Small businesses turn to slow fashion
Competing against low-priced, fast-fashion chains like Zara and H&M, Vancouver’s small fashion retailers are gaining ground selling sustainable, ethically produced, fair-trade clothes, Jenny Lee writes.
Vancouver fashion designer Nicole Bridger learned a bitter lesson when she purchased a “profitable” Vancouver cut-and-sew factory business and realized after the fact that it was losing money. Many transactions were “off the books.”
“Just because something is made locally doesn’t mean it’s ethical and just because it’s made in China doesn’t mean it isn’t,” said Bridger whose Nicole Bridger Designs strives to make chic fashion that is environmentally and ethically conscious.
Like it or not, Vancouver’s small independent fashion retailers and manufacturers are competing with fast fashion powerhouses such as Zara and H&M, and race-to-the-lowest-price retailers like Walmart, Joe Fresh and Amazon. But while the cult of overconsumption is clearly unsustainable, fast fashion per se is not synonymous with factory worker exploitation and overseas production is not inherently unsustainable.
Zara’s extraordinary fast fashion business model famously gets new design ideas from its Spanish headquarters into its 2,000 worldwide stores as product in just three weeks. More than half of Zara’s clothing is manufactured in or near Spain and many are sewn by co-operatives of local sewers. The company is an expert in flexibility, prepping the bare bones of garments early, but postponing their transformation into a final on-trend form as late as possible. Store managers place orders and receive shipments twice a week.
Meanwhile, fashion industry publications such as Sourcing Journal are calling exploitation of workers in low-wage countries “outdated strategies” that are “mismatched” with rising Asian wages as well as the ethical beliefs and shopping habits of growing numbers of consumers. “Today, sustainability is just as important as product price and quality —maybe more,” Rick Darling of Hong Kongbased global supply chain managers Li & Fung told John Thorbeck in an article for Sourcing Journal.
Bridger is in the vanguard of Vancouver entrepreneurs championing one emerging approach to competitive survival — slow fashion, a natural extension to the slow food and slow money movements. Slow fashion champions long-lasting clothing produced sustainably with fair wages and source transparency. While the sentiment is easy to support, the ability to control costs and to persuade consumers to spend as much as 10 times more on a T-shirt is the real challenge. Here’s how three local entrepreneurs are tackling the slow fashion challenge:
NICOLE BRIDGER DESIGNS
Vancouver designer Nicole Bridger had guts, a business focus and networking skills from a young age. Shoe designer John Fluevog mentored her when she was a teenager dating his son. And when Vivienne Westwood’s London studio turned the young fashion student away in 2002, “I got half way down the block and turned around ... ‘Just give me three days to prove myself,’ ” she told them. Of course she got in.
Westwood “was going through her second bankruptcy,” Bridger said. “I saw you can be this incredible genius as a designer but you need to know business if you’re going to make any impact in the world.”
When Bridger came home, she added marketing and accounting to her fashion studies. Then, having worked at Lululemon when it was just one store, she reconnected with founder Chip Wilson in 2005 to design for and manage Oqoqo, his casual eco-wear brand. By the time Oqoqo closed a few years later, Bridger had her own wholesale fashion business in her parent’s Kerrisdale basement.
But wholesale meant paying for tradeshows, sample making and offering terms to boutiques “that end up going out of business.” Fashion stores did not yet understand “the ethical thing,” and finding both ethically and aesthetically acceptable fabric was hard. With family help, Bridger refocused in 2011 by opening a retail store in Vancouver’s upwardly mobile Kitsilano.
Wilson offered the novice advice: start with five styles, all in black, he said, “because it sells and you’ll never have to discount. He also taught me to never pay for marketing or advertising when you’re a startup. He said, ‘Just make a story worth telling.’ ”
When the Vancouver sewing factory she used came up for sale a year later, Bridger bought the 30-employee business for $80,000. It was a nightmare. Employees competed against each other, management practices were suspect. She finally closed it in late 2015.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.
Meanwhile, she moved her store to Gastown. “I’ve learned ‘Don’t put your store where they live, put your store where they shop,’ ” she said. Her 1,300-square-foot Gastown store offered lower rent, younger urban professionals with environmental and ethical beliefs — and tourists. “Where are people in the mindset to shop? When they are on vacation.” The move doubled sales “instantly,” with half of her sales to tourists. “I also learned that I’m completely capable of renovating a store for under $10,000 and designing it myself. We spent $100,000 on the first store. Totally unnecessary.”
