Sustainably Rebuilding the Fashion Industry | Queen of Raw, ECOfashion, alternew | PI Apparel

Thank you all so much for being here early on in the morning and for being a part of this great conversation. We're going to be talking about the Eco-Renaissance: Co-Creating a Sustainable Rebirth of the Fashion Industry. And I was definitely inspired by a lot of the questions that we just heard. A lot of them were about sustainability, climate, carbon emissions, which are very much the hot topic of the world today, and I believe going to be going forward for sure. So before we jump into our incredible panel, I wanted to set a little bit of the tone and frame today's conversation, because I'm sure when you see what's going on in the world— fabric and material costs, worker shortages, supply chain disruption, a pandemic— you ask yourself, why should we be thinking about sustainability? And why does any of this matter? And I think there are two common myths for sustainability that we need to mythbust right away in order to understand why this is not just a hot topic of the day, but essential and critical to this industry and every industry with a supply chain going forward. And the first myth that I just kind of wanted to chat about was, How much it costs you. Quick show of hands, how many people assume that in order to be sustainable, it is going to cost you more money?

No?

People realize it doesn't have to cost— yes, people do assume, right? Okay, don't be afraid. You hear that S-word, sustainability, let's be real, and you assume it's gonna cost you more money to participate. And the second myth that we're gonna quickly talk about is that when you hear sustainability, how many people assume, oh, that's good for like, Charities, little eco-conscious collections, little pilot projects, but no good to automate and scale it, right? I mean, these are the myths and where your head automatically goes. So let's talk about them really quickly. The first one is cost of sustainability. I believe there has been this myth for so long that sustainability has to cost you more money to participate, right? And the good news is that if you focus for example, on your business's waste, unused fabric, unused finished goods, that is stuff that you can sell today and make money, free up that costly warehouse space, and then take that money that you make and put it back into doing good work in your supply chain, pay those workers more, use more sustainable materials, adopt more technology innovations, and you can do it without your overall CapEx expenditure going up. So that you can not only, right, survive what's going on today and manage and wade through this world, but truly thrive tomorrow. And you can do that while actually knowing what's going on in your supply chain and measuring and reporting on things like water, chemicals, carbon emissions, waste, and dollars saved. Okay, so that's the first thing. And then the second thing, and then we're gonna jump into our panel, is the scalability of sustainability. You hear that word and you think, yeah, good for pilot projects, little eco-conscious collections, but that's about where it stops. We actually started my company called Queen of Raw, and our incredible CTO and co-founder Phil Durasmo is here as well, as a marketplace. It was a B2B exchange so businesses could buy and sell each other's unused textile waste, keep it out of landfill, and turn what would be pollution into profit. And that was a great step one, right? And we started growing globally around the world, working with Fortune 500 companies. Customers. But if you think about it, having a marketplace to sell waste is great, but it's kind of just slapping a Band-Aid on the problem. Takes care of the immediate pain point, but you have waste, here, go sell it, make money. How do you actually get to the root of the problem and figure out why do I have waste, where does it come from, who does it go to, and how can I use that data for better forecasting, better predictions, and better communication with end consumers? And that's why through the pandemic we released our enterprise software, we call it Materia MX, so that businesses can do just that, automate and scale their business around the world while doing it in a capital-efficient and environmentally and people and planet-friendly way, right? And so we're gonna unpack more of that, but I wanna now be, talk about our incredible panel, literally coined the terms that we're gonna be talking about with eco-fashion and figuring out how we can do this in a way that it makes sense for people, Planet and Profit. So if you could each introduce yourself, first on the high level, talk a little bit about what you do and your background, and then we'll jump into how you embed sustainability in your business model. Let's start with Marcy.

