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I always say that every fast fashion brand out there should be sending an Edible Arrangement to Instagram every week for the rest of time, because nothing helped fast fashion expand, make billions off of selling us more more and more clothing than Instagram, outfit of the day posts, and influencers.
Fast fashion democratized style, right? It made it accessible to a lot more people (obviously not people who were larger, taller, shorter than what fashion deemed acceptable, but still, a lot more people). And Instagram let us all believe that WE were style icons and influencers in our own right. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to look back and see all of the widespread consumer habits that ultimately began on Instagram:
What we didn’t realize, as we fretted over finding something new for every Instagram post, was that the system that was creating all of those new outfits was fundamentally flawed, frequently unethical, and super wasteful. We were just trying to fit in, or stand out, or at least, live our best lives. But that desire for something new that we all seemed to be feeling all at once…well, retailers made a lot of not-so-great decisions in pursuit of profiting from our collective hunger. And of course, because this is Clotheshorse, we’ll be talking about that today.
Welcome to episode 176 of Clotheshorse. As always, I’m your host, Amanda and today we will be continuing our conversation about the evolution of fast fashion. So I should just tell you now…I told you last week that this would be a two part situation. And it is now officially a three part situation. I just kept adding stuff to my outline this week! Next week, I swear we are going to conclude this series and share some of your audio essays about secondhand..but this fast fashion series just has a lot of stuff to discuss! So let’s jump back into it!
I don’t even know where to begin with how fast fashion–well really, fast everything– commoditized the ideas of “self care,” “retail therapy,” and “treat yourself” into reasons to buy more stuff.
And going back to holidays: every holiday–no matter how small–became a reason to shop.
Oh yeah, that’s another thing: in the era of fast everything, every fast fashion retailer was thinking of new categories to sell, because as we know, everyone had raced their way to the bottom on pricing. The only way to be more profitable year after year, to increase revenue and make shareholders happy was…finding new things to sell! By 2015-ish, retailers had already expanded into shoes, jewelry, basically any kind of accessory. But it wasn’t enough. So we see lots of hype over and over again for new “emerging” categories that fast fashion retailers were quick to jump on:
Okay, so here’s something else that fueled fast fashion even more than Instagram: ecommerce, aka, shopping online.
As I mentioned in the last episode, in the pre-online shopping world, everything we bought had to fit inside an actual physical space: the store! And had to look non-chaotic and hoarder-y, right? So there was a very real ceiling on the number of styles we could buy every month. In the first few years after the the 2008 financial crisis, when my employer (like every other retailer) was beginning to lean into the fast fashion model, we kinda struggled with how to balance the constant newness dictated by the fast fashion model with the real problem of fitting that steady flow of new styles into a store every week.
At first, the stores did look kinda chaotic. So we escalated our markdown cadence. This was the beginning of the “if you paid full price at this store, you would feel a little embarrassed” era. If you recall in the last episode, in the beginning of my career, we bought most items to live in the store at full price for ten weeks (about 2.5 months). The idea was that if they hadn’t sold out by then, we would mark down whatever was left, and theoretically, almost all of that would sell out in 2-4 weeks. So effectively the store would see a complete turnover every three months. That was the goal, right?
Well that didn’t work when we were suddenly offering twice as many new styles every month. It certainly didn’t work when we were delivering FOUR times as many styles every week. So we shortened that window that something sold at full price. First it was 8 weeks, then it was 6 weeks, and eventually it moved to four weeks. We were doing markdowns multiple times a month. The first week would be new markdowns. The second week would be further markdowns, taking things to a lower price. The third week would be jobouts–things we pulled from the sales floor and sent off to jobbers to resell on the off-price market. Fragile items would just be destroyed (meaning smashed, broken) by the store staff and dumped into the dumpster. Sure, we didn’t want to have it in the store any more, but we didn’t want anyone to have it without paying for it!
In fact–let’s talk about those jobouts. Once upon a time the volume of items that made it to that “job out” point was very small. Extremely manageable on a store by store basis. So stores would donate to a local charity of their choice: shelters, thrift stores, etc. But over time the volume was just too high to manage that. No one wanted THAT much stuff from us. And furthermore, since so much stuff was selling at markdown in the first place, it was imperative that the company recover as much of the cost of that stuff as possible. So that was when stores started boxing it up and shipping it back to the warehouse, where it would be sent to jobbers. Once again, anything remotely large (furniture, throw pillows, quilts) or fragile (candles, glassware, ceramics, most jewelry, fragrance, beauty products) would be destroyed by the staff and tossed in the dumpster.