A year after her move, Bridger is now profitable but is convinced she must scale and move most production offshore to stay in the black.
“I’m wanting to do it ethically and I want to pay people above minimum wage and a living wage in Vancouver is $22 an hour,” she said. “We will still be getting the same margins manufacturing ethically overseas compared to here, but people are being paid a fair wage.” Bridger uses low-impact dyes and as much sustainable hemp, silk, linen, modal, organic cotton and Tencel as she can find. Her designs are intended to be relevant for five to 10 years.
“All my focus is on our financials and systemizing so we can replicate,” she said. When she had the factory, 70 per cent of revenue went to payroll. Now she employs herself, a manager and one parttimer. Gross sales are $1.2 million. Online sales account for 10 per cent. She’s reduced wholesale from 30 accounts to five favourites. “We wanted partners, we didn’t just want sales.” She hopes to open 60 stores in 20 years.
Bridger’s dresses sell for around $250. A linen T-shirt is $84. Where a high-end competitor might sell polyester, she’s selling silk with bound seams. “They are getting a much bigger margin than I am.”
She believes — and hopes — enough customers will pay more for quality product. “I think we un- derestimate people’s morality and knowledge. Once you are educated to the reasons why to make certain choices, then it’s hard to turn that off. I’m in the middle of proving this hypothesis.”
Meanwhile, she’s fostering client connection by offering seminars on making soap and darning clothes. “Customers are wanting to learn this stuff. It’s a huge movement that is kind of like homesteading. It’s back to an older way of life but in a modern context.”
MY MODERN CLOSET
Chloe Popover’s take on slow fashion is My Modern Closet, an online-only consignment store she started last fall.
“I’m getting to give all those clothes a second life,” Popover said. She picks up clothes for consignment, and delivers purchases for $5. Product sells at 50 to 70 per cent off retail, consignors get 20 per cent in cash, e-transferred within 24 hours of a sale, plus a 20 per cent shop credit.
“You don’t have to buy 10 black dresses. You can buy one really good one,” Popover said. Customers can “buy second hand which I believe is slowing down the fast fashion and is a way to combat what is going on.”
She also holds pop-up consignment shops by collaborating with other community-minded businesses with retail locations, and said My Modern Closet has almost broken even.
PEEKABOO BEANS
Traci Costa started as a wholesale children’s clothing manufacturer in 2006 to create better, longer-lasting play clothes without “buttons, and snaps and fussy bits.”
She wanted pants without zippers that her daughter could pull on and off herself and fabric dyed to OEKO-TEX world safety standards.
Her wholesale product retailed for double what the stores were already carrying, but Costa’s product was made in Canada “and now all of a sudden, these boutiques had their story.”
Mind you, she sold pretty much at cost. “Pants about $45, shirts $35 to $45,” she said. “It was a longterm vision.”
But the 2008-09 recession hit her customers hard and she couldn’t afford to open her own stores. In 2011, she moved to direct sales. Costa’s 1000 “Play Stylists” are largely moms who sign on for $199, hold house parties and make a 15 to 35 per cent commission on sales.
“We knew we couldn’t compete on price point with the GapKids of the world,” she said. “With direct sales we were able to engage our target demographic — moms — as our sales force. Our clothes were no longer competing with all the other over-embellished, cheap options available that didn’t have the value our product did.”
Margins are “a wash,” but orders are “bigger than from any order I would get from a store.”
“Before we were receiving wholesale prices (half of retail), now we get retail sales and pay commission,” but it’s a more scalable and she controls the voice of her product. “By being able to have more face time and education with our customers, we can explain why our product is more value for their money and why we are different and worth purchasing one shirt over five cheap shirts.”
But in 2010, Costa stopped manufacturing in Canada.
It was “sacrifice this entire company,” or move production offshore. “We paid 20 per cent duty crossing the border, so it’s not like you’re saving a ton of money, but what happens is when we were producing here, we became a production company. All (the factory) did was cut and sew. Did you order the thread? We were so focused on building the product, we didn’t have time for anything else.”
Now, she outsources everything from sample development to pattern making and final production to the factory in China for about the same total cost, tax and duties included.
She employs 30 people who handle marketing, design, production and logistics. Peekaboo Beans now produces 100,000 pieces a year. A Joe Fresh shirt will cost $8 to Costa’s $40, but “ours isn’t going to pill and it’s built with ‘grow with me’ features.’ A pant turns into a culotte turns into a capri. Got stain, turn the reversible top inside out.”
People buy less, but they buy better, Costa said.