Me, The Fashionista.

My apparent foray into the fashion industry has not been a dramatic rift in my timeline as it may appear, but more a continuation of over a decade of providing consultancy, design and manufacturing services to international Brands & Manufacturers; from the traditional segments such as: jewelry, watches, handbags, footwear & cosmetics to the more niche and burgeoning segments of the fashion industry such as: interior design, lifestyle & hospitality.

With my engineering cap on, the intent of my effort was always to shepherd a highly lucrative industry, yet extremely polluting, into adopting advanced manufacturing methods and business strategies to enable highly sustainable manufacturing frameworks such as just-in-time, made-on-demand and made-to-measure to deliver increased value to consumers, while effectively contributing to them transitioning into becoming a waste-free industry.?

Throughout this journey, the biggest and most consistent hurdle to adoption was, and still is, “who will pay for this extra value?”... fair feedback, let’s put the fashion industry in context.

The pecking order

Due to the sheer size of the industry (as all 8.4 billion of us have clothing), the fashion industry, much like industries of the same scale (i.e. automotive and aerospace), is intrinsically and extremely cut-throat and penny conscious.??

Effectively, Manufacturers are being pressured by Brands to be good: to consistently improve on sustainability, environmental impact, employment practices, working conditions, supply chain transparency, product quality, production throughput & efficiency, while also requiring them to be cheap: to offer consistent reduction in their per-unit pricing year after year.?

As per-unit pricing is the only factor Brands will never turn a blind eye to, Manufacturers know that any increase in price that cannot be specifically attributed to a customer request is deemed detrimental to their business prospects; thus incentives for independent change towards more sustainable practices are near non-existent, with the exception of those changes who lead to cost reduction that is.??

On the brand side, Brands are sandwiched between their shareholders pressuring them to infinitely increase market size and revenue, while infinitely reducing expenditure and inventory risk; and their consumers who need to constantly be dazzled & wooed with new & instantly available products, to be ahead of the latest trends all while being environmentally sustainable yet equally affordable as the unsustainable homolog, or risk losing them to that Brand that does.

So who foots the bill?

The perfect compromise

All this said, and profitability aside, there is a general consensus across the mid to high-end segment that the industry must improve, and many changes are being put in place to address many key issues plaguing the industry.?

Digital sampling, to name one, is one key industry disruptor that is universally accepted as directly eliminating tons, and tons, and tons… and tons of “let me see what it looks like” instantly discarded sample products.?

Another of these positives changes is the shift to a Test-React-Replenish (TRR) business model, which is to be industry’s cutting edge effort to address over-production in mass manufacturing scenarios.

Under this Test-React-Replenish business model, Brands,?

• Test the market with a limited run (i.e 300 pcs) of a new product, captures market feedback and size the market for it with very low exposure to inventory risk;?
• React by adjusting their product accordingly and seeding a slightly larger run (i.e 600-800 pcs) to validate the market, then?
• Replenish stocks in even larger runs (i.e 1000-2000 pcs) until the market no longer yields any demand for it, such as sales tapering off or the launch of a new collection or season.

This model is extremely successful with both Brands and Manufacturers, as it provides brands with extreme flexibility to launch new products and to keep producing products until the market yields no more sales for it while mitigating their inventory risk and the potential deadstock brands fear the most; for Manufacturers the business model is a step away from the traditional super-large-volume of the past, however it allows them to tap into a higher value brand segment with the ability to accept a higher than super-large-volume per unit prices.

On the sustainability front, sadly all unsold stocks still go through the same end of life cycle: first undergoing discounts and clearance sales, then being handed over to liquidators and eventually purged from existence by being burnt or thrown in landfills. However, as the run sizes are trending downwards (we can even find “reasonable” production for lots as small as 50pcs in some cases), the amount of waste produced is also trending downwards, hence why the business model is so successful with all the industry’s stakeholders.

The unintentional consequence

You might have noticed over the course of the last few years that seemingly everyone, and their cousins, are launching their own brand or product line.?

