Sustainability Doesn't Sell
Tiffanie Darke I 10-10-24
But Sustainable Brands Do - If They’re Clever.
By Tiffanie Darke, author of What to Wear and Why, BOARD Member, fashion consultant and author of the Substack It’s Not Sustainable.
If you are a fashion company engaged in the business of making clothes, you’ll have noticed a problem. About a third of what you make is not even reaching the customer (McKinsey), and the materials that do less harm to the planet (natural, organic) cost you a whole lot more than synthetics or semi synthetics. Meanwhile, your consumer is beginning to ask questions about your compliance in the unwritten contract we have with the natural world. Only - sustainability doesn’t sell.
Touring my recent book around different rooms, from universities and colleges to private shopping salons and town halls, what struck me was the hunger for information. Everyone was engaged in the conversation about how we could be more responsible consumers, but didn’t know which brands to trust, whether to buy ‘recycled’, or if second hand was ‘ok’.
I come from the UK where audiences tend to know more, and they are a bit bored of it, tbh. If I’m buying a beautiful item of clothing it’s because I really want it. It makes me look hot, feel sophisticated, confers power. I’m not buying it because it saves a few trees. People will only buy things if they love them. Desire comes first. Stop lecturing.
Smart CMOs know this. All the headway US business has made in the circular fashion business has been because the proposition is different - it’s not about sustainability. The rental market is more advanced because Rent the Runway showed everyone how they could get catwalk clothes at a fraction of the cost. Pickle (now joined in New York by the UK’s By Rotation), lets Gen Z rent out their wardrobe for $20 a Friday night pop. Veja makesmake cool sneakers and they’ll mend them for you in store - and any other shoes you’ve got that are broken. The audience aren’t doing it because it’s good for the planet. They are doing it because it makes sense.
Particularly convincing, is the brand Reformation. Early out the circularity gate, it was founded in Los Angeles in 2009, retailoring vintage clothing. By 2013 they were making their own clothes and by 2015 they had offset the company’s entire footprint. By 2017 they were publishing sustainability reports. Throughout all this, though, the product remained the thing. Mostly, very appealing dresses, which is how customers find them, because they have a wedding, or special event. For that they are likely to spend a little more, so the premium that comes with responsible sourcing is a spend the customer is willing to make. Because the party is special, not the trees.
Reformation
Once they had a community, next came denim - specifically, water-saving denim made with organic, regenerative, and recycled cotton blends. They are not competing in price with Zara, but they will tell you on the label (in small print) they have done the homework so you don’t have to. Their stores are sparsely merchandised and fitted out luxuriously. You’re in a different world, and it feels good. I found them a few years ago when I was looking for a loafer with exactly the right amount of chunk. Reformation’s was the shape I was looking for, so I went in store to try them on. Super comfy. And although not cheap ($300ish), not silly money either. I bought them because the design and the price were right and two years later they are not even scuffed. Quality matters.
Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s Chief Sustainability Officer has possibly got the best CSO job in fashion, because she gets to do it all. “We started thinking, what if you made new styles but you weren't using new materials?” she gushes, (she speaks very fast, like her brain is so full she needs to get it out in case it explodes). “How do you not use net new or first generation materials? Or start making sure that we have a textile to textile recycling solution for everything that we put out in the world?”
Reformation
Remarkably, Reformation is a Private Equity owned business (Permeira), and not many people have nice things to say about PE. PE tends to buy the brand, strip the assets, take the money and run. Not in this relationship. Kathleen is allowed to run riot with circularity models “because they know that’s our point of difference. As long as we’re delivering on our core product, which we are, they’re happy to let us run with it.”
Circularity is not all they are up to, however. “There's lots of other things that are going on under the hood, like how do we design out waste to begin with? How does that affect our inventory planning? 30% of garments never make it to the customer because of our clunky merchandising and planning models. Now we’re working with our teams to design things that can be disassembled.” So when you over produce, you can take the product apart and start again.
How much of this does the customer actually care about? “Awareness of our sustainability efforts amongst our customers is still quite low. But we don't want to be too in your face for a customer that's like, ‘Come on, I'm just here to buy a dress, I didn't ask for a chemistry lesson’. You’ve got to balance it. All this stuff we do, we don't necessarily want it to be the reason someone buys. We just want it to be foundational, part of the value proposition to a customer. The hang tag on our cashmere is ‘You can feel good’ - it feels good and you know, that’s the vibe.”
Reformation is commercial proof you can be a successful fashion brand and have sustainability at the core of what you do. To those brands that have gone bust recently citing sustainability as an unworkable business model, Kathleen has this to say: “I don't think they’re missing their numbers because of their sustainability commitments. It's management decisions or they're overextending and have too big an inventory. Can we call it mismanagement not sustainability, please? Because you're really hurting the cause. It's been really challenging to watch brands put up the green flag and say, ‘That's why we can't scale this.’
If you’re an activist, Reformation is ticking a lot of boxes. They are committed. For years “we were engaging in the degrowth and overconsumption conversation and asking, ‘what does this mean for a brand that makes new clothing?’” In the end, they decided a successful business model with circularity at its heart, that minimises waste as best it can, was a better offer to the world than not making anything at all.
Sustainability doesn’t sell. But sustainable brands can - and do.
Adapted from Tiffanie’s Substack, you can find the original article here.
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