Yeah, the fast fashion model is at the root of a lot of wasteful and frankly shitty phenomena out there, right?
To be clear, this is all still happening BUT ecommerce allowed retailers to offer even more new products:
To make things more complicated for all of the regular retailers with stores who had adopted the fast fashion model of cheap, fast, and always new, new brands were popping up who didn’t have the financial (and planning) burden of actual stores. These brands only sold online, so they could offer even more new stuff all the time. The first one that comes to mind for me is Asos, with its practically infinite offering. But I worked at TWO other ones that were playing that game, too.
When I was working at Modcloth we literally launched new items every day at noon. And guess what? Customers would show up every day at noon to buy them, sometimes placing multiple orders in a week. Launching 20-30 styles every day meant that we were constantly looking for something new. Yes, we had our own in-house line with designers and fit techs working hard to create the best final product, but they would never be able to create the 600-900 new styles we needed to launch every month. I mean, we would have needed a team of 100 to execute that.
But fortunately we had another resource at our disposal: the San Pedro Apparel Mart in downtown LA. Imagine about 300 different showrooms of inexpensive, high profit,0 fast fashion clothing, with new arrivals every single week. And everything you find there could ship to your warehouse in two weeks or less!
It’s hard to describe the Mart to someone who has never been there. One showroom after another, with names like Hot & Delicious, Cotton Candy, Virgins Only (for real). “Showroom” is kind of a generous description for spaces crammed with rolling racks of new arrivals and stuff in the works. People are rushing around with racks and boxes full of shipment. Every showroom has a bowl of M&Ms. Most of these “brands” are really acting as the middle man between factories overseas and the boutiques and retailers that shop there. In my early days at Modcloth, a big chunk of business at the Mart was coming from Forever 21. In fact, that’s where a lot of the early Forever 21 inventory came from. But over time Forever 21 elected to cut out the middle man (meaning these showrooms at the Mart) and go factory direct for lower prices, more selection, more exclusivity, and faster delivery).
I found a great 2018 WWD about one showroom, Honeypunch, that made the leap from the Mart to actual brand. I don’t think that’s still happening for them because the IG hasn’t been updated since 2019, but I remember Honeypunch well. We bought from them at both Modcloth and Nasty Gal. And I knew back then that they were doing a bunch of private label stuff for Need Supply (RIP). Basically manufacturing stuff for Need Supply but rather than sewing in Honeypunch labels, the labels had the names of Need Supply’s new “house brand.”
Marina Chianese, Honeypunch’s VP of Sales told WWD, “San Pedro, downtown was like a secret to some people and not everybody knew that and the people who knew about it were killing it and making a lot of money because the consumer had no idea what that San Pedro cash-and-carry business was. So buyers would fly down, fill up their stores, go back and make a lot of money on this stuff.…You had all of these Korean-owned brands that were from here. They started doing the trade shows and that educated the buyers all over the country, ‘Oh, these brands are something’ and then they all started buying it.”
So who shopped at the Mart? Boutique owners for one. Boutique owners from all over would fly down to LA, go to the Mart, and buy a few months worth of inventory on the spot. Other shopkeepers would go to MAGIC–the big fashion trade show that happens twice in a year in Vegas–and place the orders with these Mart brands there. And in the years that I was working for Modcloth and Nasty Gal, more and more of these online-only retailers were shopping there in a major way: Lulus, Dolls Kill, Modcloth, Nasty Gal. The Mart was great for these smaller online retailers who needed a ton of newness all the time, but didn’t have the buying power or budget for a full on design team.
And this Mart clothing was profitable. Why? Because customers just couldn’t google it and find it for a cheaper price. This meant that we could charge as much as we wanted for it! At both Modcloth and Nasty Gal, everything we bought and sold came from three different sources:
A typical trip to the Mart meant walking around—often for a full 8 hour day–from showroom to showroom, looking at the new arrivals. You might find half a dozen new styles at this one, twenty at the next, and so on. After a while, it would start to feel kinda boring, as you saw essentially the same thing over and over again. At that point, pricing becomes the deciding factor: who has the lowest cost. Still, we would trudge along, visiting 20, 30, or more places in one day. Each visit just a quick pop in to browse the racks, and then off to the next spot. The vendors would drop off samples of everything at our office the next day and we would make our picks. We might be sifting through 100-200 different items, trying to find the best ones. Then we would write the orders and they would deliver a few weeks later. We did this at least once a week, if not more.
