How An L.A. Based Apparel Brand Is Modeling Clean Fashion

In 2013, numerous overcrowded clothing factories collapsed in Bangladesh. The accident was the deadliest in garment industry history, killing more than 1,100 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Workers in that factory made clothes for big global brands such as Benetton and Mango.

After the accident, which is also considered the deadliest non-deliberate structural failure in modern human history, many big brands pledged to improve garment factory conditions. Almost a decade later, it's worth looking at how the fashion industry got to this point and how one upstart apparel maker based in California is making clothes in a way that's gentler on the environment and on the people who help transform raw materials into the outfits you love.

The Rise Of Fast Fashion

For most of human history, the clothes on people's backs were made locally. Often, they were customized by artisans who spent their lifetimes honing their craft. This was highly laborious and time-consuming, but there weren't many alternatives.

The Industrial Revolution brought about a number of innovations that revolutionized fashion. Chief among them was the sewing machine, which was patented in 1846 and soon catalyzed both a rapid fall in the cost of making clothes and a huge increase in the scale of clothing manufacturing. But it wasn't until after World War II that the nexus of making clothes shifted from homes and small workshops to larger factories that produced standardized clothing that had become appealing to typical consumers thanks to the war.

Partly in an effort to reject the sartorial traditions of older generations, young people began to embrace cheaply made clothing that they felt was trendier and more expressive of their identities. Meanwhile, some fashion houses sought to slash the time needed for a garment to go from a designer's brain to a customer's closet. Globalization and industrialization enabled the rise of complex, international supply chains that allowed brands to take advantage of international differences in labor and business conditions to quickly make cheap clothing that resonated with customers.

This all gave rise to the concept of "fast fashion," which is now a dominant force in the global fashion industry. Fast fashion describes a business model focused on quickly mass-producing clothing at a low cost to meet ever-shifting demand. Fast fashion items often sell for a fraction of the price of comparable products, but while they might be cheap on your wallet, they come at a high cost.

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The Costs Of Fast Fashion

Fast fashion inflicts massive environmental and social costs that are borne most acutely by people involved in the industry but to a larger extent across the globe. Millions of workers (some of whom are children) in poorer countries toil under brutal working conditions with low pay (often illegally low) to quickly make products that retailers might only sell for a few weeks and then discard. A typical workplace environment is a windowless room with the air full of fumes from the chemicals used to manufacture and dye clothing.

Fast fashion perpetuates a culture of disposable consumerism in which consumers chase the latest trends and constantly discard items that are no longer in style. If you don't have a closet full of cheap clothing that you hardly wear and will likely toss in a landfill soon after purchase, you likely know some people whose closets look that way.

Americans buy tens of billions of garments every year and, on average, throw about 76 pounds of clothes and shoes away every year. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the average person bought 60% more clothing in 2014 than in 2000.

Meanwhile, less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new garments. As a result, one garbage truck of clothes is burned or landfilled every second, and humans waste enough clothing to fill the Empire State Building 1.5 times every day. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new garments, and every year, some $500 billion in value is lost due to clothing that is barely worn, not donated, recycled, or ends up in a landfill.

All of those cheaply made sweaters and jeans exact a terrible toll on the planet. Synthetic fibers release microplastics that disrupt a variety of bodily systems in humans and many other species. Approximately 35% of all microplastics^[1] come from synthetic fibers used in textile production. Of the total fiber input used around the world for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill.

Plus, many of those cheaply made garments require a lot of water. It takes about 10,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of conventional cotton. A typical cotton shirt requires roughly 3,000 liters of water, which is enough to quench one person's thirst for almost three years. Every year, the fashion industry uses almost 100 billion cubic meters of water.

Cotton is probably not the worst environmental culprit within the fashion industry. Chemical leaching and excess water use are problematic, but carbon emissions are the most worrisome dimension of fast fashion's environmental impact. Fast fashion is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, which is more than all international flights and the maritime shipping industry combined.