OK. So hi, everyone. I'm Marcy Zaroff. I'm the founder and CEO of Eco Fashion Corp, which is a greenhouse of brands made up of MetaWear, which is the engine of our whole company. It's a B2B manufacturing and sourcing platform Predominantly based right now overseas. We have an office in India, a whole team on the ground in Asia, but we are also looking at diversifying and looking at an on-demand factory of the future here in the US. We also have 3 of our own house brands, Seed to Style and Farm to Home, as well as Yes and, which is my life philosophy, which is yes, you can have everything you want in the way of style, quality, fit, color, comfort, hand, price, and, oh, by the way, be socially and environmentally responsible. So it is that brand or that concept of no compromise that really birthed my life work. So in 1990, I started the first school that did all health and wellness education. Today, that school is known as the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It's the world's largest holistic health nutrition school. Has certified almost 200,000 people worldwide as health coaches. And with that, I discovered there was an interconnection in the supply chains of food and fiber, also in agriculture, but also in popular culture, right? When you look at the connectivity between food and fiber, and you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that people oftentimes become more conscious when they start changing their diet, and then they ask, what else? What's next? What more? So in 1995, I coined and trademarked the term eco-fashion. As Stephanie mentioned. People thought I was crazy then, that nobody would ever buy into the concept. And you know, the stigma was that if you were environmentally and socially conscious, you were not fashionable, and if you were fashionable, you could care less about the environment. And I was certainly one of those people that said, wait, I'm both. How do I, you know, bridge the tree hugger and the fashionista, the tribe and the boardroom, and style the world of change while changing the world of style? So for the past, 28 years, since I was 3. I have been in the trenches building the sustainable fashion movement globally. Everything from, I started the first sustainable fashion and home brand in 1995 in North America called Under the Canopy with the premise that we all live under the canopy of the planet's ecosystem together. And then from there, I was on the team of people that wrote the GOTS standard, the standard for fair trade textiles, helped launch the Cradle to Cradle certification standard for fashion positive, and I've been at every touchpoint of building supply chains as well as being a speaker on the front lines. And I'm the author of a book called Eco Renaissance, woo-hoo, inspiring our title today, Co-Creating a Stylish, Sexy, and Sustainable World, which connects the dots of this whole lifestyle from art to food to wellness, to beauty, to business, to fashion. And it talks about the spokes in the wheel of change and the fact that you really can't support one part of the equation without the others when you look at true climate action, inclusivity, sustainability, social justice. It's all interconnected from agriculture to popular culture. And then what am I doing? I guess we'll go into that more later into the detail.

Awesome. And I love, by the way, on the back of your jacket, it says optimist. Because when you're talking about these issues, not everyone has has that optimistic point of view, but we on this panel, I think, all agree.

And P.S., which I don't know if I— I don't want to spill my coffee, but this is cornet printed. So this was an on-demand printing on certified organic regenerative cotton jacket.

Living it and wearing it. Awesome. Nancy.

I walk the talk.

Hi everyone. My name is Nancy Rhodes, and I think it's really funny because I call myself a serial optimist. I think you have to be in this industry. I have a company. I'm the CEO and founder of Alternew. We are a mobile clothing alterations and repairs platform. I think that each one of you could be sitting up here and providing value. I'm really the only person here doing what I do, and every time I sit with people, I'm like, oh, this is what I do, and I'm all about the recirculation and repair, and they're like, oh, we don't do that in our supply chain. That's fine. I'm here, please. I got my master's in sustainability. Like, you want to talk about it, I could talk all day and all night about sustainability, so feel free to come up to me afterwards. So I'll be talking just a little bit about my own background. I had been a shoe designer for almost 2 decades. I've worked for many, many brands, most notably Dereon, which was Beyoncé's line. And when I interviewed at Kenneth Cole, I was like, oh yeah, Beyoncé and I are best friends, so you know, you should hire me. And they did. So it's been this really interesting thing. And people always say like, oh, you're a shoe designer, that's so cool. And I'm like, the best part about what I do is getting to tell people what I do. And so I think that there's a lot about understanding the space. And so I kind of felt like I had this time where I was feeling like a cog in the wheel, and how could I really be a catalyst for true change? And I think that all three of us have had that moment. And speaking to young designers, I know that there are a lot of people with that same drive for purpose. So for me personally— oh, we're going to talk about the metrics. But let's—

Good job.

