Buying smarter, not more

We love clothes and the cloth­ing indus­try loves us. Our predilec­tion for fash­ion and the pur­chas­es we make keep half a mil­lion peo­ple in jobs in the UK. It’s a £26-bil­lion indus­try, accord­ing to the British Coun­cil. But the sands are shift­ing in the fash­ion indus­try and there’s a grow­ing aware­ness of respon­si­bil­i­ty on both sides.

Con­sumers are cau­tious about the way the indus­try works and the wastage and poor con­di­tions under which work­ers toil to bring them the lat­est cat­walk fash­ions on the high street. Retail­ers are also wor­ried that, lured by cheap prices and abun­dant designs, we’re shop­ping our­selves into unsus­tain­able debt, par­tic­u­lar­ly at a time when coro­n­avirus is crash­ing the econ­o­my. Respon­si­bil­i­ty is the watch­word for all par­ties, whether they’re buy­ers or sell­ers.

The changes brought about in con­sumer behav­iour by the pan­dem­ic have giv­en retail­ers the abil­i­ty to under­stand bet­ter their cus­tomers’ needs and habits. It has also giv­en the indus­try time to pause and reflect on how it can help pro­mote a sus­tain­able future for all.

Fast fashion comes at a cost

Fash­ion-con­scious con­sumers can quick­ly rack up big bills buy­ing the lat­est items, all while churn­ing through their wardrobe at a wor­ry­ing rate. Retail­ers are cot­ton­ing on to the risks and help­ing con­sumers become smart shop­pers. As well as sim­pli­fy­ing and reduc­ing lines to put out whole-year col­lec­tions, rather than reg­u­lar new releas­es with the change of sea­sons, retail­ers are offer­ing shop­pers new ser­vices.

Many have part­nered with pay­ment provider Klar­na to offer buy-now, pay-lat­er ser­vices, allow­ing peo­ple to try items with­out accu­mu­lat­ing inter­est for a short time before either return­ing the gar­ment or pay­ing for it by text mes­sage. Lay­buy, a sim­i­lar scheme, works with oth­er retail­ers to reduce impulse pur­chas­ing and improve sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Oth­er busi­ness­es for­go gar­ment own­er­ship entire­ly. Com­pa­nies such as Hire Street encour­age peo­ple to try rather than buy items, rent­ing lux­u­ry fash­ion for a short time before return­ing it, instead of buy­ing a dress to sit unworn at the back of the wardrobe for 11 months of the year. Yet busi­ness-led ini­tia­tives are only part of the solu­tion as con­sumers need to change, too.

Online retail’s impact on the industry

Between 1963 and 2009, the num­ber of deliv­er­ies a day remained steady at around one for every ten peo­ple. By 2017, it shot up to 2.5 for every ten peo­ple as a result of more of us shop­ping online. More choice, low­er prices and the lure of free returns meant ecom­merce bal­looned. It was a buyer’s world and we knew it.

But untram­melled growth and a fast fash­ion econ­o­my couldn’t con­tin­ue for­ev­er. Every online deliv­ery of new clothes to offices and homes sent car­bon emis­sions ris­ing. The miles trav­elled in the deliv­ery chain com­pound­ed the issue and that’s before we even thought about send­ing back the four sizes of the same item we also ordered to ensure the right fit.

Ecom­merce has changed atti­tudes to how we buy as one in ten pur­chas­es made in stores are returned at most, com­pared to one in four online. DPD, one of Europe’s biggest deliv­ery com­pa­nies, saw the num­ber of returned items it han­dled dou­ble between 2017 and 2018.

Online shop­ping con­tin­ues to rise: inter­net sales as a per­cent­age of every­thing we buy have increased 50 per cent in a year, accord­ing to the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics. Yet con­sumer atti­tudes are chang­ing.