Granted there is a growing “Side-Hustle” trend compensating for the miserable employment conditions, poor salaries and the overall instability & uncertainty of the employment market.

However, the ease of launching a Brand and producing products is directly related to Manufacturers embracing this new business model and adjusting their business & operations processes to effectively lower their minimum order quantities while remaining competitively priced, in turn becoming Emerging Brand friendly.?

Why do Emerging Brands rock?

To me, Emerging Brands are instrumental to transforming the fashion industry into becoming an environmentally sustainable industry; and we should only be buying from Emerging Brands if we can afford to! This is not just for socio-economic reasons of decentralising the flow of money away from the 1% and empowering young entrepreneurs, but for the environmental impact Emerging Brands enable individuals to make with every purchasing decision.

To put in context, Established Brands are what I like to call “generation trend chasers”, their efforts are focused on capturing market share in major current generation-sized trends on the market. Their products are designed to satisfy 85% of their target consumer segments. They think big and operate very effectively at a macro level of the market, and thus are often too big to adjust to the rapid changes in the market and micro trends briefly popping up.?

Emerging Brands on the other hand, are what I like to call “persona driven”, where their products are designed & created to meet a specific need, solve a specific problem for a specific type of individual: a narrowly constructed archetype of the ideal consumer, usually rooted by people in their community and within their social reach. Ultimately building branded communities, converging like-minded consumers around their values, purpose and products.?

This proximity to the consumer enables Emerging Brands to become, if they choose to, infinitely more in tune with their consumers, and for some at an almost individual transaction level, and throughout the entire life of each unit of their product.?

Combined with the flexibility & agility that comes from operating a leaner organisation, Emerging Brands are also able to quickly, if not instantly, react to micro market shifts. Creating the ideal condition to take leadership of the industry, to roll out new business practices, to integrate new technologies, introduce new materials, or even act at the bedrock of the industry by taking responsibility for the full life-cycle of their products, or introducing new product ownership models, something Established Brands can only dream of ever doing.

Ultimately, making Emerging Brands the most effective instruments to improve sustainability and address the environmental impact of the fashion industry, and this eagerly and happily done hand-in-hand with their consumers, and at a higher price point.

Are we there yet?

Although there has been a huge leap forward when it comes to sustainability and accountability in the fashion industry, we are nowhere near a zero-waste world, and this for the simple fact that Brands still need to manufacture products with hope of a 100% sell-through rate future; in other words that no single product unit manufactured goes unsold (or gets returned).

Unfortunately this will never happen, as it is simply impossible to exactly size market demand for a specific product, let alone size a market for specific colour-ways or sizes, and even less so for a specific colour-way in a specific size… consequently an average of 30% of products made go unsold no matter what, making overproduction one of the key problems to solve to instil real change in the industry.

What am I doing about it?

So what I’m trying to solve at the moment (amongst other things), is how to increase the run size accuracy of the Test-React-Replenish model, to achieve, and perhaps eventually guarantee, a 100% sell through rate for every production run made.

I believe better data, better access to data and better tools to interpret this data is vastly insufficient for this purpose, that to accurately size a production run, and achieve a 100% sell through rate, consumers must be fully integrated in the inner workings of the fashion ecosystem and have them enlisted as active and conscious participants in shaping a Brand’s assortment and having them commit their intentions even before products are manufactured, effectively scaling the made-on-demand to become the industry underpinning business model for mass production.

Coincidentally, on February 18th, I received a Linkedin message from Tatiana Alexa , CEO of Sangrove | Impact Shopping? , and I read “transforming consumer behaviours from impulse to impact, from impulse-buyers to impact-buyers” for the first time, fast forward a few weeks I’ve joined the board of Sangrove and spent every free minute since supporting her leadership in creating a future free from overproduction fashion waste, because Sangrove brings to market exactly this value proposition.

So what’s Sangrove?

