“Ethical fashion” and “fast fashion” have become antithetical in the $2.5 trillion fashion industry. The latter seemingly has two identities; on one side of the debate, it’s an economic wunderkind, easily outpacing sales growth from traditional fashion brands. At the same time, it's become the poster child for unethical and unsustainable manufacturing practices. Soko, an artisan-made jewelry brand, is out to bridge the gap.
Gwen Floyd (right), cofounder of Soko, pictured with Verolyne Akoth, one of Soko's production field officers.
“We want to create an ethical fashion landscape where shoppers can buy ethically by default,” says Gwen Floyd, co-founder of Soko. “We don't need to make choices between our wallets and our values.”
It’s more than just a warm and fuzzy idea: Soko’s stackable rings and statement earrings, made from materials including reclaimed brass and locally-sourced cattle horns, are handcrafted by over 2,000 artisans in Kenya before they end up at chic retailers including Nordstrom, Reformation and Goop.
With a background in design and technology solutions for emerging economies, Floyd didn’t exactly start out with dreams of disrupting the fashion industry by making ethical accessories from Africa. Instead, Soko started from an idea for building peace in the Middle East.
Designing for social change
While running her own design consultancy, where she worked with major brands including eBay and Nike and helped take on serious social issues—like developing a communication infrastructure to support democratic dialogue in Cuba—Floyd got stuck on an idea. “I started understanding that not only have we created a legacy of horrible infrastructure, waste and technology that's dependent on non-renewable resources, but that there was this amazing opportunity to leapfrog some of the mistakes we've made in our part of the world in emerging economies, where we could use technology in innovative ways,” Floyd explains.
As the thought percolated, Floyd began working on two proposals for peace building in Afghanistan. “Oftentimes there’s unrest because there's not distributed income,” Floyd explains. “In those communities, it’s especially hard for women to be able to earn money in ways that don't threaten the social order." Floyd started exploring how mobile technology (access to mobile phones is surprisingly common in the developing world) could create a marketplace “almost like an Etsy,” she explains. Cell phones, she understood, had serious untapped potential—they could provide access to a marketplace, infrastructure for payments and a means to transform livelihoods, especially for women.
Floyd's fascination with mobile technology found a purpose when she met Soko's cofounders.
Several months later, Floyd was in Kenya when she met her two co-founders, Ella Peinovich and Catherine Mahugu, who had also been stuck on the idea of using mobile technology to make ethical goods as easy and affordable to buy as an accessory from Zara.
“Much of the African continent is far more technologically-advanced than we are as it relates to mobile technology,” Floyd says. (In Kenya, 80 out of every 100 people have a cellphone, according to data from the World Bank.) “Years before we had Apple Wallet or anything like that, they were transacting primarily on their mobile phone,” she explains.
In 2012, Floyd, Peinovich and Mahugu launched Soko, backed by dollars from social impact venture funds. Soko started out as an Etsy for Africa, Floyd says, evolving to become an empowering brand of jewelry that’s affordable, ethical and instagrammable.
Soko's pieces are handcrafted from reclaimed brass and locally sourced cattle horn.
“Made-in-Africa” goods come with a lot of clichés. “So many of the stories about this environment are like, ‘Oh these poor people. So sad. They’re so helpless and disenfranchised',” says Floyd. That can be misleading, she says—a condescending characterization. “Yes, these communities are super disenfranchised but they’re not helpless—they’re super f-ing smart. These are amazing business people who are incredibly talented. They’re agile and dynamic and can really [successfully] evolve their business and production,” she says.
Soko’s aesthetics try to communicate that level of sophistication; when you don one of Soko’s delicate gold cuffs, polished horn hoops or architecturally-crafted pendants, Floyd hopes you’ll feel instantly chic and empowered by both the cool aesthetic and the story behind it.
Soko's ethical core doesn't come at the expense of an elevated aesthetic.
That’s only the tip of Soko’s iceberg. In addition to creating a marketplace to bring down barriers for artisans in Africa (Soko’s methods are able to quintuple profits for its artisans, according to the company), the founders wanted to disrupt the way the entire fashion industry does business.
Refashioning manufacturing
Building an entirely new type of ethical fashion company had an interesting side effect: it was also fast.
Fast fashion operates by relying on cheap inputs and cheap labor to reach economies of scale. In other words, for companies like Zara or H&M to churn out a gingham, off-the-shoulder top the second it starts trending on Instagram, a lot of corners have to be cut. Floyd and her co-founders call this “the race to the bottom.” “It’s an environment that’s horrible for people—people are being treated as extensions of machines. That’s essentially the model we’ve used to manufacture for 150 years, but [in that time] we’ve learned so much about advanced technology and human development,” she says. “I feel like we’re all going to lose if we [keep going] that way.”
Here’s where the founders' preoccupation with the power of mobile phones comes in. Soko created what they call a “virtual factory model,” to coordinate the made-by-hand production of their 2,000 independent artisans across Kenya. It’s a “real-time, demand-responsive manufacturing model,” Floyd says. The model formalizes the previously invisible and unorganized workforce while also creating a manufacturing model that can respond to changing trends and market demands in as little as two weeks.
Soko’s snappy model can produce over 30,000 pieces a month and counting, the brand says—a game-changer for their business model that means getting stuck with excess inventory or not being able to meet demand are almost non-existent risks. “We feel that this is the secret sauce of our success,” Floyd says. “When people feel meaning, connection and accountability, everything—efficiency, output, drive—skyrockets.”
The result is the utopian dream of “ethical fast fashion,”—an ideology sitting squarely at the intersection of two warring movements: values-based buying and the competition-driving behemoth that is fast fashion. Soko is proving the two trends don't need to be mutually exclusive.
Starting a revolution
Ultimately, Soko’s founders hope their model will catch on. “The industry is literally in crisis, and it's in crisis because our production models no longer fit with our consumption models,” Floyd says. “There's only one way to fix that, and that's to innovate.”
So far, Soko has shared their virtual factory model with 15 other private label brands.
While the impact of one company can be extremely important, moving the dial requires industry-wide change, Floyd says. “It's not just about creating beautiful products out of beautiful materials and stories—innovation and scalability need to be a part of that dialogue,” she says.
Traditionally, aligning your wallet with your values has come at a prohibitive price point for many; the ability to direct dollars towards ethical buys often runs along socioeconomic divides. “I feel like up until now, ethical fashion has been marketed to a very specific genre of 30-year-old white women,” Floyd says. She hopes Soko’s model will help democratize ethical fashion, making ethical buys inclusive for a "racially, ethnically, and geographically-diverse global customer base."
To help accomplish that, Soko is hooking other labels up with their manufacturing network to create more fast—and ethical—fashion brands. “It's been 150 years since the assembly line was created,” she says. “It's time to create more efficient, kinder, smarter, better business.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/macaelamackenzie/2018/06/25/ethical-fast-fashion-is-possible-and-this-women-led-startup-is-proving-it/
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