Sustainability, all I'm going to say is what I do is intrinsically sustainable, and you all should have— repairs and alterations as part of your supply chain, and you can use us to do it.

Awesome. Yeah, you kind of in a perfect way jumped into where I'm going to. You all do incredible work, passionate about what you do, but I think as we're here at a supply chain forum, right, talking about this as a business, how do we actually embed these kinds of sustainability practices into our business, and what are the metrics that we actually measure, and how do you measure that? Because, you know, and obviously that S word, sustainability, It means a lot of things to a lot of people. I honestly prefer the word circular economy. Second word is economy. This is an economic principle here, right? And the idea by keeping these materials in circulation longer, reusing, reselling, recycling, repairing, you can actually save and make money while doing good, right? It just makes economic sense. And so I know one of the things that we do, we spent a lot of time the past 2 years working with MIT and the United Nations and others in order to actually help businesses measure and report. So for us, we're tracking on the blockchain the good activities that you do. And based on all those reusing, reselling, recycling, we do measure and report financially and legally things like water, chemicals, carbon emissions, waste, and dollars saved. So you can see those metrics, and then you actually have the proof of where it comes from. So that's kind of how we think about it. To give you two quick metrics, one of our Fortune 500 customers saved 15% of their bottom line in just one year just by participating in the circular economy in this way. And not only that, they saw 3 times the conversion rate in their online direct-to-consumer business just by talking about the good work they're doing with confidence. So I'll leave those figures there. And yeah, we can jump into how you think about and embed the sustainability and the metrics in your practices.

Yeah, so the ecosystem that we've built between MetaWear and YesAnd allows for us to pilot a lot of new technologies through the YesAnd retail platform. So we then, once we do those pilots, we offer those opportunities to our private label clients at MetaWear. And the way that we work at MetaWear is, think of us as kind of the Lien Fung of sustainability, if you will. We build full package programs starting at the raw materials, unlike the past sourcing models that start at factories and build down supply chains, and as many of you probably are well aware, a garment can change hands 7 to 10 times, even more, in a supply chain. And every single step in that process has to be managed. And when you're talking about sustainability, it adds another layer of complexity into managing that supply chain. So at MetaWear, what we do is we meet with our clients from mass to class. So we have partners that are the biggest retailers in this country, mass market retailers. We also have very high fashion designer brands. And so everything is bespoke. It's tailored to the needs of that partner. We meet with them and say, what stories do you want to tell? Is it fair trade, circular, recycled, organic, regenerative, low impact, made in the US, any and all of the above, women's empowerment, so that we can understand sort of where you want to land. Where do we start? We say, what are the products you want to make? We're equipped at MetaWear to do women's, men's, kids', baby, home. Pet, all textiles in all categories of wovens, knits, sweaters, and denim. And then we say, what are your volumes, what are your lead times, and what are your current strategies? And then what we do is almost part consultant, part sourcing and production company, oversight on all the compliance. We're a turnkey plug-and-play manufacturer. So really like the Intel inside of sustainable fashion to make sustainable fashion easy. For other brands and retailers and designers by meeting them where they are and helping them navigate the supply chain in a very collaborative way. So the phase 1 of the company was to really build products and embed certifications and full traceability into the supply chain where we could talk about the farmers and the factory workers and actually provide photos and videos and content creation to connect content and commerce. Phase 2 is we actually have recently introduced a blockchain technology into our supply chains where from farm to finished product, we're able to digitize the supply chain and actually elevate those farmer and factory worker stories along the supply chain and include in there all of the inputs of the product, the entire journey of the product, every single touchpoint, including, as I said, meet the farmers, meet the factory workers on a QR code technology. That's a platform that a customer, a consumer can scan and get the entire story of the journey. And phase 3 is the ESG metrics. We are embedding by the end of this year carbon, water, labor, and energy use in our supply chains. Many of our factories use renewable energy. All of our raw materials are vetted to be preferred fibers and materials. We don't use any virgin polyester. We don't use any virgin or conventional cotton. Everything is either organic, regenerative, circular, or preferred on some level, cellulosic. We work a lot with Lensing and Tencel. And so for us, it's really about co-creation from the standpoint of 1 1 11. We are stronger together than we are apart. We can get farther and faster, and that's really the essence of our business model is to help accelerate this industry and leverage the power of of collective buying, of being strategic in the way that we create yarns and fabrics. We can consolidate among different customers. We can also hold fabrics and yarns to try to create efficiencies so that vertical integration allows for being cost competitive. So it's not why would you buy sustainable fashion, it's why wouldn't you? If you can have everything you want in the way of style and quality and price, It's the people, planet, profit, passion, and purpose. That's really, those are the principles of our company. And sustainability is in our DNA, including our own farm project, which is called RESET, which stands for Regenerate the Environment, Society, and Economy through Textiles.