The San Pedro Apparel Mart still exists and I still see “brands” I recognize from there in just about every boutique I visit. There are online retailers who sell exclusively product from the Mart, like Dressed in Lala.
And over time, online platforms arose that made it easier for online retailers and boutiques alike to order these “brands” directly, either from the vendors in the Mart or directly from the factory.
Story about job interview
One last thing that I want to call out here: we already know that clothing manufacturing is really opaque…like most companies have no idea who is making the stuff they sell, much less the working conditions of the people making these clothes. At least when we were making stuff using our in-house production team, they had an idea of who was closest to the factory because we were working with the agent who was kinda the middle man of it all. Working via the Mart made it even more confusing, because often the people we worked with in those showrooms had no idea who was making the clothes, either. So we had even less visibility. There were like three more people standing between us and the factory. Some of this stuff may have been made in LA, but most of it was probably made overseas. We had no idea. And any brand or boutique who is selling these items to you, doesn’t know either, no matter how good their intentions might be.
Making the fast fashion model profitable is all about saving every penny anywhere you can. We’ve already seen that play out in a lot of ways:
It was hard to see how anyone could make things faster or cheaper. I mean Zara was literally finishing garments on ships as they crossed the Pacific Ocean. Everything else was shipping on airplanes.
How could it possibly be faster and cheaper?
What if you could get closer to the factory…or maybe even OWN it?
The story of the Kamani family is often lauded by British tabloids as a “rag to riches” story. A “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” story come true.
The patriarch of the family, 55 year old Mahmud Kamani, is worth more than $1 billion, thanks to the wild success of his retail company, Boohoo. He got his start in sort of the UK version of the San Pedro Apparel Mart system, selling low price clothing to stall vendors and high-street brands like H&M and Primark. But he wondered, how profitable could clothing be if you cut out the middle man and just sold directly to the customers? After all, he was selling these clothes at 25-50% of their retail value. What if he could sell them for 100% of the retail value?
He and designer Carol Kane founded Boohoo in 2006. And Boohoo from moment one was all about being the fastest and cheapest: launching about 3,000 items each week, with an average retail price of $17. It’s infamous for its 1 pound (the currency, not the weight) bikini. And its partnership with influencers and Love Island.
In many ways, what Boohoo was doing wasn’t much different than anything anyone else on the fast fashion landscape was doing: selling lots of new stuff at low prices. But what made it more successful than its competitors was the speed! While Zara could bring stuff from mere concept to inventory in stores in about six weeks (which is wildly fast), Boohoo could do it in TWO WEEKS. This my friends, is fast fashion 2.0, a somewhat short lived and highly shady business model that SPOILER: involves a lot of forced labor, wage theft, and exposure to Covid.
Everything Boohoo sold was designed in house in their headquarters in Manchester (where it was also photographed and launched on the site) and most of the product was produced about 100 miles away in Leicester. Boohoo was saving so much time (and money) by not shipping the product overseas. Anything that wasn’t made in Leicester was made in London or Manchester.
Of course, there is a reason why very little fast fashion is made in the US or the UK, and that is price. These countries have a higher minimum wage that cannot compete with the minimum wages of Bangladesh and China (also: the US and the UK have more intense laws protecting workers). Yet somehow Boohoo was able to make this work, growing at an exponential rate while supposedly being super profitable. It acquired other brands, like Pretty Little Thing, Coast, and even…Nasty Gal!
Industry publications cited Boohoo as this genius company, that was able to somehow (magically) produce tons of product domestically and still sell at low prices. I don’t know why anyone thought that made sense? But by 2019, about 80% of its inventory was being produced in Leicester. Meanwhile (and once again, no one seemed to question this for a while) competitors like Asos and Missguided had pulled out of factories in Leicester over concerns of unsafe working conditions, tax fraud, forced labor, and illegally low wages.
Well, I said no one was questioning it, but actually more and more people were starting to question how Boohoo could make so much product, so cheaply, and so fast and still adhere to labor laws. Well that’s because they weren’t!
If you’re unfamiliar with Leicester as a big clothing manufacturing hub, don’t feel bad because you would only know if you were really deep into this stuff and/or had read as many articles about Boohoo as I have over the years.