All in all, fast fashion is highly polluting and detrimental. It encourages customers to treat their clothes disposably, meaning they often end up saving little to no money while imposing immense costs that they're often hidden from.

But fashion doesn't have to be this way. As accidents like the Bangladesh factory building collapse and growing awareness of environmental degradation put a spotlight on the flaws of fast fashion, some brands are leading the industry toward a cleaner future.

Looking Inward To Cut Emissions Without Sacrificing Growth

Far too often, the fashion industry prioritizes cutting costs without cutting emissions. As a planet-conscious apparel brand, MATE wants to do both. The brand is constantly scrutinizing its production process to find ways to both cut costs and cut emissions. As Cobian reiterated, the insights from that internal analysis can help shift their business practices.

"It was a big insight for us that anywhere from 20% to 30% of (our) overall emissions are coming from the dye. I think that is maybe an under-discussed topic in the industry. People are really focused on materials…but the energy use required to dye the fabric is huge. If companies are striving, as we are, for these really ambitious product emission reductions and (move) forward with an undyed product, that could be in contrast to what your customer wants."

MATE's analysis revealed that the majority of its carbon impact comes from fabrication and dye whereas very little comes from cutting, sewing, and packaging. Cobian sees an opportunity to drastically slash emissions by getting renewable energy into its fabric mills and dye houses.

However, unless customers suddenly express a preference for undyed cotton and linen, this implies that there are limits under the current production paradigm to how much MATE can slash product emissions. In essence, processes like LCA help brands like MATE categorize the factors they can change internally versus those that require some external change.

Similarly to other industries, the fashion industry's supply chain is complex. It's hard for an individual player to make and sell apparel that's fully removed from some of the industry's supply chain issues.

But that complexity is precisely what drew Cobian to work for MATE. He recognized that working in the fashion industry would enable him to move "light and fast" on these issues and affect change quickly. As Cobian recounts, the apparel supply chain is known as one of the world's most complex, leading to a lot of environmental degradation. This gives Cobian an opportunity as MATE's sustainability manager to tangibly help mitigate some of those supply chain issues for a brand that has a sustainability focus in its DNA.

One of his key goals as part of MATE's sustainability efforts is to reduce the company's emissions as the company grows. Across almost all industries and countries, for that matter, emissions tend to rise as companies and economies grow. Some service-oriented firms (such as Big Tech giants) can grow sales while cutting emissions largely because they have much lighter physical footprints and don't need to create a physical product to make money. For instance, Google did this by switching its massive server farms to renewable energy.

For a company like MATE that has to sell a physical product to make money, this is a much bigger challenge. It requires lowering the carbon intensity of its products (basically the amount of carbon emissions needed to generate a given unit of product). Decoupling revenue growth from emissions growth would be a massive achievement for a brand like MATE.

Cobian sees different ways to meet this goal, from using factories powered by renewable energy to increasing the recycled content of MATE products to capturing more content that has already been put out into the world (i.e., post-consumer waste and post-industrial waste). It won't be easy, but these are the exact sorts of ambitious problems Cobian wants to solve. And he sees opportunities to amplify MATE's impact by looking horizontally across the fashion industry to literally fix the supply chain from the ground up.  

"We're seeing really strong opportunities in working with other brands. We're working with a coalition of brands to source Farm Forward, (which means we will) commit to a group of farms, pay them a premium, and commit to cotton before it's ever planted in the ground. (We will) help them transition towards carbon farming or regenerative practices that reduce soil erosion, reduce emissions, build soil diversity, and increase soil health."

Furthermore, MATE is in the process of obtaining a B Corp certification, which both reflects the company's sincere sustainability efforts to this point and will benefit their sustainability efforts going forward. Cobian is excited about the prospect of working for a B Corp but stresses that MATE won't get complacent as a result of obtaining that certification.

"I think that it's one thing to be certified, and it's another thing to make goals and strive towards improving that (B Corp) score year on year. And then I'm really looking forward to promoting that score and that change in score year on year to our customers and showing a growth curve on how we're measuring through B Corp and how we improve that score."