Not a bad mission.

All right, Nancy. Both of them are amazing. Clothes are mass-produced, bodies are not. It's something I always talk about, and I think every single person in this room is part of the supply chain. We're part of creating mass production. I'm personally in volume. I found white space at Target and white space at Payless to provide value to an assortment. At this point, I'm providing opportunities for white space and sustainability where we can make profits through that. And to Stephanie's point, Data, OK, if you extend the life of your clothes per a WRAP report, you can— if you actively extend the life of your clothes for 9 months, you can reduce your carbon footprint by 20% to 30%. So that in itself is an industry benchmark we can use. Personally, we're using data to not only analyze our customer needs, but also what kind of product they're getting repaired, where those products are coming from, who's doing the best. That way in the future, we can use that data to work with brands to provide them information on what their biggest sellers are and what people are extending. So how can they use that to better their own product? Now we talk about emotional, and so it's interesting. So Stephanie talked about circularity, so I, I think everyone knows what the circular economy is. I will just— it's— there's 3 principles to the circular economy. It's eliminate waste, recirculate products and materials, and regenerate— regenerate agriculture. So it's really interesting because the dynamic just on this panel is looking at all 3 pieces of that, and I really like notice that, and I love that we're all these plot points on the graph. And I think that with sustainability, we get So defeated in the expectation, but at the end of the day, we're all going to saturate this space and truly provide value to sustaining for our future because sustainability in its name is so greenwashed. We need to create ways to describe them in better ways. And the one other thing I will say is learning from history. So I, you know, as the founder of this company, I talk to a lot of young tailors who the first thing they say to me is, "Oh, I hate fast fashion." And I was like, "Well, you wouldn't have the opportunity to express yourself today if it wasn't for fast fashion." And we forget to look at history as an opportunity to succeed in our future. And so for us, there's this, really big way to use the excitement of fast fashion and the way people were able to express themselves. Now people are looking for customization, individualization. We talk about our three pillars within AlterNew, which is convenience, inclusivity, and sustainability. How can we use those three pillars to help people extend the life of their clothes and have a long-term relationship with both their clothes and their brands?

Now, with that in mind, I think there's some awesome questions coming in, and I'm gonna bring them in as we're talking about things, and two that really jumped out at me. One in particular is, with all of these sustainability initiatives, where do you go and what do you do on day one? How do you prioritize these? And that's a great question, 'cause there's so many different points, as are all represented here, of where you can go and what you can do. From our point of view, starting with the, waste, unused inventory, and overconsumption is a great place to start on day one. Because think about it, if you go to a brand or retailer and you tell them, we're going to make you end-to-end 100% sustainable by 2040 from farm to finished good to end of life and around again, it's totally possible, as you hear from all of us, but you have to know where to go and what to do on day one and who to partner with. And so starting with things like waste, you can tackle this. Learn more about your supply chain, free up some money, and then go and build up and down your supply chain and leverage all of the tools and partners that you're hearing about here. Happy if anyone else wants to jump in on that one, otherwise we can take another—

I just agree on leveraging partnerships. We're doing that both with Reese, we're launching a pilot with new clothing, we're doing that with Manhattan Vintage Show, leveraging used clothing, and we're doing that direct consumer.

