buy new fashion, and then how many garments are being produced and presumably bought, it’s hard to even imagine how people are buying, let alone able to wear all of those clothes. 

But the interesting reality is that actually, we’re not even wearing all of these clothes. In fact, a study that surveyed 18,000 heads of households across 20 countries found that people are on average, not wearing at least 50% of their wardrobes, that is half, half of our purchases, half of the clothes in our wardrobe are going unworn. 

In the US, the average person hasn’t worn a whopping 82% of their clothing in the past year. And in the UK, that number is still quite high at 73%. 

So the point here is that there are way more clothes being produced than is necessary for us to clothe ourselves and even for us to wear. And we’re going to come back to these numbers later when I talk about the cost of fast fashion to consumers. But I think that just goes to show how excessive the production levels of fashion are. It is more clothing than we could possibly ever wear. 

And this production has a heavy toll on our collective home. Yes, I am talking about planet earth. 

Now to describe the environmental impacts of fashion, I hesitate sometimes to give specific statistics. Since this industry is so opaque and reputable data, again, it’s very difficult to come by. 

But let’s talk about some of the overarching issues. And I’ll throw in like some ranges of statistics. So you have an idea of like the impact of fashion. 

So first, we have greenhouse gas emissions, which are of course driving the climate crisis, which is perhaps the most urgent but certainly not our only ecological crisis. 

And again, estimates vary, but sources put fashion proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions at 4% to 10%. Now, even at the low end, this is a massive contribution to our climate crisis. 

And these emissions calculations go far beyond what we might see as shoppers through like the physical stores or the individual shipments we receive from ecommerce. But they start all the way back at the cotton farm, or when it comes to synthetics which are unfortunately becoming more and more common at the oil refinery. 

And then we get into spinning the raw material into a fiber, weaving it into fabric, finishing that fabric, dyeing it, and then we have cut and sew factories where the cloth is turned into a garment. And all of this, most of this, if not all of it is done in factories that are powered by fossil fuels, perhaps even coal, and ship their transportation methods that are run on fossil fuels.

And then once the garment is made, it’s typically shipped across the ocean to warehouses and the US or Europe, from Asia, before being shipped to stores or to individual people. 

To be clear, all of the fashion industry is contributing to these total numbers. The absolutely dizzying speed of fast fashion is accelerating the industry’s emissions. As the often quoted statistic from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s A New Textiles Economy goes, clothing production doubled from 2000 to 2014 and the average consumer buys 60% more garments, while keeping them just half as long. 

And so when we hear things like clothing production has doubled in 15 years, it sounds terrible from a waste perspective and just imagining all these clothes, but if we also consider the emissions and some of these invisible pollutants, you know, that means that fashion’s footprint has also had to dramatically increase. 

Truly, absolutely every element of fashion’s ecological impact increases as we increase production. 

So I don’t want to get into the details of every aspect of fashion’s environmental footprint, because I actually covered a lot of that in episode 2 of the podcast: What is Sustainable Fashion? So you can go back to that episode. But I want to sum it up here to say that every one of the following impact is increased with more production. 

So let’s go through this list here: water consumption and water pollution, chemical use and air pollution, pre-consumer textile waste and end-of-life clothing waste, loss of biodiversity, loss of wildlife habitat, and deforestation. The more garments being made in this mass-produced, overproduced way, the more we have of all of this. 

And fast fashion brands like to convince us that there are silver bullet solutions to these things. Whether that’s their use of recycled synthetics, or switching to bio-based materials, or making their jeans in a more water-efficient way. 

While yes, these things are great, and we do need them, they will just be a drop in the bucket if we’re not getting to the root cause of overproduction. And they really won’t make much of an impact if we’re still increasing production at increasing rates. 

For example, a lot of fashion brands like to talk about bio-based materials. And this is something that is also in like luxury fashion. It’s not just fast fashion. But I want to make a point here. So while yes, moving away from animal-based materials, will potentially help with like deforestation and wildlife habitat loss. If we’re still clearing land to grow new plants for bio-based materials, it could also require destroying native ecosystems for that industrial agriculture. 

It’s not just about the actual material, but also the processes, you know, we should be shifting to smaller farms to regenerative agriculture. And for much one regenerative agriculture, I recommend listening to Episode 30 With Nishanth Chopra, because he explains regenerative agriculture a lot better than I am going to. 

But in any case, these things are only possible on a smaller scale, like you can’t have it at the level of industrial agriculture. So here, scale is so important to consider. 

And then, when it comes to another thing that fast fashion brands love to advertise about recycled synthetics, we still have to be thinking about microplastics. Recycled synthetic still released microplastics. And of course, there’s a lot of energy used in that process and potentially toxic chemicals being released in production too. 

So for producing more garments, and we’re just like saying, well, it’s fine, because we’re using recycled synthetics instead of virgin synthetics. Well, no, I mean, 50 billion garments made from recycled synthetics is still gonna release a crazy amount of microplastics. 

And then finally, with efficiency gains, whether that’s energy efficiency, water efficiency, better efficient use of fabrics, these improvements are great, but typically outweighed by the increase in production. 

So to sort of lay it out, let’s say a brand brags that they are reducing their average garments footprint by 20%. But then, if you’re producing twice as many clothes as you were five years ago, well, then the overall carbon footprint, like the total carbon footprint of all those garments together, still gonna go up, if that makes sense.

Put in another way, even in like a really aggressive sustainability strategy from a fast fashion brand, where a brand was able to half the carbon footprint per garment. If they doubled their sales, that would mean that they would still be leveling off, like, yes, each garment is half the impact. But if it’s double the garments, then the total impact is still the same.

And so while this leveling off is sometimes promoted by green growth advocates as a way to continue to perpetually, exponentially grow the economy and production without increasing the carbon footprint and ecological footprint. We do have to remember that we are in a climate crisis and it’s not just about leveling off and keeping emissions the same but we need to really be reducing emissions. That is the key. 

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that all sectors must cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Okay, that is in eight years and greenhouse gas emissions have to be cut in half. 

So it’s hard to really when you actually truly think about that number and how huge that is, it’s really difficult to imagine that happening like us being able to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half, while we’re still increasing production and still producing 150 billion garments per year. So I think that’s really important to sort of sit with. 

And while I am talking a lot about admission, specifically in this case, because that is something very tangible, this mode of thought can be said about all sorts of impacts, you know, even if an individual pair of jeans was made with 30%, less water, if you’re still increasing, the total number of jeans that you produce every year, you know, is the overall water footprint really being reduced? 

So this is what I feel totally different about sharing these sorts of efforts like water saving, energy efficiency, switch to renewable energy, all that stuff. I feel so much different about that, from slow fashion and small fashion brands that produce in really intentionally mindful ways and have smaller batches versus the same efforts from like, big fashion and fast fashion brands that are producing, say, 3 billion garments a year like H&M, you know, the scale makes all of the difference.

And I really want to emphasize that because this episode is all about the impact of fast fashion specifically — and what defines fast fashion is the level of production and the speed of production. 

Like, again, all of fashion has an impact. I don’t want that to be misunderstood, expensive designer fashion is not necessarily produced sustainably or ethically just because it’s expensive. But fast fashion’s prerogative is exponential growth. Their business models are only made possible because of their huge production volumes. 

And this brings me to the final environmental impact that I want to talk about, which also has a massive impact on people. I mean, every environmental issue has an impact on people and all living things, right? 

The climate crisis is massively impacting people and will continue to have even worse impacts on people. Pollution has impacts on people, water use and water contamination have obviously impacts people. 

But with that said, the other side of this exponential growth of volume that fast fashion is producing is the waste. So as we talked about fast fashion’s business model is dependent on people buying a lot very quickly and discarding a lot also very quickly, so that they can buy the latest new styles, the newest micro trend. You know, these brands are releasing new clothes every week, if not every single day, in the case of brands like Shein and other ultra-fast fashion brands. 

So, you know, in order to buy all those new clothes, people only have so much room in their closets. And then there’s this rise of this movement of decluttering and minimalism. But we also know that people aren’t buying less, right? Consumption is going up. And yet we’re seeing all these things about minimal wardrobes and decluttering and it’s where all of these clothes going. 

And lately we’ve been seeing fast fashion brands come out with their, “take-back programs and recycling programs”, which are a bunch of greenwashing. But I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole because we have covered that topic in previous episodes. 

But I think the biggest thing to acknowledge here is that with this constant cycle, these clothes are not going away, right? Most of them are made from synthetic materials. Plastics don’t decompose. Maybe after 100 years, they break down into tiny little microplastics but that’s still like pollution. They’re not joining the natural environment in a healthy way. Like they’re not composting into soil like maybe a compostable all-natural linen garment might be. 

And we do have an episode all about compostable clothing and what qualifies as safely compostable. So I’ll make sure that episode is linked in the show notes because it’s a really big topic. 

But the point here is that these clothes don’t go away. Even though they’re designed to fall apart after a couple of wears go out of style after a month or less, these clothes never disappear. And even with these take-back programs or “recycling programs”, that is not a real solution. 

Most of the clothes that get donated are not able to sell in local charity shops when we’re talking about clothes donated in places like the US, Canada, UK, and other countries in the Global North. Most of it either gets downcycled or shipped to countries in the Global South and sold in markets like Kantamanto market in Accra Ghana or Owino Market in Kampala Uganda. And these places are being dumped on with just millions and millions of used clothes.

In fact, the OR Foundation has reported that Ghana receives 15 million used garments every single week. To put that in perspective, the entire population of Ghana is 31 million. 

So every two weeks, they are receiving as many garments as their entire country’s population. So this is just way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way too many clothes. And for the record, they’re not being donated, they are being sold. 

And that is part of the inequitable global secondhand clothing trade, which is another massive topic. But I did discuss this with Nikissi Serumaga of Vintage or Violence in episode 31, The Reality of the Secondhand Clothing Trade. I highly, highly recommend you give that a listen. It’s one of the most important episodes I think I’ve ever put out on the show. Like I just wish everybody could listen to that, whether they’re interested in fashion or not. It’s just such an important topic that I think impacts everybody who wears clothes to like some extent. 

But I’ll just leave it, for now, to say that fast fashion is causing a waste crisis that is impacting people, devastating local economies, and destroying ecosystems. Looking into fashion’s waste crisis and how it is impacting places in the global south has forever changed the way that I view how I not only rehome my clothes but also how much I buy and how like messed up this fast fashion system is no matter what fabrics they’re using. It is too much clothing for the world to handle. 

So for even more on fashion’s environmental impacts, I’m going to link an article that contributing writer Stella wrote that summarized it all really well and shares how we can find our role in the movement for change. It’s a great article, so that will be linked in the show notes. 

But let’s shift on to fast fashion’s impact on people.

With this, there is a very similar theme of the fact that all big fashion or mass-produced fashion is implicated. But fast fashion is exasperating the impacts. So as a briefer or a review, the fashion industry is rife with exploitative labor practices from unsafe working conditions, gender-based violence, excessive working hours (we’re talking 12 to 15-hour days, sometimes without any days off in the week), on unlivable poverty wages, (sources estimate between 92 and 98% of garment makers do not earn a living wage), lack of basic worker protections like the ability to negotiate or organize, and job instability. 

And when makers aren’t being paid living wages, they certainly do not have the funds to save for times of unemployment caused by that job instability. So this is a huge issue that can leave workers vulnerable to a host of horrible conditions from getting into predatory high-interest debt, having to skip meals, turning to unsafe avenues of earning income.

I mean, I could go on but I covered all of the nitty-gritty details of fashion’s human impacts in episode 1, What is Ethical Fashion? But I think that gives you enough of an overview for now as we head into what fast fashion’s role is in all of this. 

So in the environmental portion of this episode, we talked about the level of production like the volume of production, and how that just makes the impact so much bigger. Now we’re going to talk about the other defining element of fast fashion, which is the speed of production. 

So this speed, these rapid turnover times that fast fashion brands require are directly related to working conditions and working hours in factories. For example, if a brand goes to a supplier and says we need 1 million garments by next week, and that supplier only has so many workers in their factory, then that means that those workers have to get that work done if the supplier wants the deal. 

And you might say, well, the supplier can just say no, and that’s true. But the brand will likely just go to the next factory, or the next or the next or the next, or there’s endless factories that the brand could go to. So it’s really driven by the brand. 

Okay, and then if that volume that the brand wants from the factory is double the normal capacity of the workforce, that presents a big problem, as you could imagine. 

A supplier cannot double their employees overnight to fulfill an order next week for XYZ fast fashion brand. So if they have order expectations that are twice what can be done by the workers within a reasonable 40-hour workweek, they have you know, two options. 

One, they require double the amount of hours from their workers. Their workers, you know, have to work 80 hours then, instead of 40. And this is unfortunately very commonplace. The Clean Clothes Campaign reports that many garment makers might see workweeks as high as 96 hours. And I’ll just add here quickly that like regular, so to speak, 40-hour work weeks are not the norm at all, and garment factories, it’s just, I’m painting a picture of like an example of the impact of the speed of production. 

But anyway, the second option for a factory when they have more garments to produce and they can realistically fulfill is subcontracting, which is quite common. So the factory says, all right, I cannot fulfill this order from that brand but I also don’t want to lose that money so let me contract with other factories that can help me fulfill that order for the brand.

And this is where things get very opaque and murky. The brand may not even know about the subcontracted factory at all. That factory may not even meet the most basic worker standards like being free of child labor or forced labor. 

And so with this, yes, there are factories that are bad apples. But the deeper issue is that purchasing practices from these fast fashion brands, and in general fashion brands drive these practices. 

So a brand might have in a contract with a brand that they are not allowed to subcontract, you know they might tell the supplier, and they would have that in the paper. But if that very same brand is then telling the factory, we need you to all of a sudden produce double the number of clothes that you typically do for us and you need to do it in two weeks. If a brand is doing that to a factory, what did they expect? 

You know, there’s still human hands making these clothes and they’re not going to magically be twice as fast. And so I think that’s really, really important to talk about. Like, okay, the brand can have all this and that in the contracts but if their purchasing practices aren’t enabling the factory to actually follow those standards, then you can see how it seems a little bit disingenuous when a brand is like child labor gets discovered in their supply chain, like oh, well, it was in our contract that this wasn’t allowed. And it’s like, yeah, well, what drove your suppliers to subcontract? Maybe you should think about what you’re demanding from your suppliers. 

So this is a big issue. It’s a bit complicated. I mean, I don’t think it’s as complicated as brands pretend, you know, I think it’s a fixable problem. But it is challenging maybe to understand when we’re not super familiar with how like supply chain practices work. 

But summarizing it to say, purchasing practices from brands are a huge problem demanding on a whim large quantities of clothing very quickly makes it challenging for a factory to anticipate the demand and have an appropriately sized workforce, which may push them to do certain actions. 

In fact, Arjen Laan, who is the CEO of the fashion manufacturing company Pactics, said in episode 45, that the most challenging part of being a supplier and his point of view, is balancing workload. So like there are slow times when there might not be enough work for everybody. And there are also times where there might be too much for everybody to reasonably finish in time. And better forecasting from brands can help suppliers better prepare and ensure that they have the right amount of workers.

You know, I think we can just even think about this on a personal level, right? Like, if we have a bunch of work projects, we would much rather receive advance notice of said large projects, rather than our boss giving us this massive project and it’s like, due by this Friday. You know, that’s really stressful, and it probably is going to lead to overworking. And it definitely happens at companies. And you might have even experienced it, and it’s not great. 

