ReMode Turns Focus on Fashion, Tech, Sustainability
The inaugural two-day conference posed questions around sustainability, financing young fashion brands, where tech is going and marketing in the digital age.
“Perfection can sometimes be the enemy of good,” said Allbirds founder and chief executive officer Joey Zwillinger, who opened the inaugural ReMode conference last week with a fireside chat alongside the event's founder Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel. “Start with something you think is best in class, and as long as you are up front with people that you are trying to make products that are authentically tied to that, you can have great success.”
ReMode gathered industry leaders and innovators at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Nov. 13 and 14 to spark ideas on new ways of investing, designing, marketing and approaching fashion, from raw materials to the in-store experience. Among the companies represented were Kering, H&M, Google, Target Corp., Tmall, Lacoste, Farfetch, Alice + Olivia, The Real Real, Westfield, Levi Strass & Co. and Shopbop, as well as leading financial investors and technology providers.
Also opening the day, Everlane founder Michael Preysman spoke of the company's infancy, when pricing transparency was the focus. “Pricing was easy to unpack and tell the story to the consumer about how much their T-shirt cost. When we started looking at which factories to work with, it got more complicated…it became about environmental transparency. In a world with a global climate crisis, people were looking to companies to lead that change.”
“The thing to remember is we don't own the supply chain, but our goal is to push them forward to find the right combination of price, design and ethics. We're auditing ourselves, then educating the consumer on things they didn't know existed,” said Preysman.
Sustainability was a common thread throughout the presentations, as retailers, technology companies, designers and influencers discussed ways to spread the message beyond the inner circle to consumers at large.
Said model Amber Valletta, founder of Master & Muse and A Squared Films: “We are all consumers and so it's a responsibility that lies on all of us. Those of us who know about the issues have an obligation to get the information out to rest of the world. We don't have the time and luxury of ‘hoping' it gets out. We need to make a priority across all businesses. We need to make this information to be really clear, concise and accessible.”
With Master & Muse, her platform that aims to bridge the gap between cuttingedge design and mindful manufacturing, Valletta educates brands about more sustainable practices. Through A Squared Films, she is producing shorts that will educate consumers about how their buying behaviors can impact the planet.
As companies like Allbirds scale, so does their power to develop new materials. For example, it is now using Tencel made from eucalyptus fibers and foam that is made with sugarcane instead of petroleum. In August, it will roll out its first carbon-negative foam, used in the the bottoms of all its sneakers.
“It's pragmatic and altruistic,” said Zwillinger. “And it's open to everyone in the industry. We've gotten calls from over two dozen companies, and the more people who use it, the lower the price will get.”
Kering, too, is sharing its technology within the industry. Laurent Claquin, president of Kering Americas, said,
“We believe we have to do it together to win.” Claquin pioneered the company's sustainable initiatives in 2007 and said its goal is to be completely sustainable by 2025.
Toward that end, the luxury conglomerate has developed a leather tanning process that uses no heavy metals, and has partnered with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton on an open-source charter model. Kering also partnered with H&M to share research costs on how to extract polyester and cotton fibers from old clothes. With its environmental profit and loss accounts, or EPNL, Kering assigns a monetary value of these initiatives on every part of the supply chain, from raw materials to stores.
“This lets us prioritize,” said Claquin. For example, we learned that 85 percent of the impact is at the extraction and processing of raw materials, so we need to go to the source for cotton, silk, gold and leather.” Innovations such as lab-created diamonds and stem-cell-generated leather have come to the fore as a result.
New business models, too, such as rentals and memberships, have thrived.
Rati Levesque, chief merchant and cofounder of The Real Real, talked about the Sustainability Calculator, which will launch next year. “We developed it with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, as a way to see our impact on the environment. Since 2012, we've offset [the equivalent of] 65 million miles of car and greenhouse gasses.”
The Real Real's partnerships with Stella McCartney and Neiman Marcus also help grow the circular economy by encouraging people to consign by offering money back to spend at Stella or Neiman's.
“You don't always have to reinvent the wheel,” said actress Rosario Dawson, who founded the artisanal fashion brand Studio One Eighty Nine with Abrima Erwiah, which recently won the CDFA Lexus Fashion Initiative for Sustainability. The two sat down with CFDA president and ceo Steven Kolb to discuss ways to disrupt the status quo.