One other great question, and then I have one for you, Marcy, is that if we do more sustainable fashion and we still have to keep a competitive price point, how are we actually going to be able to deliver to our end consumers something that they can afford? And I think that's a great question too because so many times we've got great millennials, Gen Zs driving this. They are willing to pay maybe more, maybe a little bit more, so they say in reports, for good. But when it comes to going to a store, And they have to pick between two. I mean, there are some who are mission-driven and do really care, but there are many who are affected by price for a lot of reasons, whether they can't afford it or at that point when they're making that judgment call. The other interesting thing is when you think about leveraging waste as a resource and selling and buying unused inventory and deadstock from each other, you're actually able to offer a sustainable product at the same price point, if not a cheaper price point, because you just bought all of these materials at a discount, and they have a sustainable value to them. How cool is that, right? And then leveraging the tools you see here, you can scan that QR code, and they can see all of their savings, economic and environmental, right at point of purchase. It's kind of a win-win-win, and how do you say no to that, right? So hopefully, we can come away feeling inspired and like this is tangible. Great questions for you, Marcy, came in on the regenerative agriculture piece of this, and knowing that cotton cotton growth and processing are water-intensive. What efforts are you seeing with the products that you're creating and regenerating around agriculture, water scarcity, and the preferred fibers we should be looking at?

Yeah, so I'll just start with cotton. There are, I mean, a lot of myths about cotton, and there are a lot of truths about cotton, right? It is the dirtiest crop. It is the most heavily sprayed in agriculture, uses some of the most toxic chemicals. And when you look at, you pull the curtain back and you actually unveil the human and environmental impacts of cotton, you have to look at the water, the chemical use, and the social justice issues. Regenerative cotton is not just a solution that's free of chemicals if it's done in an organic methodology, right? It is an important, the most important part about regenerative agriculture, it is one of the greatest solutions to climate change that we have globally right now. So what people don't realize is that the cotton that we've been producing for, you know, hundreds of years is not the cotton that we produce today. The GMO and chemical agriculture that happens today in the cotton industry has degraded the soil health all over the world, not just in the fiber system, but in the food system as well. And what happens when you have degraded soil is you break down the ecosystems of the soil, to the point where the soil is no longer serving in the role that it's meant to serve for, call it humanity, right? We have a symbiotic relationship with our environment. We breathe out carbon, nature breathes in carbon. Nature breathes out oxygen, we breathe in oxygen. Soil is meant to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere when it's in its living, breathing, biodiverse ecosystem state, when it's healthy. right? Think of it as an immune system. And when soil is degraded and breaks down, it becomes dirt. And what happens is the carbon no longer gets sequestered into the soil. Instead, it reflects back up into the atmosphere. So one of the really important reasons that you're seeing a rise in demand around organic and regenerative agriculture is to rebuild soil health. Because when you have that healthy ecosystem in the soil, You actually have a sponge that will suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Think of soil as the skin of the Earth. Very metaphoric as, you know, our skin is the largest organ in our bodies and our primary organ for absorption, right? It's meant to protect us. So when I look at leveraging the power of fashion to expand agriculture, it's really to solve for rebuilding soil health and also leveraging cotton, which is a third of the world's textiles. Now the water question that came up is that when you grow cotton using methodologies that are organic and regenerative, like crop rotation and cover cropping and green manure and all the methodologies that are inherent in building soil health, you actually can depend on rainwater because when you have healthy soil, the soil is also not only more resilient to climate change because, or the plants are more resilient to climate change 'cause they're being built or growing in healthy soil, but the soil will retain water better too. So when you don't have a healthy ecosystem in the soil, the water will run off with all the chemicals in a conventional system. But in an organic or regenerative system, the water will actually absorb and stay much longer in the soil. So that equates to less water use. Plus, because I think about 90% of the cotton that's grown using organic regenerative principles out there is being rain-fed versus irrigated. You need irrigation when you have GMO seeds to feed the seed. So that's kind of a long, detailed way of talking about cotton, but when you look at preferred fibers and materials across the board, there is a place for circular fibers, there is a place for organic and regenerative fibers. It's not one or the other. We have to look at our procurement strategies in a holistic way because our oceans ecosystems, not to create another layer here, but they're also being compromised. Because synthetic garments, whether they're circular or not, are actually little microfibers, and I'm sure many of you know this or have heard this. You know, when we wash our synthetics in our washing machines, they start to, the little microfibers start to shed, and those microfibers go into our water systems, which end up in our oceans. So now our oceans are also filled with, a third of the plastic in the oceans today is from textile, microfiber, synthetic pollution, right? So there is no easy answer here. There's a lot of work to do. Relatively speaking, we are at our infancy, which is why it's all hands on deck. We need everybody at the table in this conversation.