So, going back to fashion, when you have an ultra-fast fashion brand that wants to hop on the latest micro trend from TikTok, and, you know, you might need a turnaround time of a few weeks. In fact, Shein is reported as having turnaround times as fast as 10 days, when things are being produced on the opposite side of the world from where they’re being shipped, that doesn’t really leave much time for the actual production. 

So this has a huge impact on workers who are already overworked, by and large, it impacts the pace of the production and also their working hours, you know, with overtime. And the thing about fast fashion is that has sort of pushed a fast fashionification of the entire industry. So even brands that might not have been considered fast fashion 10 years ago, might be in the fast fashion category now. 

As Amanda McCarty explained in episode 40, she saw firsthand as a buyer in the fashion industry, that the brands she was working for were speeding up their production, reducing the quality, increasing the frequency, and turning to low prices, or more often constant sales to drive profits. 

So fast fashion’s impact goes beyond fast fashion itself, but it has really driven the race to the bottom of the entire fashion industry as well. Instead of brands striving to create the best highest quality product, companies are trying to sell the cheapest products at the highest quantities. 

And of course, this has the most impact on workers in the end. If brands bought more product for less, and there are still human hands making it that means more working hours, or more stressful, higher speed production. Most often it means both, but we’re like the same pay or maybe even less pay. 

So there is of course more to be said on working conditions and pay could go on and on about that. And in this season, we are going to be exploring the connections between fair pay and safe conditions, and reduced production volumes. Slow fashion and ethical fashion are very intertwined. If they’re done correctly, there’s ways a slow fashion can be still exploitive. But generally, I do find that they’re very interlinked. 

But for now, let’s get into the third and final cost of fast fashion that I’m going to cover in this episode: consumers. 

Now, this might be surprising to you, because I feel like we often talk about how shoppers are “winning from the system”. They maybe benefit from fast fashion, you know, they have access to endless cheap, stylish clothes. 

But I think that there are more hidden costs for fast fashion shoppers than what meets the eye. 

The first is the marketing machine that drives fast fashion. We know that we are bombarded with ads, influencer campaigns, and subtle messaging that we need to follow the latest trends and have the newest clothes in order to fit in and be cool or even to be happy, which is ridiculous. 

But anyway, I remember when I first realized all of these harmful messages that were being perpetuated by fashion marketing, and frankly, other consumer industries as well. And it was such a shift for me like it is so normalized that a brand is telling us that we need new outfits because it’s a new season. 

It’s normalized that a magazine is telling us that last year’s trend is now out and this now is what is in or these days I guess it’s more like TikTok, I don’t know. And it’s also normalized for like brands advertise shopping as being retail therapy or somehow improving your life situation or your mood and well in the short term yes, that’s true. It’s not really a real solution to our problems. 

And it’s a bit manipulative to be profiting off of people having a bad day. Or worse, profiting off of people’s low self-esteem and just craving to fit into sort of feel accepted. I think that happens a lot with younger people. 

I mean, there’s a there’s such a good documentary on Netflix about Abercrombie, I think it’s called White Hot. And it’s sort of part of this how like, these brands create a culture that you want to like fit in, and you feel like you have to buy their stuff to like fit in and to be cool. And while these days, it’s not really Abercrombie anymore. It is brands like Boohoo, Shein, H&M, Zara, you know, it’s still relevant. 

But anyway, all of that messaging that we are so inundated with, like, the moment I realized that that actually isn’t normal, the more I saw it everywhere, like so many brands participate in this. And the harm in that is that it perpetuates this pressure that we need to constantly stay up to date on what is trendy, we need to follow what’s in and wear it even if we don’t feel good in it, and it’s not comfortable for us. 

Like, even if it doesn’t suit our body type and it perpetuates self-image issues like we don’t get to wear what we actually feel great in, and what makes us feel like empowered to go about our day, you know, we are made to feel that we have to be always buying new clothes to be fashionable and part of society. And it’s stressful, it can harm our self-esteem. I mean, there’s just so much wrapped up with that. 

I mean, there’s just so much tied up with what we wear and self-esteem. I think we’ve all experienced that there’s certain things we feel really good in and certain things that don’t make us feel so great.

And so by fast fashion pushing this trend cycle and sort of putting down our throats what we should wear, we get further and further away from what actually makes us feel good. And we talked a lot about this with Elise Holliday on the episode about the power of style. But like, once you’re happy with what you have in your closet, that’s like the key to shopping less, because you’re so happy with what you already have in your wardrobe, that what you see at the mall, what you see online doesn’t even appeal to you because you love what you have so much. 

And that journey to finding your personal style to finding what feels good, is made a lot more difficult by fast fashion and fast fashion influencers on social media that show us that we should be wearing this or that and we just want to keep shopping to fit in and shop to have this certain life that these influencers are promoting. But that’s not leading us to like genuine fulfillment and contentment. 

I mean, I can speak for myself, like my own experience, my journey to finding my personal style has been not to be dramatic, life-changing. Because it just has allowed me to feel so much more comfortable not only in the clothes that I wear, but in my own skin. 

Like I’m more confident in what I’m wearing, I’m more confident in who I am because I feel good about expressing my style, like I don’t feel like I have to look a certain way. I know that I don’t have to purchase something from this fast fashion brand, to suddenly feel worthy or to feel happier that my life is together or to be like said influencer on Instagram, you know, I just feel so much more comfortable in who I am through my journey of clothing. 

And it might not be like that for you. It might not be like that for everybody. I’m not trying to say that, just saying from my personal experience that learning how to sort of reclaim your personal style and reclaim what you love can have so many amazing ripple effects. 

But on the other side, fast fashion can sort of take us further away from who we are. Like I think it’s a really common experience that once you’ve been so sort of deep in this fast-fashion world, you don’t even know what feels good anymore. Because you’re just constantly buying, constantly discarding, wearing the thing once or twice that there’s not even this opportunity to connect with any of your clothes or this opportunity to reflect on anything that you’re wearing it’s just this, this constant consumption. 

And that can have a really, that can have a very real impact on us. And I really do think that a lot of satisfaction, a lot of happiness comes from finding a personal style, especially if you’re interested in clothes and interested in fashion. It might not mean that much to some people. But I think if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably are interested in fashion. 

And I think that people interested in fashion, do find a lot of satisfaction from getting more clear on their personal style, and loving their closets more. And just finding what really, really, truly, truly brings you joy, and what actually makes you feel confident to go out into the world. 

So to reiterate what I’ve said a million times, this is an issue that is all across fashion. But I do feel like fast fashions marketing is most aggressive in this because they not only want us to buy once a season and maybe make a few intentional purchases, but they want us to buy daily by at least weekly, you know, have these huge shopping halls hauls we’re not even thinking about what we’re putting into our carts because there’s just so many cheap clothes in there. 

And all of these constant pushes to buy, you know, new outfits for every social media post, every party, and so on. This can push us to buy more than we even have the money for. It can push us to buy more than we can actually afford.

Which brings me to the next point, which is how fast fashion and the push to overconsume can put a very real strain on individual finances.

And here I want to remind you of the statistic I shared earlier in this episode, which is that people on average, do not wear at least half of their closets in the US that number is like 82%. And to be specific, that’s clothes that were unworn in the past year. But with a cycle of fast fashion, I mean, people aren’t really keeping their garments longer than a year, scary as that is. 

So like, why are we buying so many clothes when we’re not even wearing some of them and we know that this like fear of outfit repeating is really a thing on social media, like a lot of people are just wearing a garment once and discarding it. And I don’t even want to know what those numbers are, I’m too nervous to look that up. But let’s talk about how fast fashion contributes to this. 

So the clothes look cheap, right? The individual garments look really inexpensive, $10 for a shirt, $15 for a dress. But if everybody was buying moderate amounts of clothes, these brands could not be the billionaire corporations that they are, they could not be reeling in billions of dollars right? These brands depend on people buying a lot of clothes. They’re only profitable if people buy a lot of clothes.

And as we also talked about in the beginning, there’s only a certain population that can afford to buy a bunch of clothes. So these brands have new arrivals weekly or daily, they pump out new products on the regular and market it very aggressively, as we also talked about. 

And this has gotten even worse with ultra-fast fashion. So brands like Zara and H&M would have new clothes on the weekly, you know. They were famous for having weekly micro seasons 52 seasons in a year. But Shein has 365 seasons, they have new arrivals every single day. And they advertise that they drop over 1000 new arrivals daily. It’s really, really difficult to like wrap my head around that. 

And real quick that reminded me of another point, which Aja Barber made at a panel at The Sustainable Fashion Forum, which was that all these new arrivals, these constant new arrivals going through all that is super time-consuming. 

So something that people might say is that you know, fast fashion is accessible, people maybe don’t have time to sift through thrift store racks, which is very fair, not everybody has the time to go into secondhand stores are not everybody has the time to mend. 

But I think it’s also worth asking, well, do people have the time to sift through 1000s of new arrivals on the daily? I mean, like, you know how easy it is to like lose time and shopping or social media, like all these things are quite similar, right? They’re designed to like, grab our attention. And it can be an endless scroll, just like tons and tons of garments. 

Like if you’re checking that site every day, which I know that these shopping apps send notifications, and they’ll text you, they’ll send push notifications, they’ll email you constantly letting you know that there’s new arrivals. And if you’re really going through all of that, that’s really time-consuming. 

You might be losing like a lot of, a lot of your life, just scrolling through Shein’s new arrivals. But yeah, I just wanted to make sure to add that in there. 

But back to the point that I was starting to make before with the finances. So although the individual garments look inexpensive, we definitely see the shopping hauls of people buying $500, $1,000, or even more worth of clothes, all over TikTok or YouTube, or occasionally Instagram.

And so the important point to remember is that just because the individual pieces are inexpensive does not mean that the total checkout number is or the total annual cost of clothing purchases. And when each piece is so inexpensive, it’s really easy to not notice it. 

You know, for instance, if you know we’re buying $5 lattes from Starbucks every day, it seems like a really small purchase. But even if we’re only doing that on the workdays, and we’re only having one a day, that’s still $25 a week, that’s $100 a month, that is $1,200 in a year, over $1,000. And that’s only if you’re having one a day, which I know a lot of people have several a day, I know because I used to be one of those people. 

So the small purchases can add up really fast. And you might notice if you hop onto one of these fast fashion brands’ websites about how much they push, these Buy Now Pay Later services or point of sale services. They don’t want people to think about how much money they are spending. 

So real quick, buy now pay later services, you’ve probably seen them, some examples are like Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm those are like the most popular ones in my experience. And essentially these platforms enable shoppers to pay for their purchases in installments so that they don’t need to pay upfront for the full amount. 

And these services are promoted by influencers on social media. They’re advertised in magazines, these companies sponsor events. And of course, as I mentioned, they are promoted by the very brands themselves. 

And I don’t want to get too much into buy now pay later as a system, because not a financial expert. I’ve never personally used these systems. But I do think it’s very important to look at how these fast fashion brands and fast fashion influencers are promoting them. 

There is a great article in SF Gate about these Buy Now Pay Later programs and something that the writer Joshua wrote that really stood out to me was how these influencers with their hauls are not just normalizing debt, but even glamorizing it, promoting these Buy now pay later programs as a way for people, largely their Gen Z audience on TikTok to access all the latest, coolest trendiest stuff, even if they do not actually have the money for it. 

And the article had some great quotes from people talking about how the scheme’s made it look like you’re not really spending as much money as you are, since it’s split up in several installments. And, you know, made them feel like that they can afford more than they maybe actually can.

And this article even pointed out that many of the buy now pay later companies actually advertise to brands using their services can increase cart sizes or total order amounts. So they’re saying like, hey, brand use our buy now pay later system to get people to buy more from you. 

And I think we can kind of all see how that happens. I mean, 10 payments of $100 sounds a lot better than paying $1,000 right away. 

But the very tricky part about all of this is that those monthly payments can add up very quickly. And we may not always be able to pay them back on time, they can add up, it can get overwhelming. And this is especially true for young people who do not have experience with things like credit cards or loans. 

I am very privileged and very lucky that I was like educated about this stuff growing up from my parents and from having an education in business, having finance classes, and learning about all this stuff. But not everybody is aware. And Gen Z is a significant audience for these buy now pay later systems as it is for ultra-fast fashion brands. So that’s important to acknowledge. 

But let’s talk specifically about fashion. So Afterpay, one of these services has recorded that 73% of its Gen Z consumer group uses their buy now pay later service for fashion purchases, according to that same SFGate article. 

Now, this is fashion overall. But as the article continues, the rise of ultra-fast fashion has accelerated the pace of trends, driving the desire for constant wardrobe overhauls and therefore constant shopping. 

And I think that again, with fast fashion, it is so deceptive because it looks cheap. And it adds up very quickly. 

Of course, this can also be a huge problem with people buying luxury fashion when they can’t afford it because they’re like, oh, well, I can afford $125 monthly payments. And you know, they buy these designer goods that they actually can’t afford. 

So it’s not exclusive to fast fashion but I do think is interesting how much fast fashion brands are shit, and how these fast fashion influencers doing these hauls basically say that they were able to do that or some of them say they’re able to do that with these like buy now pay later systems. And so it encourages this overconsumption. 

So this whole conversation around overconsumption and debt is really a big one. And it’s complicated, and we don’t have all the numbers. Obviously, there are a lot of causes of debt. Like for one inflation, inflation is a huge problem right now.

I know that the debt is a complicated issue, but I think that it’s worth noting fast fashion’s influence on getting people to overbuy. 

And personally speaking, that I know Aja Barber talks a lot about this as well, it’s easy to underestimate how much you’re spending on fast fashion because these things each purchase might be $50 or $60 here, $70 there. But when you add it up, you might be spending like way more money on fast fashion, then you might think at first. 

And this money is going to be like billionaire corporations is not going to the workers. We know that. So yeah, I think it’s worth adding up the total cost of spending on fast fashion and seeing if it really is cheaper. 

I would argue that adopting a slow fashion mindset of buying less, prioritizing pre-love, and considering cost per wear before purchasing something, I think it saves money for a lot of people. Again, I know access is an issue. And I’m not trying to shame anybody but just try to encourage people to maybe think a little bit differently than we’ve been trained to think by these fast fashion brands. 

And we’re going to be talking more about the cost to consumers in a future episode about the addictive nature of fast fashion and what we need to be doing about that. So stay tuned for that. I think it’s going to be a really fantastic episode. 

And yeah, I think that wraps it up for this episode on what’s wrong with fast fashion. 

So I hope that you found it interesting or informative. The goal is to encourage people to rethink fast fashion, how it’s impacting people and the planet, and maybe even yourself, or themselves in the plural. And I also hope to encourage people to give slow fashion a try it doesn’t mean you have to spend $300 on a dress, there are a lot of ways to get involved. 

If you can’t quit fast fashion, you can still even be part of the movement by, you know, say demanding better from brands, emailing these brands, and asking them questions about their production practices, or maybe joining in on campaigns led by advocacy organizations, like Remake. This movement really needs everybody. And you can get involved in no matter the capacity that you’re able to dedicate to it. Like we need all of us coming together. No matter what level you’re able to participate, the slow fashion movement needs you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. Please share with someone who you think might find this information interesting or informative —  hopefully, both!

And if you are liking the Conscious Style Podcast so far, it would mean so much if you left a rating or review of the show. 