I found a great Financial Times article about the issues with clothing production in Leicester, which I will share in the show notes, but I’m also going to read you a few bits from it. The title itself tells you a lot about what you will find as you read it: Dark factories: labour exploitation in Britain’s garment industry:
How is it possible to make cheap clothes in a country where the minimum wage for over-25s is £7.83 an hour? Online retailers’ nimbleness and lower overheads allow them to pay more for products while still giving consumers a good price. In addition, there are manufacturers that use technology to make clothes more efficiently. But factory owners in Leicester say some take a different route, one more reminiscent of the 19th century than the 21st. They call these places “dark factories.”
Part of Leicester’s garment industry has become detached from UK employment law, “a country within a country”, as one factory owner puts it, where “£5 an hour is considered the top wage”, even though that is illegal. Doshi (not his real name) says he has worked in places with blocked fire escapes, old machines and no holiday or sick pay. There are garment factories that follow the law, but a “perceived culture of impunity”, as a 2018 government report puts it, has created a bizarre microeconomy where larger factories using machines are outcompeted by smaller rivals using underpaid humans.
And while some retailers blame unethical factory owners, the factories say retail’s relentless push for cheap prices makes it impossible to improve.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this labour exploitation is that it is an open secret. Central government knows; local government knows; retailers know. “When I came to the UK and I discovered what was going on in Leicester, it was mind-blowing,” says Anders Kristiansen, who was chief executive of high-street retailer New Look from 2013 until September last year. “This is happening in front of your eyes and nobody’s doing anything?!” he remembers thinking. “How can society accept it — not even society, how can government accept it? It’s so sad, I’ve not spoken about it for a long time because it frustrated me so much.”
Seriously, go read this article because it talks about all of the external factors that are allowing this situation to continue: pressure for low prices from retailers, consumer pressure for low cost clothing, the government sort of overlooking it to protect jobs…
Ultimately, Boohoo was busted a bunch of times around 2020 when news emerged that the factories it was using were forcing employees to work without covid protections in place, even if they were sick, and for paying below minimum wage or straight up committing wage theft and using forced labor.
Every time one of these revelations would emerge, Boohoo would kinda be like “oh, we didn’t know.” But here’s the thing: Boohoo does know in one way or another. They want product so fast that workers can’t socially distance themselves or take sick time. They want product so cheap that factories can only pay workers below minimum wage or commit wage theft. By asking for so much, so cheap, and so fast, they are complicit in the abuse of the humans making their stuff. And they know it. Last year, Boohoo finally bought its own factory in Leicester of course…and made a lot of promises to do better from a human rights and workers rights perspective. I’m not so sure they can make that work without raising prices.
Furthermore, their sales were not good for 2022 and 2023, and they are dealing with a ton of returns cutting into their profit margin. They are promising a better year by cutting costs, which Hmmm, I don’t know about that. My guess is that they are figuring out that their business model can never successfully involve ethical domestic production.
Which brings me to the US version of fast fashion 2.0: Fashion Nova. A glowing 2019 piece on website Edited declared “There’s fast, then there’s Fashion Nova fast.”
Fashion Nova–based in LA–can design a product and have a sample within the same 24 hours. Within the next 24 hours, it is photographed on a model and launched on the site.
Fashion Nova–get ready for a familiar story here, or at least a story filled with intense foreboding–relies on a network of 1000 manufacturers in LA to make most of its product. This domestic manufacturing means that product can be available for sale in just a few days after it is a mere concept.
Fashion Nova is all about cheap, new and fast, just like Boohoo. And also like Boohoo, it relies heavily on social media marketing and partnerships with celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B.
The brand was founded in 2006 by Richard Saghian, and yeah, in case you were wondering, he’s a billionaire now. In an interview in 2018, he declared that $200 jeans were over, saying of his customer, “They need to buy a lot of different styles and probably only wear them a couple times so their Instagram feeds can stay fresh.” The jeans that sold best for Fashion Nova at that time? They retailed for $24.99
Now–much like with Boohoo–we have to ask ourselves: how could someone make jeans in LA that sell for $24.99 and are profitable enough to make a billionaire out of the founder of the company in a relatively short period of time? Like, the math just doesn’t math, right? Because the minimum wage in California is $15.50. Labor costs more money there, period. And all of the fabric and trims would have to be imported from overseas, which adds a lot of cost, too. So how is this working out?