Yeah, no, that, that's, that's a great, well-researched answer and a great way to think about these things. Here's a question that came in that is going to be probably controversial, um, in a good way. So there is this issue out there in the world that is about greenwashing, right? And obviously I think we can probably all agree that isn't controversial. You should never lie or intentionally misstate things. That's for sure. But let's talk a little bit about fast fashion challenges and opportunities because there are a lot of people in the sustainability community, I am not included, but there are those who do not work with fast fashion companies. They made that choice for a variety of reasons. We looked at the data and the numbers and realized that if you don't work with these incredible companies, we're all part of the problem and we're all part of the solution. Fast fashion companies and others literally hold the key to solving the world's water crisis if we help them rethink how they do things and be more efficient and do it for people, planet, and profit, right? And so I'm very proud to work with many of the world's biggest fast fashion companies because changing just a small percent of the way they do business in a good way has the biggest impact. We've saved over 1 billion gallons of water and we feel like we're just getting started. That's enough clean water for 1.4 million people to drink around the world for 3 years. So how can you not want to work and partner? But happy to hear other thoughts as there are questions about working with certain partners who may not have sustainability in their business model. Yet.

I'd love to just start with that. We talk so much about looking at agriculture, and there's so little done in the end of life cycle. And so we talk about the emotional durability of clothing. And so for us, I mean, yes, we have a Kardashian as the Boohoo sustainability ambassador now. I have opinions. But— You have power. For me, and something— again, there's so few people looking at a repair economy. 86% of unwanted clothing ends up in landfills, and most of those landfills are overseas. Basically, the people who are least responsible for it are getting the most impact from it. That kind of sucks. So how can we— yes, fast fashion, I get it, economies of scale. And I see how these large companies, Unilever, Walmart, et cetera, are doing their part both vocally and internally to actually make scalable solutions. But I just want to say from my side, I want you guys to look at innovations in this space, in the recirculation of materials. Because with your brands, if you tell the customer, not only do you want to sell them product, but you want to help them extend the life of it, I promise they will be with you forever.

Yeah. No, very good point. I think that there's a lot going on in this sustainability conversation right now more than ever, and questions are coming in about what's going on with sourcing cotton in certain regions of the world and forced labor and all of health, the impact on people and planet. The good news is that aside from consumer demand growing for this, who you are making and selling things to, there's also legislation happening around the world, in the US nationally, locally, internationally in the EU and beyond. So there is going to be legal requirements that our supply chains comply with this, of course. So things to think about. We have a question coming in right now. It's New York Fashion Week, right? Which is awesome. I mean, this is part of what we are here doing, creating and getting people excited about the beauty of what touches their skin all day long and power of expression. But with all this conversation we're having on the panel around reducing, reusing, recycling, how do you feel about and what are ways to drive reduction while also growing as a business who's in the business of making and selling things? I have thoughts, but happy if either of you want to jump in.