And finally, if you’re looking for more sustainable fashion content, I do have a free weekly newsletter called The Conscious Edit that you can sign up for at consciouslifeandstyle.com/edit. I share articles I’m reading, podcasts I’m listening to, campaigns I’m supporting, brands I’m browsing, things I’m learning, and more. The link is also going to be in the episode description. 

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. I will catch you again for another episode next Tuesday. And if you’re looking for another similar episode, in the meantime, I recommend episode 3: What is Slow Fashion and How Can You Get Involved?

Alright, that is all for today. Bye for now!

The post Why is Fast Fashion So Bad Again? The True Costs of Cheap Clothes appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

As you may know by now, I end every episode by asking each guest what a better future for fashion looks like to them. And Oshadi Collective is creating an incredibly bright future for fashion, one that I didn’t even imagine possible before learning about their incredible initiatives.

• From their regenerative cotton farm, 
• To their dyeing practices using natural pigments from indigenous plants and organic dyes, 
• To their in-house spinning and weaving practices that honor the local artisans’ heritage crafts with fair payment and safe working conditions, which are in stark contrast to the exploitation that frequently happens at this stage of the supply chain,
• To the cutting and sewing, which is done in the same village where the fabrics have been spun, dyed, and woven.
• And, as part of their circularity efforts, Oshadi also recycles textiles by creating patchworks from old garments, weaving new fabrics from strips of textile waste, and breaking down old materials to be respun into new fiber.

Oshadi is truly breaking molds and boundaries and re-imagining a fashion future that can uplift rather than degrade, regenerate rather than destroy, celebrate rather than exploit.

I was so humbled to have the opportunity to talk with Nishanth all about Oshadi’s seed-to-sew supply chain and what their approach to circularity, regeneration, and building a more ethical fashion system is all about…

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

Download the transcript for this episode [PDF]

LINKS MENTIONED:

• Christy Dawn Farm to Closet Collection
• Nishanth on the Green Dreamer Podcast
• Nishanth on the Conscious Chatter Podcast
• Nishanth with Holly Rose

About Oshadi Collective

Oshadi is a regenerative fashion initiative, mindfully building a seed-to-sew supply chain in rural India. 

Originally founded by Nishanth Chopra in 2016 as a womenswear label, Oshadi now is involved in every element of the production process, from growing the cotton, to printing and dyeing, to weaving and spinning.

Rooted in ancient Indian agricultural practices and artisan heritage, at the heart of Oshadi is a 50-acre regenerative cotton farm and a simple ethos:  to give back more than they take.

Connect with Nishanth & Oshadi

Website

Instagram

Shop Christy Dawn’s Farm-to-Closet Collection

The post Regenerative Fashion & Building a Seed-to-Sew Supply Chain appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

What if our clothes could return to the soil from where the fibers to make that clothing was grown? It might sound like only a dream, but there are actually a few brands working to make fully compostable clothing a reality.

One of the brands making significant headway in this realm is California Cloth Foundry. This small slow fashion brand believes in creating a healthy wardrobe the natural way using botanical ingredients that we could consume and avoiding all petroleum-based fibers, treatments, and dyes. 

Not an easy feat in today’s fossil fuel-addicted fashion industry. So, to dive into how California Cloth Foundry is doing all of this, I sat down with founder and designer Lydia Wendt.

In this conversation, Lydia is sharing:

• What fully compostable clothing is and what elements might make natural fiber clothing no longer compostable
• What the challenges are as a brand to create compostable clothing and
• What natural dyes are and how they’re different from low impact dyes 

Lydia is also going to talk about how California Cloth Foundry is going beyond doing less bad and investing in creating a positive fashion system. And Lydia is going to share some interesting reflections on her previous experiences working in big fashion and why she decided to create an entirely local and traceable supply chain for her label.

Next week’s episode will also be talking about soil to soil circularity, so make sure to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss that interview or any future conversations about conscious fashion!

If you’re enjoying this podcast so far, a rating on Apple Podcasts can go a long way in helping this content reach new audiences and also helping me get more amazing guests on this podcast. Thank you in advance!

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

Download the transcript for this episode [PDF]

About Lydia & California Cloth Foundry

Lydia Wendt is Founder and Design Director of California Cloth Foundry. Originally from New York, she trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked with some of America’s top fashion designers and brands, including Tom Ford for Perry Ellis America, Calvin Klein, Bloomingdales and Jones New York.

Before founding CCF in 2014, she produced The North Face x Fibershed Backyard Project and was a member of the faculty of the Academy of Art University’s internationally recognized fashion department after completing her degree in textiles there. There she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in sustainable fashion and textile design.

From Lydia’s 25+ years of industry experience, California Cloth Foundry was born.

Her past work on 7th Avenue, then in fast fashion, a ‘race to the bottom’ of ethics, environment and quality; informs and guides California Cloth Foundry’s mission:

to positively change the industry by reformulating the supply chain in collaboration with nature, for the health of the planet and the future of her two daughters.

CONNECT WITH CALIFORNIA CLOTH FOUNDRY

• Website
• Shop
• Instagram

The post Compostable Clothing, Natural Dyes, and Localizing Fashion Systems appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

And it’s no surprise why: secondhand fashion has been growing rapidly with an increasing interest in sustainability and the growing desire for cheap clothes.

The value of the secondhand market is projected to double in the next 5 years according to ThredUP’s 2021 Resale Report. [Quick note: ThredUP is a major player in the resale market themselves, but they did use market data analysis gathered by GlobalData for these numbers.]

So, a decade ago, shopping secondhand fashion pretty much exclusively meant charity shops and thrift stores. But that has changed dramatically in the past years.

Now there’s a new player in the secondhand market: resale.

As you know, now we can buy secondhand fashion from online marketplaces like Poshmark and Depop, somewhat curated thrift stores like ThredUP, or luxury consignment sites like The RealReal.

And this resale subcategory of secondhand has been a major driver for the growth in the secondhand market, in fact resale is expected to grow 11x faster than the broader retail clothing sector according to that same ThredUP report referenced above.

While all types of secondhand have been growing, the resale sector alone quintupled from 2017 to 2021, while charity & thrift grew 25% in that same time period.

To be clear, ALL of these forms of secondhand fashion are valuable and important to a circular and sustainable fashion future. But online resale does have more of an ability to “keep up” so to speak with traditional retail because of the convenience, searchability, and variety of selection.

So, of course with this rapid growth in resale, brands are taking notes and want a piece of this $36 billion secondhand market pie — a pie that is projected to grow to $77 billion by 2025.

And you may have noticed a surge in brands launching their own resale programs, especially in the past couple of years. Also, of course, with growing consumer concerns about the ecological impact of fashion, resale can also appeal to sustainability-minded consumers.

Now, I don’t think that any of this means that sites like Poshmark or Depop will go away. The growing secondhand market should mean that there will be room for a lot of different players and different forms of access. Like the birth of online resale has not meant that charity shops went away — in fact this sector has still been growing, 2020 lockdowns excluded — so I don’t see brand resale programs causing online marketplaces to go away.

As previous guests Aja Barber and Emily Stochl have pointed out: the world has way more than enough clothes.

I think that we need a variety of secondhand fashion options, as different options will appeal to different types of people. Some may love the hunt at thrift stores, some may love the selection on marketplaces, some may love the curated almost retail-like experience through brand resale programs.

So, all of that said, today we are going to explore the brand resale programs in a bit more depth. 

For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Cynthia Power, an expert in brand resale programs. Cynthia currently helps brands build and optimize their resale programs at Recurate, a full-service recommerce partner for brands, whose clients include Mara Hoffman and RE/DONE.

Before that, Cynthia worked as the Director of Eileen Fisher’s take-back and resale program. And as you may know, Eileen Fisher has been a major trailblazer in the brand resale space.

Cynthia is also an avid thrifter and self-proclaimed vintage fanatic herself, so she has a lot of great insight into the secondhand fashion space.

In this episode Cynthia is addressing topics like:

• What are the differences between brand-led resale programs vs. third-party platforms like a ThredUP or Depop?

• What do the logistics look like for a brand’s resale program? And what are the challenges to getting a resale program off the ground? 

• And how can brands design for resale from the very beginning? 

Cynthia is also addressing some of those big difficult-to-answer and hotly debated topics, like:

• How can we start to get fashion to *finally* talk about reducing new production?

• And does resale give brands an “excuse” to continue to overproduce since they have a home for that unsold stock?

Let’s dive into this conversation with Cynthia to get the answers to all of these questions, and more.

Quick reminder: If you enjoy this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app! so that you don’t miss future conversations like this one.

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

Or, watch this interview on YouTube! (coming soon)

Download the transcript for this episode [PDF]

Links Mentioned

• ThredUP 2021 Resale Report
• Recurate’s Brand Partners
• CS Podcast Episode about Clothing Rental
• The Sustainability EDIT 2021 Report
• CS Podcast Episode with Natasha Halesworth of The Consistency Project
• Brass Clothing Case Study

About Cynthia

Cynthia Power currently helps brands build and optimize their resale programs at Recurate, a full-service recommerce partner for brands, whose clients include Mara Hoffman and RE/DONE. Before that, Cynthia worked as the Director of Eileen Fisher’s take-back and resale program. 

Cynthia is also an avid thrifter and self-proclaimed vintage fanatic herself, so she has a lot of great insight into the secondhand fashion space.

Connect with Recurate

Website

Instagram

The post How Brand Resale Programs Work — and Can They Help Reduce New Production? appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

First off: a lot of home goods are made with textiles: meaning they too can be made from linen and cotton, recycled materials, or virgin synthetic oil-based fabrics like polyester.

And interior design has always evolved over the years. But also just like the fashion industry, it has been following faster and faster trend cycles. And this is due in part to furniture and home goods getting cheaper, both in price — and quality.

But, another similarity that home furnishings and decor has to fashion, is that we can follow a lot of the same principles for conscious home as we can for conscious fashion.

And in today’s bonus episode, I’m chatting with a secondhand and sustainable home expert to teach us all about how we can decorate and design our homes more mindfully: Nina Verduin of Homebody, which is a slow living interior design studio.

Nina started Homebody to show how to intentionally style beautiful, cozy homes that encourage us to slow down, let go of stuff, and make conscious decisions. 

In today’s episode, Nina is sharing:

• Why sustainable furniture & home decor matters
• How we can get started with sustainable interior design
• How to make the most of the furnishings and decor pieces we have
• The benefits of choosing secondhand home goods
• Plus, her tips for secondhand home shopping 
• And, advice for making all those existing pieces and secondhand pieces feel cohesive in your space

RELEVANT EPISODE LINKS:

• 5 Easy Ways to Update a Space
• Tips for Using Color in a Room
• 27 Brands with Sustainably Sourced Furniture
• Ethical Home Decor Brands

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

Or, watch this interview on YouTube! (coming soon)

Download the transcript for this episode [PDF] 

About Nina

Nina is an advocate for sustainable living and a lover of all things interior. She started Homebody to show how to intentionally style beautiful and cozy homes that encourage us to slow down, let go of stuff, and make conscious decisions. When she’s not in front of her laptop, she’s walking her greyhound, drawing, or playing video games.

Connect with Nina

Homebody Website

Homebody Instagram

Nina’s Interior Design Work!

The post Sustainable Interior Design + Secondhand Home Shopping Tips with Nina Verduin appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

The Consistency Project (@theconsistencyproject) does more than sell clothes, though — they are working to break the stigma of secondhand and drive conversations about the unique value of pre-loved fashion in the industry.

In this episode, Natasha is giving us a glimpse inside what it’s like to run a secondhand and reworked clothing brand. She’s sharing the unique approaches to sourcing, designing, and producing for reworked or upcycled garments.

Natasha is also sharing:

• What her sourcing process is like and what she keeps in mind when shopping for secondhand textiles;
• What deadstock is and how the deadstock system really works in the fashion industry today;
• What the production process looks like for reworked garments — and if that process can or should ever become scalable;
• And her advice for other small businesses focused on pre-loved fashion and reworking.

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

Or watch this interview on YouTube!

The transcript of this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast is below.

ELIZABETH JOY: Hey there, and welcome or welcome back to the show. In continuation of this season’s theme on circularity, today we are talking all about secondhand and upcycling.

I am chatting with Natasha Halesworth of The Consistency Project, which is a shop that curates secondhand fashion and designs reworked clothing.

But the Consistency Project is not just about selling clothes. They are working to break the stigma of secondhand and drive conversations about the unique value of pre-loved fashion in the industry.

In this conversation, Natasha is giving us a glimpse inside what it’s like to run a small business focused on secondhand and reworked clothing, which offers us a really fascinating perspective on this side of the circular fashion economy.

Specifically, Natasha is sharing:

What her sourcing process is like and what she keeps in mind when shopping for secondhand textiles;

What deadstock is and how that system really works in the fashion industry;

What the production process is like with reworked garments, and if that process can — or should — ever be scalable;

And her advice for other small businesses focused on selling secondhand fashion and reworked garments.

As always, the transcript for this episode is available in the show notes, which are hosted on consciouslifeandstyle.com. And the video version of this episode is available on YouTube, on our channel Conscious Life & Style. The links will be in the episode description.

And if you like this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so that you don’t miss any future interviews like this one!

Finally, for more conscious content on all things sustainable fashion, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, The Conscious Edit, where I share what articles and books I’m reading, what podcasts I’m listening to, videos and documentaries I’m watching, brands I’m browsing, campaigns I’m supporting, and more.

To sign up, you can head on over to consciouslifeandstyle.com/edit or visit the link in the episode description.

All right, now let’s get on to the conversation. Natasha is going to start us off here with a bit of background on herself and tell us why she decided to create The Consistency Project.

NATASHA HALESWORTH: Hi, I’m Natasha.

A lot of things define who I am. But basically, I was born and raised in Hawaii and had grown up there for a while. I’d lived in California for a bit and then moved to New York.

And really along that journey, I had done a bunch of different jobs and explored different careers. And I’d always been interested in fashion.

And so over that timeframe, I decided to kind of start a little side project, now, The Consistency Project, to really kind of explore my interest in fashion. And I think it’s evolved over time.

So what it was when I started, is definitely not what it is today. And I definitely see in like 10 years, if I still got to be doing this wonderful thing, I feel like it could be different then.

But then I’ll dive into The Consistency Project as we probably get into the interview.

ELIZABETH: Yes, for sure.

We will be talking a lot about what The Consistency Project does. Because you do come at reuse and secondhand from various angles that will be really interesting to explore.

To start off, I think it would be helpful for us to sort of set the foundation here and discuss the difference between secondhand, vintage, reworked, and upcycled clothing. That’s a lot of terminology there.

So I think it would be helpful to define what all of that is. Could you break that down for us?

NATASHA: Yeah.

And so this was definitely something that I, in the beginning of my journey of starting The Consistency Project, that I didn’t really understand myself and was exploring.

And so really to break it down, I think secondhand really — and the reason why we try to use the term secondhand more so over vintage is because it encompasses a lot more. So vintage really is defined as at least 20 years or older. And so really kind of that gives a date.

But I think nowadays we’ve loosely used the term vintage a lot more. And really, it has almost like, taken over the term secondhand a bit, which I think can be beneficial in the sense that vintage has become more mainstream.

But I think truly secondhand encompasses everything, whether modern, it was just used yesterday and given to a friend the next day. It’s really something that you’re able to reuse and give another life, essentially.

Within the rework and kind of upcycle space, I think rework and upcycle are both basically the same thing.

