👗 Reformation, Fashion Sustainability Hero?
The fashion label Reformation stands for a sustainable conscience when shopping for clothes. What's behind it? My analysis including 3 big learnings about marketingstrateg and sustainability.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
Fast fashion is a problem.
And I was part of it.
Most of the clothes we buy are neither good for the planet nor for the people who make them.
10% of global Co2 emissions come from the fashion industry. That's more than all flights and shipping worldwide combined.
A single jean consumes 3,781 liters of fresh water in production.
And every second, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles is incinerated or sent to landfill, while the textile industry produces up to 20 percent of the world's industrial wastewater - mainly due to dyeing processes.
Our love of new clothes costs us the nature in which we often want to wear them.
Brands overproduce goods worth 500 billion dollars every year, and at the end of each season around 12% of clothing remains unsold. A large proportion of these unsold products end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which now covers 1.6 million square kilometers in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California.
“Most people don’t realize that those items in their wardrobe create about 10 percent of global carbon emissions and cause other environmental damage. We need to raise awareness of the carbon in our closets, and, through education and industry measures, ensure sustainable fashion – rather than fast fashion – becomes the toast of our catwalks.”
Linda Freiner, Chief Sustainability Officer at Zurich Insurance Group
I bought a lot of (cheap) clothes from fast fashion giants like Zara and was sometimes on the lookout for new clothes on a weekly basis. A lot of my WhatsApp conversations with my brother were about the fashion bargains we could get hold of.
👀 Can sustainable clothing be sexy?
But when I started working in marketing for Greenpeace at the end of 2017, I realized for the first time how my own consumer behavior contributes to the fact that our summers are getting hotter and hotter and other people are suffering because of how I buy clothes.
Since then, I rarely buy clothes. And when I do, I only buy from companies that adhere to strict sustainability criteria and have a positive impact on their employees and production chains.
It wasn't easy in 2017 and it felt like there were very few “cool” brands. If I didn't want to conform to the clothing cliché of an eco, I had to spend a lot of time looking for trendy items of clothing.
Quickly I realised how “spoiled” I was from the sheer endless, simple and cheap offer of fashion giants I was. Something that fashion designer Katharina Reuschel also observes:
“Unfortunately, we consumers have been spoiled by fast fashion giants and their marketing over the last few decades. We want something new all the time, and as often as possible. So it has to be cheap. We have forgotten how to appreciate things and keep them as long as possible. That's why it's difficult to get customers interested in products that are genuinely fair and sustainably produced. The much higher price is often a deterrent.
But customers actually have the power to bring sustainability into the product range.”
And even if the offer for sustainable clothing is much bigger and sexier in 2024 - from Nudie Jeans to Veja shoes or underwear from Dedicated - many customers and companies struggle with finding the right way to communicate higher prices.
Especially one thing was hard to come by:
Beautiful and sustainable women's fashion that can be worn on the catwalk, at weddings or in a business context.
Enter: Reformation.
🥈 Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We’re #2.
This headline is the slogan of the sustainable fashion brand Reformation, which produces stylish and environmentally friendly clothing.
It is characterized by the use of recycled materials, environmentally conscious production methods and transparency in communicating its ecological impact, thus combining fashion and sustainability.
Compared to the super brands I have analyzed here (Apple, LEGO, Patagonia), Reformation is still very young, but has already built an amazing brand.
Reformation was founded in 2009 by Yael Aflalo in Los Angeles, originally as a vintage boutique before she started designing her own sustainable clothing. Aflalo recognized the enormous environmental impact of the fashion industry and decided to take a different path. Since then, Reformation has specialized in creating fashion that is both trend-conscious and eco-friendly.
If you want to read more about the brand's initiatives, I recommend the company's sustainability page, which is very in-depth and engaging.
I would like to focus here on the brand itself and how it has become a pioneer in sustainable fashion with a clever marketing strategy.
There are 3 particularly exciting aspects that we can learn from.
1️⃣ Coolness meets environmental awareness
2️⃣ Transparent & Purpose-Driven Marketing
3️⃣ E-commerce with enthusiasm
Let's go!