I mean, you know, it's like Patagonia when they say on Black Friday don't buy anything. It's like antithetical to the business model of consumption, right? So we're sort of faced with this paradox. So for me, it's always been about doing well by doing good in the world. It's not about doing less bad. It's about doing more good and leveraging what we're doing. Nobody's going to stop buying clothing and bedding, right? Like, this is one of our basic needs is as human beings. It's about doing it smarter, doing it better. And a lot of the fast fashion retailers, as it's been touched on, to some extent they're victims of their own business models. They sort of got on this train, the train left the station, and it's been picking up steam for the past decade. It's now time to kind of slow it down and reset it, or reboot, you know, in the world of technology. It's about looking at new systems. It's about looking at, the way we're producing. And I know we've touched on that a bit. And one of the things that excites me— whoops, sorry, I keep forgetting I have the mic on— excites me is this sort of phase 1 of driving sustainability in the fashion industry was really accelerated by the internet. That's how far back I go, not to get an age of myself. But being able to tell stories. The first chapter of this movement was really hard to— if you did great work, You would get lost on a shelf. Point of purchase was just impossible to tell a story. I launched Under the Canopy as a mail order catalog kind of back in the day, back when that was direct to consumer. But the ability now to connect source to story and tell those stories in social and digital media, that can work for you, that can work against you. But at the end of the day, when you look at what millennials are demanding, they want a good story. And if they see a story that is something that they want to call out, they have no hesitation, right? You look at organizations like Remake right now, and there's accountability in our movement unlike ever before. And now you look at technology and the power to accelerate change through looking at, through the lens of these impacts, water, waste, energy, climate, right? And thinking, how can we reduce production and be smarter about it? So I know we're gonna touch on that a little more, but whether it's sampling and fitting with a SETI or a Style3D, or it's print on demand with a company like Kornit, where you don't have to go out and hit minimums on screen printing and make a new screen for every single color you're doing. And there's ways now that we can actually be smarter. And so it's not even eco-fashion anymore, it's obviously smart fashion. And I think that's the next chapter of this movement. And you're all gonna be here today. You're gonna trademark that.

Yeah. Coined here.

Yes.

Yeah. No, you're right. It's smarter. It's efficient. Waste and this stuff is inefficiency. It's expensive. And I'm excited too by when we can stop saying sustainability and just the way good business is done. And what we're talking about, I just also wanted to hit on, I mean, while we're thinking about ways to reduce waste and inefficiency, it doesn't mean you don't make more money. These are additional revenue streams. And we were looking at the latest data of who dominated in unit economics and value creation through the pandemic in this industry, right? And I looked at the list, and it was Nike, H&M, H&M, LVMH, Richemont, like, looking at who, Inditex, who did that. And you compare that to who's making movements in sustainability and trying to do better in this space, and they're very much aligned in who our customers are. And there's a reason for that, right? Because it makes business sense, and you do improve bottom and top line by doing this. So just to frame that, there was a question in here that was interesting about looking at what's going on HIG and SAC, and not to call them out, with all measuring tools, right? And what if it's not perfect? And what happens when we're evolving as a business and also with algorithms that measure this stuff? Any thoughts on how you're looking at measuring and thinking about how we can be more accurate?

Do you want to go?

Or do you want me to? We have used HIG Index. It doesn't really speak to what we're doing. I, I've done a lot of research on HIG, you know, ESGs. We have all of these frameworks in which to measure sustainability. But at the end of the day, there's going to be a lot of AI needed. And in fact, a lot of what Stephanie does is, is that machine learning. And it's as much, you know, you also have the SASB and all of these different ways of measuring. And sometimes it feels a little arbitrary, like why did they decide on this number and how is that coming? And I think it goes to what Alex was saying in the past in his talk. They talked about consumer insights and that being able to so quickly change. And again, clothes are mass-produced, bodies are not. Like if someone has a— and I get it with materials, but when it comes to fit, that's a trend. It's not actually going to make— a big impact, it's going to make that impact. So all to say, I think it's important to decide on a way to measure, but if that's internal, if that's external, it's deciding how you can look at your outcomes through the lens of like true value and not just what you're going to use in your marketing campaign.