I think upcycle has traditionally had a little bit more, not a stigma around it, but a little bit more of like, oh, if you’re upcycling, it seems more of like a project that might be just at home and may or may not be something that you are necessarily doing full time.

[Upcylcing] doesn’t give kind of this air of like a business, I guess you’d say.

So, I think, obviously, there are businesses that upcycle. But I think the term rework was kind of instead adopted by us to give the air of like, we are literally taking something and reworking it.

Just like upcycle you’re taking something and you’re upcycling, so it’s like, re and cycle, like maybe you can buy recycled… it’s basically the same thing.

But I don’t think there’s much of a difference.

And truly, we are also an upcycle brand if people identify with that term more. We just personally identified with the rework aspect because we’re really in the business of taking existing garments versus only deadstock fabrics and reworking them.

ELIZABETH: Mhm.

Yeah I’d love to talk more about that as well, like the difference between using deadstock versus using existing garments.

So could you walk us through your sourcing process?

NATASHA: I want to ask you a question about this — I thought it’d be interesting.

I think this idea of sourcing has this air of like a hidden secret. Or I don’t know, it seems like weird! So from your perspective, why do you think that is? I’m curious

ELIZABETH: I feel like I envision it being like a warehouse, like maybe something that’s only available B2B.

Like you have to be an insider because I don’t envision them being just like shops that you can go to.

I envision them more like these warehouses that you have to know where they are to get access to them.

NATASHA: Totally.

So sourcing, I think it’s such a complex thing to talk about because it really depends on the phase of your business.

So I can talk about like phase one of The Consistency Project. Which essentially I was just sourcing vintage from thrift stores and reselling it, right?

And so I know a ton of different shops to this day that have brick and mortars, but also online shops on Etsy. Really, the sourcing process is exactly what someone might think, and it’s so obvious, but it’s like going to a thrift store.

I think that is a main source. But for some reason, I think from the consumer side, you kind of doubt that that’s the source.

But really, it is a huge, huge source for many, especially starting out.

Because the next phase is really the phase or the source that you’re talking about, which is like warehouses or things that are a little bit more inaccessible, I guess, to just someone walking up the street and wanting to buy for themselves, for personal buy.

And the reason why warehouses are a little bit more B2B is because you’re dealing with minimums and you’re dealing with more of a process that essentially needs to be in scale or in bulk.

So when we think about our personal closets, I mean, we really shouldn’t be buying things in that scale or that bulk, to begin with.

So it really doesn’t make sense for someone that is interested in secondhand, or thrifting, to want to go to a warehouse-like that, because the requirements are just… it just wouldn’t make sense.

And from a business perspective, from the warehouses that do exist, I mean, a lot of them are rag houses. A lot of them are sifting through 1000s of pounds of clothing, and really, their time to have someone come in, help them walk through… like it needs to kind of weigh out.

And so that’s why it’s a volume-based thing where they’re like, okay, well, if we’re going to take the time to host you in our warehouse, which is most times chaotic. Most times it needs direction, like where is this at?

Like, you’re going through a lot of things; it can be a liability safety-wise. It’s not really built to just have someone that isn’t familiar kind of with the business kind of just diving in. A

So I think that’s where it just depends on the phase.

And so for us, we’ve obviously kind of gone through different phases. As we’ve really figured out what was our niche and what we really wanted to focus on, we realized that we needed to get things more in bulk.

If we’re reworking one thing, we want to kind of be able to provide multiple different options of that. And so warehouse made sense because we could buy in bulk for a particular type of pants, like our Stan Re-pant.

I think sourcing can be also built on relationships. I mean, I know a lot of people and shops have built relationships with different, they call them pickers, or people that kind of thrift and go to flea markets on regular basics that just enjoy that experience to then sell it to sellers that have shops.

And so all of that is not just like on the internet that you can just like Google, how do I find this person that’s interested?

I mean, maybe there needs to be a platform built to connect these people, which would be super cool and great for shops that are starting out.

But essentially, it’s all about the relationships. It’s all about having the conversations, and really getting to know different people who could potentially be sources.

And I think that’s what really makes a great shop sometimes is the owner, the curators, they have built great relationships, therefore, can have the best access to certain products.

And I think, anyone that is really interested in this business has the ability to really build the relationships.

I don’t think there’s any type of… there are challenges, obviously, but I think if you go with in the mindset of trying to be authentic, and really sharing and building a partnership, almost like a mutual partnership…

I think that’s where sourcing and that whole world can be something that you can really be successful in.

ELIZABETH: Yeah.

And when you go to these warehouses, what’s your criteria or checklist when deciding what you want to buy versus what’s kind of a no?

Because you’re reworking it, but I imagine there are some things that aren’t maybe as fixable as others?

NATASHA: Yeah.

So I mean, back in the day, it was really like an exploration where I kind of just went with my gut of like, oh, let me just try this out, right? Because I think it’s also a learning process.

And, almost having too much of our criteria, especially with rework can hold you back from the creative process, right? So there’s a lot of experimentation, I think that goes on in the very beginning.

And really, when I was just sourcing as a vintage shop, I was seeing different things that I saw as opportunities to rework, which then led to kind of what The Consistency Project is today.

So it was that openness of like, okay, trying something different, figuring out what really spoke to the community we’ve built. But also to what I knew was possible from a more fashion construction standpoint.

So like, having some background and understanding of garment construction definitely also helps you see something in a light that can be taken apart and then reconfigured just by looking at it.

Overarching though, we’ve always been a brand that focuses on functionality, comfort, and just something that is still fun at the same time.

I think that has always been my filter of like, okay, I’m looking at it’s like can I wear this every day, but still feel, it’s something special.

It’s like kind of finding that middle ground where it really can toy between going out with friends and just working around the house, it’s like how can I have something that can work for both settings?

And I think that that mindset just comes from a very personal interest of mine, style-wise, I guess.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, that makes sense to have kind of a style or utilitarian aspect in mind of what works in certain situations.

So we touched on this a little bit before, but I’d love to talk more about deadstock.

On the consumer, individual side, outside of the industry, it can be a little confusing. So, can you explain what deadstock is and sort of how that system works in the fashion industry?

NATASHA: Yeah, it’s still sometimes confusing to me, to be honest.

Because we’re using kind of a blanket term to really cover a range of different categories within the fashion industry. So deadstock it basically means what it says it’s like deadstock, so it’s stock that essentially couldn’t be sellable, or a shop closed down.

So, therefore they have no platform to be selling it. So it’s stock that needs to go — I mean, it’s essentially dead to the business.

And then there’s deadstock, that’s also more so potentially, like one-off imperfection, production runs, right.

So maybe they ran out, did a design of pants, and there’s one detail that was actually wrong from the actual design that they want to do.

But now you have this batch of like, 50 pants that you had made, that’s not the one that you want to release to your customer. So what do we do with that as well.

And then you have just excess production from a more fabric standpoint.

So from the beginning of the fashion journey, we also have stock that is just produced in excess, to essentially cover potential designs that may not have gone through, or maybe that they had overshot in planning.

So you’re like, okay, I need 100 yards of this fabric. And then really, like when it went to production, you only use 50. So then you have these 50 yards, that you’re like, okay well, we’re not running the style anymore. We don’t want to produce more clothing that potentially won’t be sold. So, therefore it stays as fabric.

And so I think to someone that’s like, I don’t know what this is, I mean, just really see it as things that exist already but that is potentially still new to the consumer.

So it’s not new within the business production flow. Because from business to business, I’m getting deadstock fabric; it’s not really new to me.

So it’s technically secondhand from another business. But when I produce from it, it’s still new to the customer, because I’m producing something new.

And the same with a shop that closes and they have tons of stock of inventory. At that point, it’s it hasn’t really seen the customer.

But if I’m buying it from another business, it’s technically secondhand to me because I’m taking something that is no longer useful to another business and then somehow giving it a second life in another aspect.

So I think that’s the way to see it. And I think that deadstock can be really a term that could be I guess, used in other industries as well. It’s just traditionally has been within the fashion industry primarily.

ELIZABETH: Mhm yeah.

And I think part of the confusion is that it is the pre-consumer stage, so it is kind of hidden a little bit.

NATASHA: Yes, exactly, exactly.

And I think that there are just so many subcategories that can fit into this major category.

And so when you think about all the different types, you’re like, I don’t know what’s happening.

But I think it’s part of a business or brand’s job to gently communicate these things as they’re going through the process.

So really sharing things in the moment in that particular example or experience that the brands or businesses going through. This then gives the consumer the community much more confidence and understanding what’s happening and using real-life examples to connect the two.

And I think that’s sometimes the part that’s actually missing. Because we see a lot of businesses — the reason why I think there is confusion is because we see on a website, a brand that produces new clothing advertises their stuff and says, oh deadstock, sustainable materials, and then you’re just like, and then that’s it.

There’s like no talk about well, what does that even mean?

Like did you get this fabric from another designer? Or was this is… Like, there was no communication, no narrative.

And that’s really, I think, a huge issue that even if a brand is using deadstock, well, what kind of deadstock? Where are you actually doing that is sustainable?

I guess that’s a part that as a brand for us, we say, oh, we are more than just a shop is because we care about communicating these things, and we care about showing the inside.

Because I think as consumers make decisions of who they support, it’s important for them to know, and it’s important for them to know a standard that other brands should be doing as a bare minimum.

I think that’s where, what we’re doing is just the bare minimum. We’re trying to excel, but we think this is the bare minimum that all brands should be doing. And from there, I think that’s where we can really kind of collectively make more change together.

ELIZABETH: Yeah absolutely.

Just sharing more, being transparent. And that gives the consumer as you said, more confidence and clarity.

Because there are definitely some complexities with deadstock.

And one of the complexities that I wanted to talk about was the criticism that I’ve seen a few times that relying on deadstock is basically giving these brands who are overproducing almost an excuse to do it, because they’re like, oh, well, somebody will buy it, or they can still recover some of that money that was lost.

And so maybe they are being encouraged to continue overproducing.

So what are your thoughts on that?

NATASHA: Absolutely. Yeah.

I absolutely agree with that brands that utilize deadstock or our focus on rework or do anything related to reuse shouldn’t be the scapegoat for the bigger brands that are overproducing.

That’s like, I hands down, agree with that.

I think where it gets complex is really deadstock isn’t, I don’t think a solution to how the fashion industry operates. Because again, that solution requires overproduction.

But at the same time, we’re only thinking about deadstock as excess.

Excess in a way that is in huge, huge volumes, right?

So there is such thing as excess that is almost required anytime you’re producing anything.

So for example, if you know a brand is creating a new collection, they have to plan to have a little bit extra, because if they don’t and they run out of fabric during the production process, it can cause even more waste in them having to order a whole new batch to be made.

Because there are minimums when you make things or make fabrics or anything custom.

So there’s always going to be a little bit of excess, that we’ll always have to work with.

If we don’t want excess, we shouldn’t be making any new clothing at all, and we should just be buying secondhand and only using things that exist. That is how we can approach it.

But I don’t think new brands are gonna just go away, right?

Producing new things is gonna have to be a thing because, for vintage or secondhand to even exist, it needs to be bought; it needs to be bought new at some point.

So all the things that we buy new now, I mean, potentially could be like coveted vintage, 20 years later.

It is complex because there’s this idea that to have secondhand, you need new. And there’s that synergy and that balance.

And I think that’s something that we try to understand his balance and there is kind of the ebb and flow.

Without that balance, that’s when things kind of go off.

So we can’t expect everyone to only shop secondhand, as much as that’s what we really, I mean, honestly, we probably could get to a point where we could all be doing that, but it’s probably not going to be the best solution for everyone.

Everyone has a different lifestyle, I can expect that from everyone.

At the same time, I think deadstock particularly, I don’t think it actually has as much negative connotation once people understand that there are other types of deadstock that aren’t really related to the high high overproduction that we hear about in these like fashion horror stories.

Because most times those, like those garments or fabrics are actually proprietary and destroyed by these brands.

That is a huge problem.

Other brands don’t even get to reuse it, because they’re like, well, I don’t want this particular print being made by anyone else. Therefore, we’re going to destroy it in unsustainable ways, and no one will even know it ever exists. That is what’s happening with a lot of technical deadstock.

And so really, that’s the conversation we should be having of overproduction.

It’s like, well, what’s happening to the things that don’t get to be reused?

What’s behind closed doors, when it comes to overproduction? And a lot of the overproduction is the garment itself. And we hear about things getting destroyed, and thrown away, going to landfills.

And I think that’s something that we need to shed more light on that over brands trying to reuse things that already exist.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

Let’s focus on the big problem, which is right, these brands who are maybe incinerating the material, just because they don’t want someone using their branded print or whatever.

NATASHA: Yeah and so this is why it’s very complex. I think everyone can have a perspective and an opinion.

And I think, all are valid. I think everyone’s perspective is extremely valuable to how we kind of move forward. But it’s also important to understand, listen, and kind of digest all perspectives.

And so I feel like personally, it’s like something I’m continually being open to even learning. Even being within the business, it’s like, just things are changing a lot within the fashion industry.

And even within reuse, and upcycling, and secondhand and vintage, this industry is evolving so, so much.

Every year it’s evolving. And how it evolves affects the kind of operational standpoint of how businesses run. So I think it’s a conversation that will be lasting for a very long time.

ELIZABETH: Right, right.

And it’s important to always have these conversations.

So I think it’s about having that continual discussion, for sure. And then sort of slightly shifting gears to another aspect of your business, which is the reworking.

I would love to talk about that design process. So could you share with that is like?

NATASHA: Yeah.

I mean the basis of it is taking something that already exists and kind of reworking it into something a little bit different.

And so the design process is really materials driven, garment driven.

It is driven by the need for something to potentially be reworked due to damage, due to style and fit. Our bodies have evolved over time, and so with certain things, sometimes the traditional body type and sizing back 20 years ago is completely different from how it is today.

So how do we accommodate and change something to fit and be more size-inclusive today? And I think that’s also part of the process to think about.

I’ll use our Stan Ray pants as an example. Those were our deadstock that we use. And it’s not the deadstock where it’s excess stock.

It’s deadstock that is within that category mainly due to to imperfections, potential design changes, just like small [things].

And when I say imperfections, it’s extremely minor. Stitching could be quite off, or it could be that it was sitting in the warehouse for so long and over time it started to get water damage or age spots or there’s something that makes it unsellable as new.

And so we have taken that stock and found ways to one, sell it as is — especially if we feel like it meets a quality standard for what people really want and need.

And then two, doing things like over-dyeing it to cover up stains.

Then for other ones, really taking it to change it — we have done an elastic waist, so changing it for sizing or making it more comfortable.

And then the other part of rework is just a creative expression. Like it’s not purely focused on solving a problem. It’s purely focused on the joy of taking something and making it look like… or making it have this completely new life visually and creatively.

And so really what drives that process is just more so our creative drive to kind of create something new and fun that inspires people when they wear it.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, that’s a great word: inspire. I feel that way looking at your reworked pieces, and in general, looking at reworked fashion.

It’s inspirational to see how people create what would have been waste into something so beautiful and unique.

So the reworking process is obviously very unique by nature, and I imagine it’s not easy to scale.

What does that mean for you and the operations at The Consistency Project?

Do you think that reworking could ever become scalable, or would that sacrifice, the nature of it? The one-of-a-kind-ness and the sustainability of it. What do you think?

