Sustainable can be fashionable for brands

“Yes I’m very afraid,’ admits Moussa Doumbia. ‘Sometimes I can’t sleep.’ Moussa grows cotton as a cash crop in Mali. He lies awake at night wondering whether he will be able to afford medicine to treat the malaria of himself and his two youngest children, just three and five years old. The three tonnes of cotton Moussa produces gives him an annual income of $322 less than $1 a day.

‘The cotton price is not enough for farmers to cover our needs including school fees and health,’ he says.

So Moussa also farms corn, peanuts, beans and rice to feed his 10-member family. He breeds cattle, sheep and oxen which he sells in dire emergencies. He has to rely on occasional handouts from his two brothers who work abroad one in Cte dIvoire and the other in Spain. And still it’s not enough. “I don’t want my children to be cotton farmers,” he explains. “Because they will have no future.”

Sustainability starts with farmers

Cotton farmers are the invisible foundation of the fashion industry. Transparency and traceability are now key buzz words in the industry, yet companies rarely delve deep enough into their supply chains to have any direct involvement with the suppliers of this raw material.

But ignoring cotton farmers ignores the future of fashion. The downward pressure of the clothing supply chain and the obsession with cheap fast fashion comes at a cost not only to farmers but to the industry itself.

Much of global cotton supply is grown by 35-50 million small-scale cotton farmers in developing countries, many in least developed countries. Like Moussa, most live below the poverty line, vulnerable to low and fluctuating prices lower than their costs of production, dependent on ginners and middle men.

Cotton production in developing countries has a smaller environmental footprint and costs less. Most cotton cultivation in West Africa is rain-fed, giving it with a much lower water footprint than industrialized farming. Meanwhile, it costs only US$ 30 cents to produce a pound of cotton in Benin versus US$ 68 cents in the United States. Yet it is the cotton farmers in regions like West Africa and India who suffer the most from low global cotton prices and underinvestment.

Transparency and Traceability

It will be impossible to forget that the fashion and textiles industry was rocked by the second largest industrial disaster in history during 2013. The Rana Plaza factory collapse took the lives of nearly 1,200 garment workers in Bangladesh and forced the apparel and textiles sector to put the lens on the way clothing is made.

It took weeks for some major global retailers to determine whether their clothes were made by those factories in the Rana Plaza building. A few companies were literally scrambling to figure out what contracts they had with whom, where, for what products and for how long a business relationship lasted.

Considering one retailer alone might source from thousands of factories at a time and tend to drop and add new suppliers within the year, months or even weeks, it becomes a challenge for a company to know exactly whom they are working with at any given time.

And that’s just on the surface level the first tier. What became evident after Rana Plaza is that some companies didn’t have contracts with the factories operating in the building yet clothing with their brand labels were found in the wreckage. Brands had contracts with factories that may have been illegally sub-contracting out work to unchecked factories in Rana Plaza. Unfortunately, this type of ‘non-compliance’ is common.

It’s become obvious that a lack of adequate supply chain transparency and traceability is putting the entire industry at risk and making it extra difficult to respond quickly when things do go wrong.

And the risk increases as you dive deeper into supply chains, beyond that first tier. When a company tries to look at the other stakeholders in its supply chain the mills, the spinners, the dyehouses, cotton growers, etc. the water gets even murkier. A recent study suggests that non-compliances increase 18% in the second tier and 27% in the third. In other words, less visible suppliers are often failing to meet social and environmental standards. Fashion companies simply cannot afford to not know, or even further not understand, what’s happening across a supply chain from fibre to final product.

For 2014, transparency and traceability is going to be top of the wider fashion and textiles industry agenda.

What we mean by transparency and traceability has aptly been defined by journalist Robb Young as “the disclosure of information relating to material sources, manufacturers and other suppliers in order for all stakeholders, including end consumers, to have a complete and accurate picture of the ethical and environmental impact of a product.”

 

The Future of Textiles is Transparent and Sustainable

 

The good news is that a shift towards ethical and sustainable business for fashion and textiles is happening and at a seemingly faster pace and more seriously than ever before.

Fashion gets personal with blogs

There was a time when the internet was used to exchange documents and to read up.

As the time passed, it has became a tool to communicate with, shop, influence people and even write online journals. When blogging started as part of an internet activity, it was more of one way communication. Then, interactive features were added making blogs more potent than ever. Readers’ comments on blogs helped spread the word from the horse’s mouth. Blogging is an important activity now, with popular bloggers influencing politics, fashion and every other sphere of society.

Fashion blogs have especially become a way to increase sales, understand customer sentiment and demand, improve product quality and understand future trends for both the buyers and brands. The addition of facilities like uploading photographs, viewers’ comments and queries, as well as expert opinions on a series of topics have opened up a new interactive platform for bloggers.

Strong hold on audience

In the past, fashion magazine editors, super models, designers and movie stars represented and influenced the fashion world. The modern world of fashion has evolved and it takes inspiration from everywhere – from casual street styles to elegant elite designs. Thus, the role of fashion bloggers who have a huge impact on what customers buy has become essential for new and old brands alike. Some fashion bloggers who started blogs as a hobby have made a full-fledged career out of it. It is not the formal degree that makes bloggers prominent, but it is the number of followers who read the blogs and then decide to buy their clothes.

Popular magazines have even carried editorials by bloggers as acceptance to change the scenario. Margaret Zhang of Shine by Three has done an editorial for Elle fashion magazine, while continuing with her blog and attending University lectures in Australia. According to professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, Ari Lightman, “Some of the most successful bloggers use social channels for outreach and awareness. They understand the notion between popularity and influence – who is influential versus who’s popular. They will gauge that accordingly.”

Apart from the transition that the fashion industry has gone through, customers have also changed in terms of expectations. Two-way communication is the key to building customer loyalty and bloggers have an advantage of easily building a rapport with their followers. Bloggers, these days, freely post snapshots of events and parties, which help them earn more hits and followers. And though many magazines do not like the presence of bloggers at fashion events, some magazines like Lucky have started embracing the power of the bloggers. During New York Fashion Week September 2014, magazines organised special events for bloggers. Also, several fashion and lifestyle brands favour bloggers over magazines because of higher rates of engagement and buying.

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