KATIE TAGUE

VP DENIM MARKETING AND SALES ARTISTIC MILLINERS

Artistic Milliners and myself believe that investment in education is essential as leading partners in the industry. The path the denim industry must take is getting back to investment in team education. That could mean opening travel to manufacturing areas for a wider array of the cross-functional teams involved in denim product, allowing for experience-based learning, or it could be sponsoring education credits for employees to take coursework at universities, potentially providing access to sustainable/technologically progressive learning. Designers and PD teams are often the catalyst for how a product is made in bulk, and if they do not know how to design with sustainable methods at the outset, the critical decisions may stay conventional. So by educating these stakeholders, the result would hopefully be to see more sustainability come from the front-end designs.