31–40 of 294 posts
Forever21 went into reorganization bankruptcy because they were not “fast enough”!
That’s lunacy. Make things that last, in other words durable. Make them timeless. Bigger upfront investment, lower total cost. Lower impact on environment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the industries are competing to be the one by which you display your worth to society. The order as I see it is: House, Car, Clothes, Phone. Jewelry goes in there somewhere. Each of these products is trying to convince you of their value, excess value really, so you will spend your money on them, yet the expense of the product isn't worth much. You need a house to protect you from the weather and other people. Af…
I would argue the issue with clothing is the opposite: you can buy very cheap clothes now. H&M,Zara,C&A,Terranova etc all allow you to get a t-shirt, skirt, dress or whatever for ten bucks. It's cheap synthetic and won't last long but who cares, you paid ten bucks for it. And so each season you buy 3-4 new ones...
That's interesting. I was thinking about this a lot over the past 2-3 weeks. The sheer amount of clothing lying in all the shops across the world. Talk a walk into any Macy's / Bloomingdales / Hudsons Bay and count the number of items of clothing. Then multiply that across that one store's chain of shops. Then realize there are multiple chains like that. Then realize there are multiple stores not in chains. Then real…
Seems like we need to bring back "Make Do and Mend": https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/large106365.html
It comes back to a thought I've had in mind for a while about margins.
Margins are often set as a multiple of material cost. 10x, 100x, something like that. That rather large multiple handles the materials obviously, but also manufacturing, shipping, QA, marketing, overhead, etc.
To make a price competitive product, you minimize your material cost and then use that multiple to set price.
The problems lies in that if you use 2 cent nails instead of 1 cent nails, everything upstream does not double in price. There would be a small increase in cost-of-capital, and other losses related directly to the merchandise, but many many things aren't related at all.
When your product is all the way at the bottom of the quality,price bracket, doubling your materials cost doesn't double your actual marginal cost and shouldn't double your price, but so often it does and stupid quality decisions are made which results in it being very difficult to find decent products.
You end up having to pay super premium quality prices to get things designed and built as they reasonably should be. Or you end up paying hundreds of dollars so the one part that matters is up to spec when the actual difference in cost of that one part was maybe two or three dollars.
So only 15% of textiles make it into someones home or office and doesn't get thrown out. Where is the waste? I assume it is 1) Unsold stock, 2) Unusable material during manufacturing, and 3) Consumers throwing clothing away in the first year of ownership.
Could we reduce waste most significantly by moving to on-demand clothing manufacturing?
We really need a better industry around re-use of essentially everything. Let's say I need some X. Last week I bought a base layer because it's getting cold here. I can order, or buy in a store, a brand new X trivially. I don't actually need a brand new X. A used X would do me just fine. But the difficulty in doing so is ridiculous in comparison. Cottage industry eBay stuff (that you have to order online) vs. an enti…
A crappy shirt or dress can’t get upcycled or recycled whatever. It ends up in a dump and people need to buy new fashionable stuff.
Movies, TV shows, celebrities and currently [social media] influencers are the ones creating this demand, sometimes with their own overpriced crappy brands.
We really need a better industry around re-use of essentially everything. Let's say I need some X. Last week I bought a base layer because it's getting cold here. I can order, or buy in a store, a brand new X trivially. I don't actually need a brand new X. A used X would do me just fine. But the difficulty in doing so is ridiculous in comparison. Cottage industry eBay stuff (that you have to order online) vs. an enti…
What about thrift stores or organizations like Goodwill? Those places have lots of secondhand clothes, houseware, and small appliances. You might have trouble finding a used A/C in the middle of July, and you might have to try a few locations to find what you're looking for, but it's less trouble than plenty of stuff that people do to be more eco-friendly.
>85% of all textiles go to the dump each year So only 15% of textiles make it into someones home or office and doesn't get thrown out. Where is the waste? I assume it is 1) Unsold stock, 2) Unusable material during manufacturing, and 3) Consumers throwing clothing away in the first year of ownership. Could we reduce waste most significantly by moving to on-demand clothing manufacturing?
But seriously if I was to explore finding a personal style that I could wear as my day to day work/life “uniform”, where to look, where to source from. Are there any companies focussed around this?