NATASHA: I mean, I think we have to get rid of the traditional sense of like, scaling a business.

Scaling a business typically means making more money, right or just like selling more stuff.

And with the process of rework and making things one of a kind, it is almost not impossible, but it is very difficult to sell more things when it’s being made one-off.

Especially when your process is paying everyone fairly along the way, and the costs might be really high because of that and so, therefore it’s not accessible to everyone, therefore you’re not maybe selling as many as of a pant as maybe a fast fashion brand that is at a more accessible price point.

And so I think for us… it’s I think taking it slow, and really trying to reframe what scalable, like how we scale and what scaling for us means and what growing for us means, I think is what we’re trying to do in the moment.

I tried to see other brands that are doing the same thing, as an example.

And so, there’s the one brand Bode or Emily Bode.

Essentially, she started with reworking one-of-a-kind garments but has now transitioned to replicating and using antique and textile inspiration to produce new textiles.

And so when you see that you’re like, oh, well, does that mean that’s the only way to scale?

Because that’s how she’s scaling the business, and that’s traditionally how maybe one would scale. They take vintage inspiration, and cuts and silhouettes and just replicate it in new fabric today.

I’ve even seen tons of vintage shops do that.

So there are a lot of vintage shops that have transitioned into more of their own line. What they do is they take vintage or kind of secondhand silhouettes, patterns, designs, and they replicate it in new fabric.

So it’s kind of almost like, it looks vintage, but it’s not.

And that’s traditionally what I’ve seen happen in the past couple of years for those shops that are trying to scale and to sell more. It seems like the only pathway

But I don’t think that’s really, solving the bigger issue.

If you are focused on producing more, we’re just producing more stuff when a lot of stuff already exists.

And so, I really don’t have the answer or know what it looks like to scale a business within our industry of rework and reuse.

However, I do think it’s important to note that sometimes there’s only so much space within an industry, sometimes right?

So you as a brand take up so much space. The more you scale and grow, the more space you take up in that industry. You start to kind of monopolize what it is.

The more niche you are, the more it allows other brands to come and become and be part of the industry as a whole. And to provide their own niche, their own perspective, their own special touch to what reuse and rework are.

And I love that concept of this collective range of shops that focus on very particular types of designs, very particular like something that they’re really passionate about, and kind of continue to focus on there.

Because in the end, it will just be more of a slow scaling process.

And no one’s really kind of taking over anyone. It allows more people to do what they love.

I think, we can’t let greed get into the mix of things, because I think that’s when you are taking out other businesses, for just pure again greed and selfishness.

When truly I think, us as a business even at the size that we are now we can survive. And we find it nice that we’re slowly.. I guess we like to take our time with each customer experience, I guess you would say, right, I think it is very special.

And the quicker we move, the more harder is to do that.

And we had tried different ways to scale, working with a production company to produce more things.

And we’ve learned that the current fashion production structure is not built for brands like us right now. And it’s going to take time to continually work with them to change that.

So, again, that’s just also something that we want to continually work on to potentially scale in the sense that we want to make an impact for the better within the industry.

ELIZABETH: Right.

Yeah, I kind of see the sustainable fashion space, ideally as being a bunch of small brands. Because we’ve seen the impact of the large broader fashion industry, all these conglomerates kind of taking over…

That’s how we get billionaires at the top and garment makers barely, or largely not earning enough to live well.

But it’s difficult, as you said, there are things that come easier when you’re a larger brand. You have more money for investments…

NATASHA: And access, yeah. Totally I know.

Obviously, we want to grow as a brand, but because there’s no set pathway into doing that and the pathways that we have seen to be successful aren’t the pathway that we want to take. It’s almost like, you’re just building your road, block by block.

And so yeah, we see, okay, we have a range of different businesses, and it can be difficult, but maybe if we realize there’s an issue when it comes to resourcing, how do you do more crowdsourced resourcing?

So if someone had the deadstock fabric shop or warehouse has a minimum, how do I work with another brand to meet that minimum, so that we can work towards that and still have access to the same resources?

I think there are so many different ways to be doing that. And, I wish that I could be like, yeah, I’m gonna just like spearhead all these different things. But there’s just two of us that really work on the consistency project full time.

And I’m also a full-time mom. It’s so much to take on!

At the same time, you just hope that through your presence within the industry, speaking out, connecting with other brands that slowly things will evolve to where it needs to be, where we’re supporting each other to move everything forward again, right?

ELIZABETH: Yeah, that’s the thing with a lot of small businesses, you have to work together and I’ve heard about, like farmers doing sort of cooperative type things to purchase equipment or something like that.

And yeah, so that’s definitely the way that small businesses are going to make it in this current system, the current economy is by working cooperatively.

So yeah, what advice do you have for other people all businesses may be focused on upcycling or secondhand fashion?

NATASHA: Following up on what we were just talking about, I think it’s important to understand that when you have your niche, you can kind of be within this flow and community.

So I think, if right now you’re starting out, it’s all about exploration, is all about trying different things.

You’re like going to make mistakes. You’re going to buy a batch of things that you’re like, oh, I can rework this… and then you do it and it does not work.

This is just important to know that is just part of the journey. There’s always something to learn from that.

But really, your goal should just be really finding something that you just really connect with, because the more you and your team, and the design process, like you’re connecting with the products you’re making or reselling, the more the customer and the community really sees that.

And so authenticity and kind of integrity and the quality of your work. That is something you should just be trying to instill from the very, very beginning.

It’s so easy nowadays with social media and all this stuff coming at us to compare yourself to other brands.

And I’m sure even other rework brands are probably trying to compare themselves to what we do. And it’s like, that can just be very toxic.

And personally, when I started as a vintage shop, I felt like looking back on how I curated, I could tell there are certain phases, where I was letting other shops that maybe we’re a little more successful or doing cool things, influence how I curated my own shop.

And that just got me off track, to be honest.

Again, it’s part of the process, and going through that is still super valuable.

But just remembering that it’s exploration. And once you find your niche, focus on that, that’s the next phase.

So that’s where we’re really at, it’s just really focusing on knowing what we love, knowing what we do best, and really like leaning into it and not being afraid to experiment within that niche that you have found for yourself.

We’ve primarily focused on pants. And so sometimes so easily be like, oh my gosh, that’s such a cute dress, maybe we should make something like that!

And it’s like, okay, slow down. Developing a new pattern for a dress, when that’s really not our specialty at the moment is going to take time.

If we rush it, it’s not going to be done right. So take your time within each thing that you’re working on.

Because it truly makes a difference I think, and trying to do too many things and rushing things. Never rush your process. Anything that’s rushed, I think you’re compromising a lot.

I think there’s that saying where it can either be cheap, good, or fast. And you can only have two of those things at once.

There’s always one that you have to sacrifice. So it can be cheap and good, but it’s not going to be fast. Or it can be cheap and fast, but it’s not going to be good.

So, really understanding that dynamic and balance when you’re making decisions.

And for us, we try to make things as accessible as possible at the same time, we can’t do it as fast. Maybe we can’t get there as quickly. So it’s kind of like a balance.

ELIZABETH Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s a lot of additional considerations when you’re trying to grow a sustainable and ethically minded business as well.

It’s okay to grow slow, and take your time and find your own lane. I think that was such great advice.

Thank you for sharing everything that you did in this conversation.

There are so many great insights and takeaways, and I learned a lot.

So I have one last question for you, and that is what does a better future for fashion look like to you?

NATASHA: I think it will encompass several things.

It will encompass more reuse, that’s a given. More integration of how we use our products, but also the ownership of the excess waste that we do create, and really the transparency that we need to have there.

And so it’s like a combination of reusing things, but also sharing that process.

Even when you reuse things, there’s still going to be excess.

So what are you doing to own your excess? What are you doing to like properly recycle it, what are you doing to find other ways to use it, I think that is super important.

And the other part is the accessibility and the inclusivity of fashion and rework and quality garments.

There needs to be a reframing of how much things cost and how much stuff we need.

We don’t need as much stuff. And with that, we can put more value into buying better, fewer things.

I think there’s always the side that you want to have a little bit more fun and to obviously shop and have a wider array of closets and thrifting.

I think thrifting and just overall access to secondhand clothing in an accessible way, should be a huge part of fashion industry.

Fashion and secondhand should be basically one and the same, because I think their thing provides the accessible price point for people and still allows for the creativity to style and have fun with fashion. It should still be fun!

ELIZABETH: And that’s a wrap for this episode.

Be sure to take a look at the episode description in your podcast app for the links referenced in this episode, as well as the various links to learn more about today’s guest.

If you would like to spread the word about this show and help the content reach more people, you can share the episode or podcast with a friend screenshot this episode and share about it on Instagram Stories tagging @consciousstyle.

And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, something that really helps is to leave a rating and review. Thank you in advance for supporting the show and whatever way that you can. For more conscious content, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Conscious Edit.

In this newsletter, I share recommendations for reading, listening to, watching, and much more. To get on that list, you can head to consciouslifeandstyle.com/edit, and the link to subscribe will also be in the episode description. Thank you for tuning in to the Conscious Style Podcast and sticking around until the very end. I’ll see you again, same time, same place next week!

About Natasha and The Consistency Project

The Consistency Project is breaking the stigma of secondhand and driving conversations around its unique value and impact within the fashion industry.

They curate secondhand and design reworked clothing based on comfort and versatility, providing a unique perspective on “secondhand style.” They exist to show the possibilities of choosing secondhand first and seek to bridge the gaps between the fashion industry and sustainability.

Founded by Natasha Halesworth, she has creatively led The Consistency Project to be more than just a shop. They are based in New York and Hawaii.

Connect with Natasha and The Consistency Project

• Website
• Instagram
• TikTok

The post Secondhand Textiles, Reworked Clothing, and the Scalability of Upcycling appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

Well in this episode, I’m chatting with Nicole Bassett, the co-founder of The Renewal Workshop (@renewalworkshop), which is a circular fashion business dedicated to doing all of those things.

In this conversation, Nicole is going to share:

• What the challenges are with shifting linear business models into circular ones;
• How the Renewal Workshop helps fashion brands reduce their waste and become more circular;
• The large-scale shifts businesses need to make to address the climate crisis;
• Why brands are not talking about slowing down production and producing less;
• How designers can start to design with circularity in mind;
• And more!

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

To watch the video version of this interview, check it out on YouTube!

The transcript of this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast is below.

ELIZABETH JOY: When you think of a circular fashion economy, what do you think of?

Maybe you think of secondhand and repurposing and reusing, maybe you think about repairing and mending, or perhaps about recycling and upcycling.

Well, today, I am going to be talking with the co-founder of The Renewal Workshop, a circular fashion business dedicated to helping brands do all of those things.

In this conversation, Nicole Bassett of The Renewal Workshop is going to share:

• What the challenges are with transforming linear business models into circular ones, including some really unexpected [challenges],
• How The Renewal Workshop helps fashion brands reduce their waste and become more circular,
• The large-scale shifts that businesses need to make to address the climate crisis,
• and why fashion brands are not talking about the elephant in the room — slowing down overproduction and producing less

As always, the transcript for this episode is in the show notes on consciouslifeandstyle.com if you prefer to read along or read this interview instead.

Also, new for season two, there are now video versions of all of these interviews! So you can head to the Conscious Life & Style channel on YouTube to watch this interview with Nicole if you prefer to consume the content that way.

Something else new for season two is the themed seasons. This season, as you may know, is all about circular fashion. So if you like this episode and want to learn more about circularity and circular fashion, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app.

And also giving Conscious Style Podcast a quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts will help me get more amazing guests onto the show for later in the season.

Okay, and one final thing before we get started if you are curious to learn more about sustainable fashion, which I’m sure you are if you’re listening to this podcast right now, you will definitely want to join the Conscious Edit community, which is my weekly newsletter where I share reads, podcast documentaries, videos, brands, and more resources.

You can subscribe for that at consciouslifeandstyle.com/edit, and it is completely free.

All right. Now let’s dive into today’s episode. We’re going to get started here with Nicole sharing her background and why she decided to found The Renewal Workshop.

NICOLE BASSET: I got into the apparel industry via environmental studies.

So I did a master’s degree in Environmental Studies in Business and out of school, got an internship at Patagonia and I wasn’t necessarily interested in the apparel industry or really understood the apparel industry but I was very much interested in environmentalism and how businesses could be agents of change.

This is back in the early 2000s. So it would be weird for people to think about but there was a time when businesses weren’t as engaged from a proactive perspective.

And so my job at Patagonia early on, was in the human rights side of the business.

So I had worked in the supply chain, and we looked at the factories that we were in and then went down all the way to the cotton fields we were in and looking at how human and environmental rights were being addressed in the supply chain and trying to find factories that aligned with our values as a company.

And then I went on to work for prAna, which is another apparel brand in the outdoor space. And back then it was early days inside of the sustainability strategy within the company.

And it was an interesting story because prAna… as you can imagine, for those yogi’s who are listening ‘used the life force’… all the customers of prAna just assumed everything we were doing was completely environmentally and socially conscious.

And that wasn’t necessarily true at that time. The company had done a little bit of organic cotton, but that that was about it.

So I was brought in to really like create a whole strategy [for prAna] and move the company towards a lot more sustainable practices.

So, we did great work and again, looked at human rights in the supply chain, and [prAna] was one of the first companies to bring Fair Trade apparel to the US; the Fair Trade standard inside of the apparel industry.

And then we looked a lot at materials and how to increase the amount of organic and recycled materials, and also the chemistry of the products or packaging or operations, like all of it.

And interestingly, I did all of that work for about 12 or 13 years, and at the end of the day, kind of came to a realization that we were doing really good work, but we were still making more stuff.

The reason we had to make more stuff is the business had its structure was based around a business model that was, the more stuff you make, or the higher price point you make is how we generate revenue.

That really got me thinking about, okay, well, how are we going to change the industry, if we’re all relying on a business model that’s about growth?

And the circular economy is obviously not something new. It’s been around the concept for a long time, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has been talking about it since the early 2000s.

So at that time, I took a sort of a step back and started to really think about what would it look like for the apparel industry to have a circular business model where truly the product is designed, and there is a post-consumer supply chain for it to the product to have its life extended, and, and to be able to capture her recycling.

That really became the sort of lightbulb moment of okay, that doesn’t exist today. It’s gonna have to get built. And so let’s build it. And that’s kind of how we got started.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, really cool. So you’ve been in the sustainable apparel space for quite some time.

And I do want to get into the nitty-gritty of what The Renewal Workshop does today. But first, I wanted to step back a little and talk about the key word of this season of the podcast, which is circularity.

And so as someone who works directly inside of the circular fashion economy, a co-founder of a circular business, could you share your perspective of what circularity is, especially how it relates to fashion?

NICOLE: Absolutely.

So in fashion, it’s really about the supply chain, that create the products. Are we doing right by the people on the planet?

And then once that product has done its first use, is there actually a system for maintaining the value of that product so it gets more uses. And ultimately, when it’s no longer useful in the state in which it was designed for, there’s a system in place to collect the value of that and move it into another state.

So for me, circularity is about designing products and systems, thinking about where things came from and where they’re going to go next.

So you can see products being designed for reuse, and then recyclability, and then brands setting up systems in place that could allow our product to easily move through these different phases of its lifecycle. That’s how I would say it.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, that’s great. That’s really useful.

I think that we hear that word a lot. And it’s confusing what it means.

