Tag: Africa

You can’t answer the question, “what is ethical fashion” without looking at the process of cutting, sewing and finishing goods. You need to ask complex questions like, who are the people that make my clothing and are they working in a safe environment where they are being paid fairly? The apparel supply chain is very complex and it’s rare that you can pick up a t-shirt and know exactly where it was made and if the people who made it are making fair wages.

As consumers become more aware of working conditions and as brands are starting to cater to these customers, the intricacies and importance of ethical manufacturing have come to the forefront of many discussions. One organization driving change is Wildlife Works in Kenya. They’ve seen ups and downs and have watched the industry grow and develop since they were founded almost 20 years ago.

Wildlife Works approached apparel manufacturing as a market driven solution to their conservation efforts, resulting in the world’s only carbon neutral, fair trade factory protecting wildlife. When they started the facility in 2000 they were way ahead of the curve and had to work hard to create a market for their product. Now they are seeing big name fashion conglomerates like Kering and fast fashion brands like H&M engaging in sustainability practices.

I spoke with the Marketing and Creative Director of Wildlife Works, Joyce Hu, who oversees operations for the apparel manufacturing facility in Kenya, as well as overall messaging and branding. She told me about how Wildlife Works began and how it’s evolved over time in the rapidly changing fashion landscape.

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Can you tell me a little bit about how Wildlife Works was founded and how you got involved with the organization?

The company was founded back in 1998 by Mike Korchinsky. Before then, he had a very successful consulting firm, working with clients from fortune 500 companies. He had an opportunity to go on safari in Kenya, and while he was there, saw a cycle of violence between the poachers, rangers, and community that was caused by the lack of jobs. The community needed jobs and a lot of the existing organizations weren’t filling that need. Because of this unemployment, poaching and deforestation were happening at a high rate.

He had a vision to create a market based solution for conservation, to combat unemployment. In 2000 he set up a factory. He focused on apparel manufacturing since sewing is a low skill job that people can be trained to do where there is very little job opportunity. Also, a lot of the communities had a sewing background already. He started with 10 seamstresses.

I connected with Wildlife Works in 2006 and thought the brand was amazing. I ended up helping them produce a fashion show for World Environmental Day. Then I went off to pursue other opportunities and got back in touch with them in 2009, when they were on hiatus after the recession. Mike was getting more involved with REDD+ and carbon offsetting and was starting to gain a lot of momentum. Through that, he met a lot of great customers and investors and hired me when a big investment came through. I was hired to take on the factory for a relaunch of the brand, manage the factory from product development and production management to marketing and branding.

What was it like to relaunch the brand, was the market ready for the product?

We first relaunched with graphic tees and trendier silhouettes and we did that for a few years. It was a time when fast fashion was really dominating the fashion market, and we were doing things so differently with logistics and manufacturing. The wholesale market was so different then. We didn’t have a million dollars to put into marketing, so we switched gears and moved to doing private label production for brands. That’s how we are able to support ourselves, doing private label with sustainable brands. That’s what we’ve focused on for the past years. We’ve tied our brand to movements like Fashion Revolution and brands are asking for ethical manufacturing now.

As the factory has developed, how have you determined fair wages? Have you always been a Fair Trade Certified factory?

We’ve always paid at an urban minimum wage level, most people train up in skill and are paid more than that. But low skilled labor is paid the county’s minimum wage.

As for certifications, we are Fairtrade International and USA Fair Trade certified, it’s very important for us to have that transparency. Puma, one of our investors requires us to be Puma Safe certified, which is mostly safety auditing. A lot of our brand partners don’t actually need the fair trade certification since we are already very transparent. Especially a lot of the smaller brands we work with, they are very transparent and are able to support their claims by showing who they work with and storytelling.

Fair trade certifications are very expensive and are mostly for larger brands who lack the transparency and they really need that sort of certification in order to legitimize whatever they are trying to say on the marketing side of things.

Do you feel now that ethical fashion is being talked about more, how has the landscape changed?

People are way more open to the conversation now. It also helps that we have some big name carbon credit customers, for example, Kering. Because of working with the carbon credit program, Kering is now open to talking to about manufacturing opportunities. We now can have conversations with bigger brands like the Gap Incs of the industry who never would have before considered talking to us when we first got started.

We’re still quite far from producing with them, not only are we a bit small for them, but we are also against the direction of mainstream fashion right now. But, at least they know about us and they are willing to have a conversation. It’s opening up a market.

Do you have your own definition of ethical fashion?

I think it’s really doing everything you can in your power to make decisions that make the least amount of harm on people, planet, and wildlife.

It’s a great question, it shows that you’re really deep in it. It’s easy to say that you’re a brand that does sustainable fashion using organic cotton or does sustainable production. But the deeper you get into it you see how grey it is and how the lines are so blurred because the global supply chain is very hidden and not transparent. It’s so hard to make the right decisions because the system doesn’t allow you to.

Are you optimistic about the future of sustainable fashion?

Yeah, I see a lot of progress. The fact that our business has been able to grow is a great indication. I am hopeful, but I don’t think that solution is what we think it is going to be. I think the solution is going to be something that is very technology driven, that we don’t even know right now. We are up to our head in the current global supply chain and we are blinded by it, something needs to come from nowhere really fast and that’s how change is going to happen.