Yep. No, exactly right. And what you're actually doing and having proof to show what you did.

Absolutely.

Back up the numbers. And that's all, right? I've read the sustainability reports. They're incredible that are out there, and there's proof about how they did it, and they're speaking about it. That's awesome, and it should be rewarded. And what Higg and others did leading this and starting measuring it before it became the hottest topic of the day, that's powerful too. So I know we don't have too much time left. Just as we look to the future of this movement, of this industry, where we're going, any predictions on or things that you're excited about what you see or what you're leaning into from your perspective and also from brands' and retailers' perspective?

Well, I'm going to marry that with another question that I saw come up about Made in the US. So I think that, you know, there was a huge chapter, as we all know, of, you know, all of production leaving the US and going offshore and, you know, to create, you know, more economies of scale, better pricing, you know, and scalability. And unfortunately, a lot of the systems in this country broke down. A lot of the technologies became very dated. The supply chains are very broken here. I started MetaWear by creating a factory here in the US in 2013, a partnership where we were doing turnkey production. And it was a bear trying to navigate the US. I then went back to our whole platform overseas, but with the vision that I would bring it back here. And I think the way that we're going to bring production back back to the US, as we've all sort of touched on, is this on-demand lean manufacturing model, right, where we can minimize waste to create a financial model that even though first costs may be higher doing domestic production, last cost will be lower, right? We have to be building those kinds of financial models to show brands and retailers who are all about hitting their cost, and trust me, They all talk about wanting made in the US, but at the end of the day, when you put a price in front of them, that's where they freeze, right? And so what we're working on at MetaWear is a factory of the future that would embed a lot of these technologies to try to minimize waste at the same time that we're creating more efficient production, more on-demand production, which not only is the millennial today demanding transparency, demanding accountability, wanting climate action within the brands and companies that they're they're supporting, but they want customization. They want it now. They want what they want. Everything's changing. This whole industry has been turned upside down. Systems are broken. It's Albert Einstein, one of my favorite quotes, "We can't solve today's problems with the same consciousness that created them." We have to change our consciousness. We have to be working collectively to change the systems that are completely broken, starting with the supply chains, but also at the retailer level. Or the brand level, where everybody is siloed, and the sourcing doesn't talk to design, who doesn't talk to sustainability, who doesn't talk to marketing. And now— and I've worked with some of the biggest retailers in this country where I'm like, wait, I think I have a better look on this company than they do, because I'll get contradictory information from different departments. To build a truly sustainable model, you have to operate like a holistic ecosystem. Again, emulating nature here. And with that, I think people are waking up. I mean, I've gone to India and taken buyers from major retailers to the farm where they've never actually even seen raw cotton before, but they've been buying cotton sweaters for the last 25 years. And it's shaking up things, but then looking at the made in US as risk mitigation. So just blending one last question into my answer, which is someone asked about the cotton procurement in Xinjiang. Right now at MetaWear, at Eco Fashion Corp, we don't do anything out of China. A fifth of the world's cotton was grown in the Xinjiang region, and that caused huge backlash in the world of brands and retailers. They didn't know what to do. And I think it really does mean we have to start at the source. And the one thing I'll just end with saying is the pandemic, the gift it gave us is it had people really look to reset their priorities go back to their own source and say, okay, what really matters? And I think people are seeing now that sustainability, health, wellness, it's not about staying ahead anymore in this industry. It's about not being left behind. And so with that, I think we are, you know, we're getting, just getting started, but there's tremendous opportunity. And I think we haven't even scratched the surface of what we're gonna see in the years ahead with US manufacturing because I can feel that momentum. Starting. You can feel how many companies are making investments into this country, but it's all going to be built with technology, which is why you're all at the right place at the right time.

Awesome. And I know we're out of time. Quick final word.

Just instead of made in the USA, how about repaired in the USA?

Woo! Let's go change the world. Thank you all.