But it’s really about… yeah, the whole system, not only what it’s made from or not only where it’s going, but kind of the whole picture. So thank you for that and for breaking that down.

And now I’d love to dive more into how The Renewal Workshop supports a circular fashion economy.

So could you walk us through the process of how The Renewal Workshop partners with brands to make their models more circular? And maybe other initiatives that you’re involved with?

NICOLE: Yeah, absolutely.

The Renewal Workshop’s primary customers are brands.

So we work with brand and basically provide all of the operations and services needed to take their product post-consumer to the next phases of its lifecycle.

I’ll use The North Face as as an example. They’re one of our customers.

So now with The North Face, all their products that get returned to them, either through their stores or wholesale accounts or e-com business that was otherwise like damaged.

So you can imagine a zipper gets broken and it gets returned to them or someone tries on something at a store and there are makeup stains on the product or someone takes it home and washes it and returns it.

So there’s a lot of reasons why the product comes back that a brand can’t resell as new — and this is across all brands; all brands have this experience.

Also, brands get products back that are from their customers directly. So The North Face has a trade-in program for their VIP customers, but other brands have take-back programs as well.

All of that product before was sort of at the end of its first life. Brands had the option of donating it. A lot of donations went overseas. A lot of products get landfilled or incinerated. There just weren’t a lot of options for what happens to this product. But it’s perfectly good, great functional clothing.

So that product comes to our facilities where we then sort it for its quality standards. We have the ability and we can extract more product — about 40% more product — out of this pile because we have operations in a house with cleaning and with repairs.

We have different quality standards, so there’s a new or a very good or a good option for consumers to buy the product. And we do photography on that product. And then we actually have the technology that allows us to resell the product again.

So there’s some stuff where — and we can talk about this a little later — but product today isn’t designed for getting resold again.

So we have to do a bunch of work behind the scenes. We have a tech platform that does that to get access to that data it allows it to get resold again.

Then we have a re-commerce platform that brands use to actually do the resale. So you can go to The North Face Renewed, and the entire site is filled with renewed products.

As far as the business model for the brand goes, they are now taking a waste — so a cost to their business — and they pay us to renew the product, and then they get to resell it again.

They’re actually able to generate sales off something that was already made and didn’t have value before.

Our operations really are about getting the brand in a place where they can see the viability of having another way of generating revenue off of what they’ve made before.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, that’s incredible.

It really just makes so much sense on so many levels: reducing waste, minimizing costs, maybe even adding a revenue stream.

So you mentioned The North Face, and actually, and I actually didn’t realize that North Face Renewed was your technology or that The Renewal Workshop was involved with that, so that’s really cool.

I love to see more and more brands do that. And these brands have such a big customer base, so they can really reach so many more people who maybe wouldn’t otherwise be introduced to circular fashion or secondhand fashion.

And so you do work with quite a few larger brands. And I would imagine that would be kind of complicated that these brands have large, complex supply chains.

So I’m curious what some of the challenges have been that you’ve run into, and then how you worked around it, how you found solutions? Or maybe if there aren’t solutions yet what do we need to get there?

NICOLE: Yeah It is a really great question.

Because really what’s happening right now is we have a linear economy where if you think about it, everything was designed for making and selling something. No one wants the stuff back — having it back is a big cost to the business.

The accounting, the product design, everything is very set in its ways, and it’s been like that for a long time. So we’re trying to change a very entrenched model.

So you can imagine what that’s like… there’s definitely a lot of challenges. I’ll give you an example.

Products were definitely not designed to be resold again, so we have to do some fancy things to get access to information that when you were first designing a product, and you didn’t think about reselling again, you would never have considered this.

For example, if I’m wearing let’s call this the Nicole Tank Top and it originally retailed for $50.

When this tank top comes into our building, all we know about it is that it is black because I can see that; it’s a tank top, because I can see that.

And hopefully, fingers crossed, it has the size tag still on it and the content tag still on it, right?

So I didn’t know this is called the Nicole Tank Top and I didn’t know it sold for $50.

So we have to use some kind of ID on the product to be able to match back to the original product data so that it could get sold again.

That’s an example of where like, oh, if I needed to sell this again, how do I design it the first time to make it more efficient, so it could go and get sold again?

Another challenge that we’ve run into, which I think is really interesting is that brands will design products for a specific trend, or they may be designing products for an outlet store or a wholesale account that they actually don’t ever want to sell again.

So then they that has to get factored in as well. It’s like okay, I’m making this product today and it could come back into my life in three years from now.

Do I want it back into my life again? Or was I just trying to make a quick buck early in the business cycle and now I’m going to have this burden later on. So thinking about that..

The other thing is around accounting. Accounting systems are set up and inventory management systems are set up so that you make a product, you get a margin, and then oh, wait, I want to resell this again, but my inventory management system was not designed to have a new version and a renewed version inside of the same system.

So with a lot of those challenges, there’s a lot of solutions that can happen as brands start to embody like a circularity strategy and they start to look at design through that lens and say, okay, I am going to see this product again in the future.

Then they’re starting to design differently, and starting to think through how to do the accounting differently, and things like that.

But as far as having solutions on the table, we’ve been able to work with our brand partners, and get access to the original product data.

We use our technology and our platform to be able to move that data through the system so we can get back out for the consumer so they can have a really high-level experience when they’re shopping.

So all of these things are more like little puzzles that we’re constantly solving.

But we also get really excited about this vision of like, we designed the whole system in the way we see it. We’re going to be able to unlock a lot of opportunities.

Because right now we’re dealing with a lot of things that are a bit manual and sort of a little bit backwards because the system we’re in was and is linear still, really.

ELIZABETH: Yeah.

And that’s why the Ellen MacArthur Foundation talks about how it starts at the design stage: designing out waste, designing with circularity in mind from the beginning.

And also, it’s something that is taught a loti in the Slow Factory courses: designing out waste, or waste-led design, like really thinking about the end of life of that product.

But speaking of challenges, something that a previous guest on the show brought up, Emily Stochl in Episode 10. She was saying how while brands are launching resale programs, we’re still not really seeing a decline in new production overall.

The total number of garments being produced is still going up, maybe not last year with COVID, but overall, it is still increasing.

So could you talk to that a little bit? Why aren’t brands talking about making less stuff? Do you hear brands talking about reducing production behind the scenes? And if not, what do you think we need to get that conversation going?

NICOLE: Yeah, it’s a great question.

It’s a great question and I’m glad you’re asking it — and I think it’s the right one to keep asking.

So I would say we are at the beginning of something. I think there’s a little bit of — for those of us who have been in it for a long time are like — “oh, it’s really obvious and clear.” And for others, it’s like, “oh, I need more data, or I need more time to figure it out.”

So I want to answer your question in sort of a roundabout way.

When we started the company, we actually were like, “Okay… does renewed actually have a lower impact?”

And so intuitively, people are running around saying, of course! You wear something again, instead of making something new — that has to be a lower impact.

But when we started looking around, we actually didn’t have any data to prove that.

So we are going to launch a report this fall, our Second Leading Circular Report, that’s going to demonstrate the data that we’ve been able to show where actually yes, renewing something has a lower carbon impact than making something new.

Now that we have this data, what we can say to a brand is okay, if you want to reduce your carbon impact, you can do so by creating new revenue out of items you already have. So they really could make less stuff and still grow their businesses.

But where we are today, I would say is most brands are looking at re-commerce as additive revenue, and there isn’t a strategy around “oh, yeah, I feel the confidence of being able to say we’re okay to make less stuff.”

Because I mean, a lot of brands are public companies, and they’re required to show quarterly earnings and what is their profitability like and what is their growth like.

So if that’s the only measurement stick, we’re never gonna see a decrease in product. We’re only going to see like, “Hey, wow, we unlocked a whole bunch of extra revenue!”

But it’s when we line up the carbon and the revenue together, you have to create boundaries on either side.

So the tension has to be strong enough to show, okay, I am increasing my revenue but I’m also increasing my carbon.

Or if I make these strategic business changes, like making less new and putting more emphasis on other business models inside the company, re-commerce being one of them, then we can actually start with data to show, okay, this is where we can start to make some chips away at our carbon impact.

So yeah, so it’s probably the most important question. And more and more companies, hopefully over the next few years are gonna start to like have a strategy around it.

But right now, everyone’s just sort of like oh, this is a nice little win.

ELIZABETH: Right. Yeah, I was kind of afraid of that.

Is there legislation in the works? Because I know France either has or is introducing end-of-life legislation.

And I know that Germany, other countries are starting to take more action on human rights diligence.

But I haven’t really seen anything in terms of production. But I was curious if you’ve heard of anything like that happening?

NICOLE: I haven’t, and there won’t be anything around legislating less production.

What will end up happening is either these public statements around carbon reduction are going to be held more accountable, either by the investor community or by government.

And brands when they start to disclose their carbon impact, and they’re not showing demonstrated improvements on reducing it, that’s then potentially where legislation could get involved in like there could be fines or there could be cap and trade.

There’s a lot of things that could be happening. Or incentives could be in place around businesses who reduce their carbon by a certain amount.

The other legislation that doesn’t get at production but is something that always gets talked about is extended producer responsibility, which is when brands take responsibility for what they make.

And we’ve had a few wins in the states recently in the packaging space.

So Maine passed a bill. Oregon just actually passed a recycling modernization bill, but within that bill, the money from the producers of packaging have to invest in recycling systems. It’s sort of like a step towards some more stringent EPR.

But the US is, is behind, like really behind. Canada has stuff, Europe has stuff.

So hopefully brands who sell into those markets are going to start to think through like, okay, what do I do as a business as a whole?

ELIZABETH: And do you think that consumers holding brands accountable would help?

Or do you think consumers just should buy less and then it’ll eventually happen? Because with that, my concern is that brands already waste so much, like waste their inventory.

So I don’t know if necessarily demanding less is the entire answer to reducing overproduction, but maybe it could help.

NICOLE: That’s something interesting to talk about.

Because it is true, right?

Like it’s almost like competing, or parallel existences. You’ve got a brand who needs to generate revenues, and the only way they know how to make more stuff. So that’s occurring over here, regardless of whether or not there’s a consumer that wants their more stuff.

The consumer relationship with the brand is so complex, that it may be like a personal decision of I’m not gonna buy anything period, as a consumer, and does a brand actually… [are they saying] oh, but what if I designed it cooler? Or if I did things in a different way, would you be able to get that customer back? Or is that customer gone forever?

And I think there’s a gap of time of learning the customer behavior, and then how the business transitions.

I would say for anyone who’s interested in wanting to see the businesses actually change is to find the brands who are being very strategic around circular, and not one-off projects that just sort of are like oh, I upcycled some stuff once…

It’s truly like, I am committed to offering a renewed line into my business model. I’m committed to taking back what we make. I’m committed to circular product design.

Not only that it has to be part of their strategy, but it also has to be demonstrated in our actions. And then be like, okay, I’m going to be a consumer within that and I’m going to support you in that.

Because a brand will not be able to do it if there’s no consumer that wants it to happen. So as much as people can support the change that they want to see, that is really where it happens.

ELIZABETH: So instead of buying new, buying something that was renewed or repurposed or…

NICOLE: And from the brand, I would say.

So like yeah, I can go down the street to Goodwill and buy a pair of jeans and that’s fantastic because I’ve gotten those jeans for you used again and it doesn’t have to go into landfill or whatever.

But the brand didn’t get any revenue from that — it didn’t change the brand’s business model.

It operated over here outside of that system.

So as much as I can come, and that’s where customers do have a great voice to go to all your favorite brands and be like, I don’t want to buy your stuff knew I want to buy it renewed.

How can I do this? How can you give me that option?

ELIZABETH: Right.

Maybe sending emails or messages [to brands] being like, I love the style of your clothes, but I want to shop only secondhand or mostly secondhand, would you consider doing that?

And so these conversations about reduction and production are not just important, of course, from a waste perspective, but also from a climate lens.

The IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), recently released their Sixth Climate Change Assessment Report, and it was their most alarming yet declaring that climate change is, quote, “widespread, rapid and intensifying.”

So there wasn’t necessarily anything new if we’re reading climate news on a regular basis, but the report is still an extremely urgent call to action.

We really need every industry to do their part, including the fashion industry, of course.

So from your vantage point, what sort of large-scale business model shifts do fashion companies, and maybe companies in general, need to implement?

NICOLE: Yes.

Well what’s very exciting is that even in the timeframe of The Renewal Workshop when we first started five years ago, it was a lot about waste. And now it really is shifting to a decarbonization strategy and how do we address carbon.

So even that the awareness and the fact that the language has changed is really important, and I think it gives me a lot of hope that people know the urgency.

So as far as shifts that businesses can do, I’ve been doing sustainability for a long time and we started back in the day with what we can control.

Really, it comes down to the products that we make.

So if you’re an apparel brand, you make apparel. If you’re a textile brand or home goods brand, you make home goods.

And when we started to assess the impact, the key thing was to figure out was what are our leverage points for changing that impact? So is what harm are we causing and how can we fix it?

That’s why you’re going to see a lot of emphasis on materials, and why brands are really looking at the environmental impact of our product in the materials piece, because materials make up a majority of our product’s impact.

So what I find, sort of heartbreaking and a little bit is that work was done decades ago. And the industry still… there are a lot of brands that don’t — even though we have the solution, and we can say this material is more environmentally friendly, this material has a lower carbon impact, all of these things — a lot of brands have not adopted a material strategy.

And they’re still making products, with the conventional materials that a lot of people know just cause harm.

So you’ve got like some brands that are further along the process, who are moving into other issues, which are these things like the energy use of our supply chain, or the business model in which is built on.

Basically, what I really see is that we need to have a faster adoption into these solutions that we know exist already.

So if we’re trying to reduce our carbon, we just have to use less carbon. So that can come from decarbonizing the energy of the industry.

So really looking at the supply chain and saying.. I remember going to factories in India, and I literally saw them shoveling coal into a burner to heat water to run the boiler to die fabric…

And so how do factories like that get solar? How do they get wind? Are there other options that are out there? And so that’s a big piece.

Then the other is, how do we make our revenue without using as much stuff, right?

So I would say it’s a little heartbreaking because I’ve been in it for 20 years, and I’ve only seen so much change, and I know what we need to be doing, and we’re like we’re just not moving fast enough as an industry.

It’s not going to change until we see more push, like the pressure has to get more intense.

And it really will come from government and consumers. And government will move things faster than consumers will.

But my experience has been we’ve had a lot of solutions at the table and brands are like oh yeah, we’ll get to that in 2023 or we’ll get to that in like this time in the future.

And I think that the most recent IPCC report showed us is that we literally don’t have more time. We cannot wait ten years or five years to start this stuff.

We have to start in the next two years because it’s cumulative problems, right?

I’ve read the report and it’s actually the summary report is really easy to read in the sense that — I mean you can get into the weeds really quickly — but there’s a lot of great visuals. The modeling allows you to see like, oh, that’s what a 1% change could do, or a one-degree temperature change could do.

And that’s what, three and a four.. and you look at the four-degree temperature change, you’re like, whoa, okay, I got some motivation and need to do some now.

ELIZABETH: Right? They need to be like looking at that before every meeting that the executives have. Like reminder, do something about this.

Yeah, that’s interesting that these changes have been around for so long. I think as an individual, you don’t necessarily know when the better solutions were available to these brands because they’re not necessarily taking action on it always so that’s very interesting.