Well surprise, surprise…it’s not working out! In 2019, the US Labor Department revealed the findings of an investigation it had been working on since 2016: Fashion Nova owed more than $3.8 million in back wages to the workers making its clothing during the period from 2016-2019.
The factories that Fashion Nova was using were paying their workers as little as $2.77 per hour to make clothing.
Of course representatives for Fashion Nova feigned shock over this revelation, but c’mon…when you’re asking for prices so low, you are knowingly asking for people to not be paid. Or work in unsafe conditions. Or work too many hours. And Fashion Nova could have at any time visited any of the facilities where their clothing was being made, to ensure that everything was on the up and up. After all, it wasn’t like they had to get on a plane to see the people making their clothes. They could literally catch a ride across town!
Fashion Nova has promised to do better in the future and claims to back legislation that will ensure garment workers in LA are paid the minimum wage (at minimum). It also started a toll free hotline that workers can call to report wage theft. But it still remains kinda sketchy. This year, it was fined $4.2 million by the Federal Trade Commission for blocking/deleting negative product reviews on its website. And customers who bought these poorly reviewed products can be reimbursed via the fund created by that fine.
So what have we learned so far?
This opens the door for fast fashion 3.0, which will figure out how to make the math math with a very short timeline and low low prices. And we are going to get into that next week. We’ll be talking about the wall that fast fashion hit in the years leading up to 2020, and all the things they tried to get us to buy more stuff: greenwashing, cause marketing, rental, resale, and so much more. And then we’ll brace ourselves for the arrival of the Shein business model. And we’ll talk about the implications that fast fashion 3.0 has for all of us, regardless of where we live, how much money we have, or what we wear on our bodies.
I’ve been making Clotheshorse for more than three years now. And sometimes I’ve had to cover some really grim, depressing, infuriating, frustrating, depressing things. It’s a lot of work and to be honest, this work occupies a big portion of my time each day.
So why do I do that when I could be rewatching Strange New Worlds and finally learning how to crochet?
Because we have to talk about fast fashion (and once again, it’s really “fast everything.”)
Forget “have to,” it’s more like we must talk about fast fashion.
It’s never just clothes or shopping. In this real life version of Mall Madness that we’re all playing, we are in the midst of an environmental and human rights disaster, that would only get worse if we ignore it.
The fashion and retail industry intersects with so many important issues:
environmental and social justice
climate change
the global plastic pollution crisis (remember, 65% of clothes made and sold right now are made of synthetic fibers aka plastic)
workers rights
income inequality
water consumption and pollution
and so much more!
Sure it’s a lot to think about. It’s a lot to tackle. It would be way easier to say “oh, well there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so I’m gonna go ahead and just keep doing what i’m doing” or “my impact will never be as huge as Amazon” or “sorry, don’t put the responsibility on individuals.” And just carry on as normal.
Or we could just pretend we don’t know what’s happening and just carry on.
But when we ignore it, things get worse. We can’t let big business or the fashion industry operate on the honor system—without our involvement—because it just doesn’t work. That’s how you get to where we are now.
Here’s the magic about talking about fast fashion: when you talk to the people in your life about it, they start talking to other people they know. And those people talk to the people they know. And it spreads and spreads. When a lot of people are talking about it, major change starts to happen, via both government policy and the rise of new social trends involving a shift in our consumption habits. But nothing happens if we don’t talk about it. Nothing ever changes because no one ever knows. No one is talking.
When we aren’t talking about it, people assume we don’t care, that it’s no big deal.
So talk about it! And don’t be afraid to be repetitive, because humans generally need to hear things a few times before it really sinks in. And share your own personal stories. Sharing our personal stories allows others to see the true impact of fast fashion, and it helps them understand how it impacts them. Our personal stories unlock doors and open ears. That’s why I share so much about my own experiences working in the industry, from my early days as a retail sales associate, through all of my years working in buying.
Studies have shown that when we are telling a story, our brain waves start to synchronize with the listeners. And that’s how true connections are built. Our experiences and stories build trust, evoke emotion, and get change started!
So talk about fast fashion with everyone you know. I know I’ll be continuing to do it!
If you want to share your opinion/additional thoughts on the subjects we cover in each episode, feel free to email, whether it’s a typed out message or an audio recording: [email protected]
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