Musings on the broken fashion system
What I wish everyone knew about fashion, retail and the global supply chain
Hi! Here goes! I’m not sure what exactly my “thing” is yet but I know that I miss writing, I’m building a business that is very lonely at times, and I care a lot about some seemingly tangential yet related topics in the vein of fashion, sustainability, mental health and culture (in no particular order).
I started writing this as an update to investors for my second company, Mile One. But then I went down a rabbit hole and recognized that no “very busy” investor wanted to read me on my soap box talking about why I find the whole fashion system deeply frustrating.
So, lucky you, you’re in for a ride you didn’t ask to go on. I promise that subsequent posts will be lighter and more similar to what I used to write in our weekly newsletter for my first company, Public Habit. But also maybe not? You tell me.
Imagine a world where in order to sell one sweater at full price, you have to make ten. What happens to the other nine? Well, five will sell at a discount (think end of season sales), and four will likely end up in landfills or burned. To just get that one sweater sold at full price. Guess what? That’s the fashion system today! In 2023!
I have worked in and around the fashion industry since 2008 when I took my first internship for a baby clothing company that needed help with on-the-ground quality control (QC) in China. I was studying abroad in Beijing and the Olympics were fast approaching; I wanted to stick around for the summer and needed a job. Enter this unlikely opportunity. My distant memories of this time can be summed up as: watery Qingdao beer, long drives to our factories from Qingdao to some rural town, having several photos taken with Chinese strangers on the street who were unfamiliar with seeing “laowai” (foreigners). At the factory, I would meet the factory owner and review samples of onesies and tiny, little bodysuits on behalf of a UK-based brand. It was a largely unmemorable work experience and yet, to this day, it marks an important moment in my journey in and around the fashion supply chain.
Ten years later in 2018, I left a solid career at Amazon to start a fashion brand of my own. Of course there was no real plan at the time and I certainly wasn’t a designer. But I needed a change, was curious about the world from my bubble in Seattle, Washington, and wanted to be closer to people and products again. I spent a lot of time back in China - I even got to move to Shenzhen in 2019 with my husband - and met with dozens of factories between trade shows and factory tours. I saw firsthand how factories operate, their razor-thin margins, their hyper transactional relationships with brands and retailers and the sheer amount of waste embedded in a system that has been optimized for lowest cost sourcing.
That “it takes ten sweaters to sell one” example I gave you? That’s because every major brand in the last fifty years has been exporting their production further away from home (typically Western markets), seeking out cheap labor, starting with Korea (70s), then Japan (80s), then China in the 80s-2000s and now to South East Asia, Africa and beyond. The theory was, if we can pay less for that sweater, we can make more money per unit sold. For a time it worked (kinda) because the fashion cycle was slower, brands and retailers were more consolidated and effectively set the trends of what consumers would be able to buy. But, in an era of digitally native consumers setting and dictating where culture goes at warp speed, brands are trying to keep up while continuing to source large volumes of cheap goods and then trying to sell it before consumers have moved on. But, inevitably, they don’t sell a lot of it, they have to mark it down and that uber-rich gross margin (>60%) they were excited about nets out to somewhere around 5% on a good day. It’s cray.
Long story short, my foray into building an athleisure brand turned into me launching a made-to-order business model for a line of cashmere sweaters and coats with Public Habit. I became obsessed with meeting suppliers and factories that were doing things differently and had capabilities to produce less upfront for a higher cost per unit. Higher margins for suppliers, better cash flow for me, less waste going to landfills.
That’s my mantra and I’m sticking to it.
Thanks for being here. Let’s go.