So you touched on this a little bit. But what do you think needs to happen for the fashion industry to shift from being more linear to circular? Obviously, The Renewal Workshop is being part of the change.

NICOLE: Yeah, so I will definitely plug us a little bit here because that’s why we started the company is to be a solution for these brands.

Because shifting your entire business model from linear to circle is not easy.

And if you can have someone that can sort of hold your hand through that process, then you’re going to get there faster without as much disruption.

Especially today. Like us five years ago, versus where we are now and what we know…

So re-commerce is available today. Brands could roll it out tomorrow and get that business model going. And maybe today it is an additive revenue.

But over time, as the brands get more sophisticated, and how they’re planning their revenue and their strategy, then if they’re locked in and have a really solid re-commerce business model, then they’ll feel the more freedom to be able to make other changes.

The other thing that brands can do is go through a circular design workshop. We run that for brands and basically help designers think through not only designing product for circular, but designing for circular business models.

And we’ve run a number of brands through that program who have adopted change immediately.

Like the next day, they went into their line reviews and they were like, okay, now I know. Because I didn’t know before. A lot of it is just a brand new way of seeing the world.

And I love that. I love sitting there listening to a designer go, okay, so what you’re saying is that I’ve been building garbage for the last 10 years in my career?

And we’re like, a little bit! [And designers are like] okay, but now I know, and I know the places where I make decisions that can change that.

So those are things like tomorrow, get that going inside the business.

Then longer-term, brands can start to change their products and their internal software, and their business models and sort of financial models. And that stuff comes over time…

What we see is that all change management happens in the same way, right? There’s resistance, and then there’s sort of a bit of adoption, and then there’s like, okay, I understand it a bit more, and then it builds on itself.

We’ve watched the brands we’ve been with over the years take that and start to adopt and advance themselves in ways that they couldn’t if they didn’t get started.

ELIZABETH: Mhm. I think that’s really interesting; training designers to design for circularity.

Could you talk about that a little bit more? I think that’s really fascinating and a part that we don’t always talk about very much.

So what sorts of things does The Renewal Workshop train designers on?

NICOLE: Yeah.

So we have this great workshop and we actually augmented it this last year and a half to be virtual, because of COVID, which has a lot to offer the workshop to a lot more brands who are not necessarily in Oregon or Amsterdam.

So what it is that designer’s come in and it’s a very hands-on working workshop where they get exposed to the one-on-one of what is circularity.

So the stuff you’ve referenced with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the design principles, and why materials… like we can recycle an aluminum can, but why can I recycle a ski jacket?

And really getting the thing of understanding like, oh, all of these little components on our product are made of different materials. Or, oh, this is where the recycling systems of textiles are today.

Yeah, we all wish it would look different than it does, but here’s where we are.

Or we don’t talk about what if you design a product that’s like, now you have to sell it in five years from now. We do some really great stuff around disassembly and repairability.

The thing of it is, is that most designers go to school and learn how to design product to build the product. And then they come and work in a business and the business puts this pressure on them.

They’re like, yes, build that brain jacket, but I need it to be at this price point. So designers really learned over time like, oh, okay, yeah, I gotta save 15 cents, I’m going to use this zipper instead of this zipper.

But then all of a sudden, if you go, oh, hey, by the way, all of here’s the data back on all your product and where it fails over time.

And say they say it was like your product pills extensively, then they might say, okay, I am going to invest more into the material the first time, because then I’m going to yield more product into the second time.

So it’s about just sort of giving designers the tools of how to think through the new future that their products are going to have to live in.

ELIZABETH: Right.

And if companies are having take back and resell programs, they’re going to be more incentivized to design with longevity in mind. So it’s all sort of connected.

Lots to think about there. A lot of exciting things that The Renewal Workshop is doing. I loved hearing about that and hearing about some of the solutions.

Thank you for this conversation, and for taking time out of your day to chat with me.

We are nearing the end of the interview, but I have one last question. What does a better future for fashion look like to you?

NICOLE: That’s a good question.

So fashion is so unique for me because it has so many coexisting realities within it.

Fashion is an element of functionality, right? So I have to wear clothes because it gets cold outside or there are laws that say I can’t be naked running around. So you have this functionality piece to it.

But then fashion is also this deep expression of identity. And this importance of reflecting me inside of the culture and society that I am.

It’s becomes complicated quickly because there’s a lot of “oh stop fast fashion”. But then there’s also like, well, fashion is changing over time, like can you truly have completely timeless products?

What I’d like to see in the fashion industry that can hold this duality inside of it. So having flexibility for creativity, but then to be constrained inside circular principles.

So that fashion brands are committed to the principles of circularity — design without waste, design for repairability recyclability, resale — but then also to have space for creativity and self-expression.

I think of it as a system that mirrors nature where there is no waste.

ELIZABETH: And that’s a wrap for this episode.

Be sure to take a look at the episode description in your podcast app for the links referenced in this episode, as well as the various links to learn more about today’s guest.

If you would like to spread the word about this show and help the content reach more people, you can share the episode or podcast with a friend screenshot this episode and share about it on Instagram Stories tagging @consciousstyle.

And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, something that really helps is to leave a rating and review. Thank you in advance for supporting the show and whatever way that you can. For more conscious content, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Conscious Edit.

In this newsletter, I share recommendations for reading, listening to, watching, and much more. To get on that list, you can head to consciouslifeandstyle.com/edit, and the link to subscribe will also be in the episode description. Thank you for tuning in to the Conscious Style Podcast and sticking around until the very end. I’ll see you again, same time, same place next week!

ABOUT NICOLE & THE RENEWAL WORKSHOP:

Nicole Bassett is the co-founder of The Renewal Workshop, a circular business that is leading the apparel and textile industry towards circular business models restoring value and reducing waste. Prior, Nicole has applied her passion for environmental responsibility and human rights in consumer products. She has served as Director of Sustainability for prAna, Social Responsibility at Patagonia, and Head of Human Rights at Specialized Bicycles. Nicole received her Master’s in Environmental Studies with a focus on Business Strategy and Sustainability from York University in Toronto, Canada.

CONNECT WITH NICOLE & THE RENEWAL WORKSHOP:

• Website
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• Twitter

The post Creating a Circular Fashion Business: The Opportunities and Challenges with Nicole Bassett of The Renewal Workshop appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

Maybe you’ve seen fashion brands advertise their “circular collections” or talk about their vision for circularity. Or perhaps you’ve seen words like upcycled, recycled, renewed, and repurposed, and are feeling a bit lost in the sea of confusing terms.

This post will break down what you need to know about circular fashion: what it is, the various approaches to it, some of the greenwashing of circularity going on, and what it will take for the fashion ecosystem to become circular. 

Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast version!

Tune in to this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast below, or on your favorite podcast app.

Quick Links: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts.

What is Circular Fashion?

Circular certainly sounds great — but what does it actually mean?

Well circularity is not a new concept.

The earth operates in a circular system. Nature is circular. Everything is reused and repurposed. There is no waste.

And many cultures today still operate within this circular framework like BIPOC communities and low income communities. I’ll be bringing on guests talk about that more, but I wanted to make sure to put that out there before we started getting into the nitty gritty of circular fashion.

For now, I’d like to start with talking about what a circular economy is and then how that relates to fashion.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “in contrast to the ‘take-make-waste’ linear model, a circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources.”

So, what does that look like in practice? Well, Ellen MacArthur Foundation goes on to explain that there are three main principles to a circular economy: 

1. Design out waste and pollution
2. Keep products and materials in use
3. Regenerate natural systems

Let’s break each of them down.

The first is to “design out waste and pollution”.

This is about ensuring that during production, there isn’t waste being created and there is no pollution of the air, land, and water along the way.

For fashion, this might be about designing pieces that use existing textiles and/or make use of every scrap of fabric.

[For more on this, check out what is zero waste fashion?] 

It’s also about producing garments (and accessories and everything else) with eco-minded materials, dyes, and components that don’t pollute the environment. And of course, about using cleaner energy sources and not using fossil fuels.

The second principle is to “keep products and materials in use”. So basically, this is about ensuring things are lasting as long as possible. It’s about repairing, restoring, refurbishing, and as a last resort, recycling them. 

But this is only fully possible if from the very beginning when the product is being designed, the designers are thinking about the full lifecycle of the product to ensure that the product is durable, repairable, recyclable, compostable, et cetera.

In the fashion industry, the most obvious example of keeping materials in use is secondhand fashion. So thrifting, buying vintage, borrowing, sharing, getting hand-me-downs, and so on. 

But we could also extend this principle to mean brands designing higher quality products and having repair programs. It can mean improving sewing literacy so we can mend our clothes, and it could mean encouraging the upcycling and creative use of existing textiles. 

The list goes on and the rest of the post will go into these approaches in much more detail.

For now, let’s get into the third and final principle, which is “regenerate natural systems”.

This is the one that is most often left out of the circular economy discussion, but a truly circular system cannot be reliant on non-renewable resources. And, a circular economy is about not taking more from the earth than you give back.

So this one is about first, stopping the extraction of fossil fuels and prioritizing the transition to renewable energy sources. And secondly, it’s about replenishing and restoring the soil and the earth.

In fashion, this means no more synthetic fabrics, no more plastic fabrics like polyester and nylon derived from fossil fuels. It also means that the production and transport of items is powered by renewable energy sources. There’s still a long way to go on both of these!

It’s also about thinking about ways that fashion can be produced in a regenerative way. The most clear example of this is growing or raising fibers for fashion using regenerative, traditional farming practices.

Fibershed is a great resource to learn more about regenerative fiber systems and I will have guests on the Conscious Style Podcast to talk about this in more detail.

Four Steps to Circular Fashion

Taking all of this into account, here is a breakdown of the various steps that would be required for creating a truly circular fashion system.

1. Produce and Buy Less
2. Design Out Waste and With the End in Mind
3. Extend a Garment’s Life as Long as Possible
4. Manage a Garment’s “End” of Life

1. Produce and Buy Less.

This is the step that very few brands want to talk about, but it’s absolutely necessary if we ever want to reach a truly circular system.

Right now, we are simply producing too many clothes — and shoes, and bags, and jewelry and everything else.

According to the Ellen MacArthur foundation, over 100 billion garments are being produced annually. 

As the often quoted stat goes, from 2000 to 2014, clothing production roughly doubled, yet people are keeping clothes half as long. 

Fashion brands have gone from releasing new clothes a couple times per year or once per season to launching new styles weekly or even daily. 

Ultra-fast fashion retailer Shein even advertises that they drop at least 1,000 new styles every single day. Some days, the retailer drops over 6,000 new products daily.

There’s no way that this overproduction and over-extraction of resources could ever be circular. Even if we switched to using all renewable sources for fabrics, dyes, etc. we’d be producing faster than those resources could renew.

And given the state of textile recycling technology today and the amount of time and energy textile recycling takes, we also could not possibly recycle all of those clothes.

We can only create a circular system if we are producing less in the first place.

Also, of course, one of the elements of a circular economy is about making durable things that last and can be used continually. Certainly, if a brand is producing hundreds of millions of clothes every year (Zara produces 450 million garments annually), you’re not considering longevity. 

Not only is the clothing not designed to be durable but the only way people are able to buy so many clothes is if they are replacing their existing garments. Our closets are only so big after all. 

Overproduction and overconsumption is very reliant on there being a significant amount of waste. Anytime you are producing trendy garments that come and go within months or sometimes even weeks, you’re not designing with circularity in mind. 

Many experts argue that being a truly circular brand means decoupling sales volume from profitability. In other words, brands will NEED to find other revenue sources outside of new production if they want to actually be circular. 

So, degrowth and reduction in the production of new garments must be the first step to a circular fashion economy!

2. Design Out Waste and With The End in Mind

This is something that the Ellen MacArthur foundation talks about in their approach to a circular economy and it’s a very important element.

We can try to extend the lives of garments and other items (which I’ll touch on in step 3) as long as possible, but it helps if these pieces were designed in a way that made it easy to repair them or keep them.

So, this means designing for durability: Using quality fabrics, reinforcing the seams so the seams don’t rip, using quality components like zippers and buttons.

It’s also about designing with really great fit so people want to keep wearing that garment. When it’s too loose or tight in the wrong areas, or falling off our shoulders, or is just uncomfortable, people won’t want to keep it. In fact, eighty percent of consumers have reported difficulties finding well-fitting garments.

And this is something that fast fashion is really bad about. I mean these brands are launching hundreds or thousands of new garments every week. There’s no way they are thoroughly testing the fit on every single piece. It’s just not possible.

And beyond designing for durability, designers need to also have the end in mind.

So, for instance using 100% of a fiber instead of a blended fabric to maximize recyclability. 

Or using 100% natural fibers and dyes and components so that the piece is compostable. 

Or maybe designing a handbag or pair of shoes in a way that makes it very easy to repair if something were to happen to it.

3. Extend a Garment’s Life Through Reuse and Repair

As the Ellen MacArthur Foundation explained in their three principles of a circular economy, extending the life cycle of items is a key part of circularity.

There are so many ways to do this with fashion!

Reuse.

This means first and foremost, making the most out of your closet. For plenty of tips on this, listen to episode 7 of the Conscious Style Podcast with Jess Atkins, the co-creator of the wardrobe app, Stylebook.

The most sustainable garment is the one that you already have in your closet. Don’t be afraid to be an outfit repeater and get creative with new outfit combinations with the items that you’ve got!

When you do need something else or you are really wanting a piece, the second most circular or sustainable option is to make the most of what already exists in general. In other words, looking pre-loved. 

For more on secondhand fashion, tune in to episode 10 of the Conscious Style Podcast with Emily Stochl of the Pre-Loved Podcast.

There are a lot of ways to find pre-loved garments! Here are some of the ways:

• We can swap with friends and family, or maybe look for a swap party happening in our community on a site like meetup.com or on Fashion Revolution’s community event calendar.
• If we just need a piece for a one-off occasion like prom, a wedding, or a work interview, we can see if we can borrow a piece or use a peer-to-peer rental app like ByRotation (you’ll get to hear from ByRotation’s founder, Eshita in Season 2 of the Conscious Style Podcast!)
• You can go to local thrift stores or check out online secondhand fashion marketplaces like Poshmark, ThredUP, Depop, and Swap.com.
• There are also a lot of places to find vintage clothing. You can search in your local area or there are also a bunch of vintage shops selling through Instagram and Etsy.
• And if you want to splurge on a designer item, there are also consignment stores. So again, you can look locally or go online on a site like Vestiaire Collective or The RealReal.

Repair.

The second R of this step is repair and this is something that has been gaining more and more traction in the sustainable fashion space, which is exciting to see!

Fashion is too often treated as disposable. When there’s a rip, tear, a missing button, a stain… that piece is tossed or “given away”. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many of these issues can be mended or repaired. Either by learning through YouTube tutorials ourselves or by taking the garment to a nearby seamstress. Many Dry Cleaners will also take on a tailoring or mending project.

And something I’m a big advocate of is pushing brands to have repair programs where shoppers can bring back in their products and get them repaired for free or for a very small fee.

4. Manage a Garment’s “End” of Life: Repurpose and Regenerate

There are a couple more R’s I want to talk about and these have to do with the sort of final stage of a garment as it currently is.

I hesitate to say “end-of-life” because that’s a terminology in the linear economy that assumes there is an end. And the point of a circular economy is that there isn’t an end; everything stays in use or gets used as something else.

But, there comes a time when a piece will be beyond repair or perhaps is unwearable or undesirable. In this case, that piece may need to be transformed so that the components or materials stay in use.