“We’re in a tran­si­tion where I think COVID-19 has made peo­ple stop and re-eval­u­ate every­thing,” explains Rachel Kan, fash­ion sus­tain­abil­i­ty spe­cial­ist at Cir­cu­lar Earth, a con­sul­tan­cy. This could have a major impact on the way the fash­ion indus­try responds, says Luke Smitham of Kumi Con­sult­ing. “What has worked is pres­sure from civ­il soci­ety on issues,” he says.

Demanding responsible sourcing

We’re grow­ing increas­ing­ly aware of the impact our shop­ping habits have on the plan­et and the peo­ple who live on it, and con­sumers are deter­mined to make a change. There are moves up and down the process and across the fash­ion indus­try to adapt to respon­si­ble con­sumerism, and to suit con­sumer demand for more eth­i­cal­ly sourced and envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly process­es.

One of the ways brands are try­ing to make clear­er the impact of their cloth­ing on the plan­et is by increas­ing trans­paren­cy of the sup­ply chain. Since the 2012 fire in a gar­ment fac­to­ry in Dha­ka, Bangladesh, which killed 117 peo­ple, con­sumers have sig­nalled their unhap­pi­ness at cheap clothes pro­duced in unsafe con­di­tions.

Head­lines about the plight of Uighur Mus­lims in China’s Xin­jiang province, who help sup­ply much of the world’s cloth­ing brands with cot­ton and oth­er tex­tiles, have also giv­en con­sumers pause for thought. And sto­ries about gar­ment work­ers in Leices­ter, paid less than the min­i­mum wage pro­duc­ing clothes for Boohoo, have thrown a light on the human impact of fast fash­ion.

“On the lux­u­ry fash­ion side, you can have short­er sup­ply chains with more con­trol because you’re mak­ing few­er pieces,” says Smitham. “You can go back to trace­abil­i­ty.”

But it’s easy to com­plete the paper trail while still bend­ing the rules and main­tain­ing a clean audit. What’s need­ed is the adop­tion of cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy like blockchain, which can track a cot­ton fibre from source through to man­u­fac­ture of a gar­ment.

“The con­sumer now wouldn’t know by look­ing at a gar­ment where it has come from, where the yarn is from, where the cot­ton is grown,” says Kan. “With blockchain you’d be able to know what sheep the fleece in your jumper is from.”

Embracing traceability and circularity

Com­pa­nies make some con­ces­sions to trace­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy, but they are often piece­meal. “As a con­sumer, it’s real­ly hard with­out a con­sis­tent amount of infor­ma­tion across com­pa­nies to make that deci­sion as to who you should or shouldn’t go to,” says Smitham.

Like­wise, tech­nol­o­gy can help head off issues with end­less returns and the iter­a­tion of designs before they’re even man­u­fac­tured. There’s also waste when retail­ers order sam­ples of cloth­ing in dif­fer­ent sizes before mak­ing pur­chas­es. 3D tech­nol­o­gy, which maps clothes onto dif­fer­ent sized bod­ies, can pre­vent that hap­pen­ing. Short­er sup­ply chains and tech-enabled insights can take the guess­work out of order­ing gar­ments.

“A good sea­son is gen­er­al­ly 60 to 80 per cent sell-through and the rest is incin­er­at­ed or sat at the back of the shop as dead stock,” says Kan. “Going towards some­thing more vir­tu­al, and some of the cat­walk stuff recent­ly becom­ing vir­tu­al, is a [busi­ness] mod­el.”

Per­haps the most respon­si­ble action is mak­ing the fash­ion sec­tor a more cir­cu­lar econ­o­my by reusing and recy­cling clothes. Rapanui, a fash­ion brand that set out to tack­le wastage in the 100 bil­lion items of cloth­ing bought world­wide, has expand­ed to become Teemill, an on-demand, sus­tain­able fash­ion busi­ness mak­ing new prod­ucts from recy­cled ones.

It’s a busi­ness mod­el Kan would like to see oth­ers fol­low. “Each com­pa­ny has to eval­u­ate their own brand’s way of being,” she says. “Big­ger brands will have to go to cir­cu­lar­i­ty in the first instance.”