Summary
An ecommerce platform that empowers fashion consumers to compost their owned products at their End of Use to then become a soil nutrient.
Description
Description
To create a new fashion ecosystem we start with understanding the customer need, use ecommerce technologies to reach the target, and integrate to optimize the customer experience. Next, we introduce biotextiles such as labgrown leather to the customers optimizing the CX using immersive experiences. The customer can now pre-order their product. In the meantime from pre-order to delivery the customer stays engaged with the process by introducing edutainment about the product (meet the makers etc.).
Who will take these actions?
Materials Scientists, bioengineers, green chemists who have developed bio-textiles
Fashion designers (the glue between bio-textiles and customers)
garment workers (paid work alleviates poverty)
customers - we need to understand how they adopt new ways of buying, using, and discarding their clothes (etc.)
municipalities offering compost facilities should customers not have them at home
What are the projected costs?
The project comes in different phases of which the first is focused on customers to find out their needs. This mostly requires a research team to collect data.
The next phase is to focus on the designers to find how they best collaborate with biotextile designers (scientists) to know what kind of products can be made with said material systems.
Following is to focus on the scientists to learn how they become suppliers of this new fashion system.
The majority of the costs are time and work from a team of behavioral researchers (salary costs TBD depending on timeline and deliverables)
Timeline
August 2020 - established company Positive Fibers with the mission to put the ECO into ecommerce (launched at the Founder Institute virtually based out of Silicon Valley and London)
December 2020 - launched brand awareness campaign
May 2021 - launch first 100% compostable garment with a 1 month lead time from the day of pre-sale.
June 2021 - deliver first batch to customers
About the author(s)
I'm Dutch, trained as a linear economist in Denmark, but have been re-educating myself to understand how the worlds of Science (specifically Materials and Biology) and Art must come together to create "aesthetics with ethics". Today I'm the CEO of Positive Fibers, a fast growing startup on a mission to put the ECO into ecommerce by making compostable fashion without compromising on great design. As a former fast fashion consumer myself, I have learnt that if I can completely change my consumer behavior everyone can. I'm an active member at the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion (UCRF), an ambassador for human rights through Justice in Fashion, and mostly a radical optimist about fashion being able to catalyze the circular bio-economy as consumption is here to stay. I have an alter ego called the Circular Fashion Detective which is eponymous to my blog where I report on all things bio-circular fashion and how to avoid greenwashing.
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