One way to do this is to repurpose it. 

Repurposing might mean cutting it up and creating an entirely new item out of it. It might mean using the fabric scraps for creating something small like a scrunchie.

Or, when all other avenues have been exhausted, downcycling that textile to use for something like insulation or couch cushions. This is really a last resort for fabrics that are just totally soiled.

And then another approach to handling a garment or other textile at the end of its as-is-life is to compost it and use it to regenerate new life. 

So, right now this isn’t really very common. But the potential here is huge because it doesn’t require expensive recycling technology and it doesn’t require fossil fuel energy or anything like that.

The problem is that almost no clothing right now is 100% compostable because a lot of clothing is made from synthetic fabrics.

And even if the fabric is natural, maybe there were synthetic dyes used, or there’s a small percentage of synthetic fiber blended in to add a stretch, or there’s elastic, or something along those lines.

But creating compostable clothing is very in line with earth’s natural circular systems. This is the direction we should be going!

There will be episodes on all four of these R’s: reuse, repair, repurpose, and regenerate in season two of the Conscious Style Podcast!

Myths of Circular Fashion

Circularity seems to be one of the biggest buzzwords in sustainable fashion today. It’s easy to see why: minimizing waste and maximizing existing resources hits on many sustainability goals.

The problem, though, is that this word is being overused and misused. So this section is dedicated to breaking down some of the myths of circular fashion.

Myth 1: Textile Recycling is the Solution for Circularity

This is one you’ll see a lot from fast fashion brands like H&M that believe that we can recycle our way out of our waste and climate crises. 

As we’ve covered earlier, recycling is a last resort option when none of the other avenues are available. It is not THE solution. Recycling still requires vast amounts of energy and other resources. Plus, most materials will lose quality each time they are recycled.

Myth 2: Buying Clothes Made From Recycled Materials is Circular

This one is similar because it again focuses on just one element of the clothing life cycle. This time it’s focusing on only the initial production.

While it can be useful to use recycled and upcycled materials for clothing, that’s not the end of the story. We also have to talk about how long that clothing is going to be used and what’s going to happen to it when the person is done wearing it.

Circularity is about the entire process; the entire life cycle.

Myth 3: Circularity Means We Can Keep Up Current Production Levels

A lot of brands, particularly at industry ‘sustainability’ conferences, are leading the industry to believe that they can keep up current rates of growth — of profit and production — simply by making it more “circular”.

But recycled materials and resale programs are not enough alone to make the system circular, let alone sustainable.

And this myth might just be the most dangerous of them all. 

One study actually found that people are more likely to use more resources when recycling is an option versus when it is not available to them.

So we really have to be careful with this greenwashing of circularity and recycling.

When fashion brands promote their collections as “circular” in an effort to keep up current rates of production — or even worse, increase them — that totally misses the point!

The biggest potential benefit of circularity is that we reduce new production. So anytime a brand is talking about circularity *without* talking about degrowth and minimizing production of new stuff, that’s greenwashing.

Final Notes About Circular Fashion

As you can see, circular fashion is a complex topic that involves many steps because it considers the ENTIRE life cycle of a piece.

It’s about degrowth or decrease in new production. It’s about considering the entire life cycle of a product during the design and production stage. It’s about extending the life of what has been produced. And it’s about responsible consideration for a piece’s so-called “end” of life.

We cannot just do one of these things. It’s all a circle and we need all of it. We can’t just recycle our way out of this mess. 

And in many ways, these steps are connected. For instance, we can’t get to degrowth if we’re not thinking about extending the life of what’s been produced. 

And the final step of responsibly repurposing or regenerating a piece is going to be very difficult if we don’t have the second step where designers are considering the full life cycle.

Circularity is not about just addressing one piece of the product life cycle — it’s about creating a continual cycle, or well, circle.

The post What Is Circular Fashion? And How Can We Get To A Circular Economy? appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.

Prefer to listen to this content instead? Tune in to the podcast version below or via your favorite podcast app.

Why Do We Need to Take Care of Our Clothes?

The linear approach of buy, wear, and dispose has left us with a massive global clothing waste problem — that amounts to one garbage truck’s worth of textiles being landfilled or incinerated every second. (Source) 

Between 2000 and 2014, the number of garments the average person purchases increased 60% — while the average garment was worn half as long. (Source) 

On the flip side of this, extending the life of a garment and buying less can reduce the footprint of our closets dramatically.

So, this article is dedicated to exploring all of the various ways — from thoughtful laundering to mending — that we can help the items in our closet last longer. After all, the most sustainable clothes are the ones we already own!

Change Your Clothing Mindset

Before diving into the nitty gritty tips and tricks to care for our clothes, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that the clothing we have in our closets is worth caring for — no matter the price of the garments!

Inexpensive fashion has reduced the incentive to handle a piece with care, let alone repair or mend that garment, but we know that this approach is wreaking havoc on our planet.  

So instead of valuing clothes at their face value — the price tag — a truly sustainable approach to fashion involves shifting our mindset to caring for all of the clothing we’ve brought into our lives. (This applies even to the clothing that we no longer want — it’s important to be mindful of how you’re discarding unwanted garments too!)

Taking some level of responsibility for each and every garment extends their life, keeps our clothing out of the landfill, and helps us develop a deeper appreciation — and therefore, greater contentment overall — with our clothing.

Wash Clothes Responsibly

We’ve all witnessed the demise of some of our favorite garments thanks to overwashing. We’ve been faced with faded colors on once-vibrant dresses, stretched out sweaters, shapeless shirts,  loose or lost buttons, damaged zippers, and shrunken blouses.

Turns out the impact of machine washing is just as harsh on our planet as it is on our clothing. Washing and drying clothing are estimated to account for 120 million tons of CO2. (Source) 

These numbers are shocking, but this is also an aspect directly in our control. The simple act of washing less — and therefore needing to dry less, too — can have a dramatic impact.

Here are some tips for washing more consciously.

Wash Less

This first tip is the easiest, but don’t let that fool you — it’s actually the most effective, too!

While items like underwear and socks need to be washed after every wear, garments like jeans, jackets, and sweaters typically need only to be washed every so often.

Get Smells Out Without Washing

One reason you may be quick to throw a garment in your washer is due to residual odor left on your clothes (smoke, spices, or even from a strong perfume).

But, my friend, a light odor on clothing also does NOT have to sentence the item to time in the laundry room or a trip to the laundromat!

There are actually a number of ways to get rid of smells sans washer, from vodka to vinegar!

Remove Stains with Ease

Similar to a faint odor, a small stain usually doesn’t always require tossing your entire garment in the wash — and it rarely necessitates some of the harsh (and toxic!) stain removal treatments on the market. 

Moreover, a stain *never* has to lead to tossing the garment into the trash bin. 

For practical tips on how to get just about any stain out, check out American Cleaning Institute’s A-Z “Stain Removal Guide” — it’s a detailed list worth bookmarking for reference later. 

Another handy resource with crowdsourced stain fighting tricks is WikiHow’s collection of Stain Removal strategies.

Some general tips to keep in mind: 

• The earlier you address the stain, the easier it is to deal with;
• Don’t forget to check the care label — if a garment is fragile and strictly dry-clean only, it might be best to take it to a professional;
• If the stain isn’t removed on the first try, go through the stain removal process again and do not put it in the dryer until the stain is gone! (The heat of the dryer could cause the stain to set in that piece for good.)

With some basic supplies, awareness of some stain “rules”, and a willingness to  do a little bit of  stain removal research, you’ll be on your way to being a spot-stick master!

Wash With Care

Though we can stretch out the time between washes, at some point the need for a good, clean wash is inevitable. There are ways, though, that we can minimize the negative impact of washing on our clothes and the earth.

When it is time to wash, wash with care. Proper care and washing can do wonders in extending the wearable life of our clothing!

Look at Care Labels

The easiest way to do this is to follow the care labels and err on the side of caution. 

Care labels are a cheat sheet of sorts letting us know the most that a garment can handle.  

They tell us if we can iron that garment safely, if a garment should be dry cleaned only (though there are some workarounds for this, see below for more), and information about the highest level of temperature that garment can withstand.

Note that it’s the highest temperatures that the garment can be washed in — garments that say “wash in warm water” can also be washed in cooler temperatures! (Source) 

Sort Out Your Laundry

Before we get into washing tips any further, let’s talk about what good garment wash care looks like before the clothes enter the washing machine — sorting!

To retain colors well, separate lights from darks. And for new colored garments, it may be worth the extra effort to hand-wash first separately the first go around.

In order to retain fabric quality, separating by texture is useful. Washing thin fabrics like your organic cotton blouse, with heavier items such as jeans, can exacerbate wear and tear of the more delicate fabrics. So, take care to further separate heavy from light fabrics for your washer loads.

Another quick tip for pre-wash prep: turning our clothing inside out before putting them in a washing machine can lengthen the life of our clothes by making sure the outside fabric of our clothing, buttons or zippers as well, won’t bear the brunt of the washing machine cycle.

Hand Wash Delicates

Items like bras, camisoles, silks or silk-like clothing, and garments or undergarments with lace or embellishments are best left out of the washing machine altogether. 

Some garment care labels will specify hand-wash only, but you can also hand-wash other pieces to protect the garment and extend its life as well.

Machine Wash in Cold Water

Washing with cooler temperatures, when possible, is preferable since the majority (90% to be exact) of the energy used by washing machines is for one simple function: heating the water. (Source) 

While there are some specific cases where hot water can be useful or necessary, if each household were to select the cold setting on their washer for four out of five wash loads, they could decrease their annual emissions by 864 pounds of CO2. (Source)

In addition to the environmental benefits, washing clothes in cooler temperatures protects the dyes on our clothes and prevents shrinkage!

Dry Sparingly

Machine dryers not only expedite the drying process, but also the wear and tear of our clothing. The high heat can be harsh on fabric, shrink our favorite tops, loosen elastics, and cause colors to fade. 

Plus, the average clothes dryer in our homes today uses more energy that most other household appliances.

In fact, Grist reported that machine dryers “can consume as much electricity as an efficient new clothes washer, refrigerator, and dishwasher combined.” (Source)

The solution is quite simple: avoid using a machine dryer for your clothing as much as possible. Line-drying, hang-drying, and laying out flat to dry are all eco-conscious alternatives that could add years of life to your clothing. 

I personally love using a collapsible multi-row drying rack! You can find them at retailers such as Target or secondhand through an app like OfferUp.

Search for Green Dry Cleaning

The first thing to note is that not all “dry clean only” items actually need to be sent to the cleaners. The Laundress has an entire collection of non-toxic products and DIY resources for cleaning (manufacturer labeled) “dry-clean only” garments, such as  silk, wool, and delicate synthetics.

For cases where an item truly must be dry-cleaned, search online for local green cleaners that don’t use toxic chemicals — most notably perchloroethylene, referred to frequently as “perc”.

If you can’t locate green dry cleaners nearby, inquire with your local cleaners to see which chemicals and methods they use. If their response concerns you, don’t be afraid to let them know — consumer demand can be a driving force for businesses to modify their operations.

Post Laundering Care

And what about after your clothes are freshly cleaned? Here are some tips for keeping those garments looking good as new!

Hang or Fold Properly

After your clothes are freshened up, it’s time to put them away. Hanging or folding garments soon after they’re washed and dried reduces wrinkles. 

Sealed garment bags can be nice for rarely-worn formal wear to keep out dust and moths. 

Other than that, it’s typically best to keep your clothes easily accessible — hanging in your closet or folded and stacked neatly in your dresser or on shelves where you have a better view of your wardrobe. 

This will not only help you with putting together an outfit in the morning but will reduce the risk of purchasing duplicates!

Another way to keep track of your clothes is to enter them all into an online “inventory” in a closet app. Learn more about that in this episode of the Conscious Style Podcast with Jess Atkins of the Stylebook app!

Smooth Wrinkles with a Steamer

While I like to think that wrinkles can give a garment — especially a beautiful pair of linen pants — their character, there are, of course, cases where you’ll want to smooth out creases and wrinkles.

An iron will usually give the most crisp result, but using a steamer is typically less time-consuming and reduces the risk of damage across a wider variety of fabrics — think wool, cashmere, and silk, anything blended with those fibers, and synthetics with similar properties — while still resulting in wrinkle-free clothing. 

Your handy steamer also gets some bonus points for being able to freshen up clothing and get rid of most smells without revving up the washing machine. 

No steamer? No problem. Hanging wrinkly garments in your bathroom during a hot shower is a well-known hack that can sometimes (though unfortunately, not always) do the trick.

Avoiding and Addressing Pilling

Conscious laundering methods, like those laid out above, can reduce or even eliminate the chance of getting pills on your favorite sweaters and other garments. 

But when the time comes that a well-worn garment does start to pill — or if you already have some sweaters with pilling — here are a few tricks of the trade:

• To remove pills easily, simply rub a pumice stone or specialized “sweater stone” on your sweater. 

• For tighter-knit sweaters, you can get an unused basic disposable razor. (i.e. nothing fancy like razors with soap or smoothing bars) or special fabric shaver to lightly shave the pills off with small strokes. 

• Roll over any remaining pills with a lint roller (look for reusable, washable ones).

Join the Repair Revolution!

Often we feel the need to discard old clothing — and then replace those items — for two main reasons: they no longer fit just right or they’re in need of repair. These issues, though, can be solved without sending our garments to the landfill. 

Learn Basic Mending Tricks

For starters, most clothing can be mended quickly. Slight damages like holes or ripped seams can be fixed with a simple thread and needle —  and, as with all things in life, by watching a few YouTube tutorials.

The most basic sewing stitch to get you started is the running stitch — this stitch is great for repairing worn hems on your trousers or sewing on patches to torn jeans. 

Some other basic hand stitches that you may want to learn to mend small snags on clothing include the backstitch, slip stitch, the catch stitch, whip stitch, and invisible stitch.

Find a Reliable Tailor or Seamstress

For some mending projects that go beyond a basic DIY — or in cases where we simply don’t have the time —  a good tailor can be an incredible resource. 

Consider finding a good seamstress or tailor that you can trust with your alteration projects. 

I’ve gone to my local dry cleaners for alterations in the past as well as a seamstress recommended to me. 

Department stores such as Nordstrom offer tailoring services and some brands, like Patagonia, Nudie Jeans, and MUD jeans offer repair services as well. 

You can also find local tailors by searching popular customer review platforms or online community marketplaces that connect service professionals with customers.

Give Your Clothes a Second Life

Finally, part of caring for our clothes means ensuring that we give them to a good home when we’re done using them. 

If the garment is in good condition, consider swapping it with a friend for something else, selling it on a peer-to-peer marketplace like Depop,or  selling it to a local consignment store or resale marketplace like ThredUP. 

If the piece is not sellable, check out how and where to recycle your clothing here.

Or, perhaps with a few small tweaks (like dyeing it a new color or shortening the hem) will turn it into something you’re excited to wear again!

If the piece is totally unwearable, see if you can cut it into pieces of fabric to use as rags for cleaning, or if the fabric can be donated somewhere else for upcycling.

And that’s a wrap to this guide to clothing care! Hope you enjoyed it. You may also want to check out this content:

• What is Sustainable Fashion?
• Plastic-Free Detergents for a Zero Waste Laundry Routine
• 16 Best Online Secondhand Stores

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The post How to Take Care of Your Clothes Sustainably appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.