Sangrove is a SaaS to empower Brands in operating under a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) “mass pre-sell” business model in a Test-React-Replenish market engagement strategy, effectively allowing them to deliver products through sustained on demand production throughout the entire product sales cycle, capturing every sale the market yields without ever over-producing unnecessary inventory that could potentially lead to waste.?

At its root, Sangrove is an assortment planner who’s Brand’s SKU (styles, colourways and sizes) data is driven by direct early purchasing commitments from end-consumers, as conscious effort on their part to both support the Brands they love and to help the fashion industry solve its overproduction problem. This early integration of the end-consumers in the assortment planning phase empowers Brands to not only improve their production SKUs forecasting abilities, but also facilitate their ability to engage in continuous sustainable manufacturing practices.

This disruptive value Sangrove creates sits exactly between the Manufacturer’s email requesting quantity confirmation for styles, colourways and sizes of a production run, and the Brand’s reply confirming these numbers.?

Whereby, Sangrove not only helps Brands determine these precise production numbers, but also ensures them that 100% of these units have been sold and consumers are waiting for them; effectively eliminating inventory risk, solving production financing and minimising production waste.

How does it work ?

Sangrove is able to report precise production numbers by enabling brands to perform sales aggregation through a series of time-bound consumer engagements (let's call them Campaigns). These Campaigns enable Brands to pre-sells products, where at the end of each Campaign the details of these pre-sold products (styles, colourways and sizes) are then used to confirm a production run with their Manufacturer.

These Campaigns are defined by time, during which the Brand’s objective is to capture the necessary sales to meet the minimum order quantities of a manufacturer to trigger a production run for the specific styles, colourways and sizes sold, or to capture sufficient market insight to make an improved forecast of their production needs.?

Whereby on the conclusion of these Campaigns, those successful are directly sent to production. While the unsuccessful ones, the Brand is prompted the option to introduce inventory risk to capture the sale (and potentially creating waste) or refund the consumers with thanks and gratitude for their support.?

We call that Impact Shopping?, and it’s a conscious effort to shift consumers away from impulse buying and sway them to make a positive environmental impact with every purchasing decision. This, by collectively and consciously choosing to stop overproduction and prevent its associated CO2e (the gasses that significantly contribute to global warming) from ever being emitted, hence the saying: from impulse to impact.?

Where does Impact Shopping? fit a Brand’s e-commerce?

Integrating the Impact Shopping? to a consumer facing brand.com’s e-commerce is done through one of two ways:

• Plug-n-Play, such as brand.com/impactshopping, where a brand can create a dedicated Impact Shopping? experience of their site, and be instantly live and empowered to feature all of their Brand’s products made under the Impact Shopping? made-on-minimum-order model
• Tight integration to the Brand’s e-commerce platform (i.e. Magento, Woocommerce, Shopify, etc), where Impact Shopping? specific transaction data is sent (from i.e. Shopify) to Sangrove for management and reporting purposes (this is usually the chosen option for larger Brands and retailers).

Why should Brands use Sangrove instead of doing it on their own?

The convenience of the SKU and the production run management aside, transitioning the fashion consumer from being an impulse buyer fuelled by instant gratification to a conscious consumer willing to compromise by slightly delaying gratification to save the planet is a collective effort that no single Brand can achieve on their own.?

In addition, Sangrove is introducing several high value-adding initiatives to spearhead this transition to conscious consumerism, for consumers yearning to gain privileged access to new, never before made, sustainable and responsibly manufactured products, including Impact Shopping? cross-selling events, an all-encompassing impact loyalty program, integration with the sustainability ratings systems, and more… and with more details to come on these in future posts.

Are you ready to lead the change?

Sangrove is soft-launching on Earth Day 2023 (April 22nd), and whether you’re a conscious consumer or a sustainable fashion brand, there’s a place for you there. Visit www.impactshopping.com/sell to find out more.

Get in touch!

As always, if you have any questions or would like a great chat, just reach out!