Leila Ganisheva

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People

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The People Pillar

The People pillar’s main focus is people, from the customers to the designers, and how the companies communicate with their consumers.

Who are Gen Z’s?

To build a successful business model it is vital to research your customer base. One way of categorizing your customer group demographically is through generations. There is no exact agreement on when exactly the Millennial generation stop and Gen Z starts, however usually demographers refer to Gen Z when talking about the people born in the early to mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Gen Z is the first generation of consumers to have been raised in an entirely post-digital era. For Gen Z technology and social media is an inevitable part of their daily lives (Fromm, Read 2018). Therefore, social media has become one of the main tools when marketing to Gen Z. Each generation has a common set of values that affects their behaviors, one such value for Gen Z is human equality. With social media, they started to get more control over huge companies through cancel culture. When a fashion business uses some practices that don’t align with their beliefs, they use social media to spread the information and ‘cancel’ the brand for unethical behavior.

How to Attract Gen Z?

To attract Gen Z many brands have started using different social media platforms, such as TikTok. Companies started to hop on the latest trends to get their items viral on TikTok. In the summer of 2020, Cottage Core gained massive popularity on TikTok which helped Lirika Matoshi’s strawberry dress reach large amounts of sales. However, as the TikTok trend cycle is short, the brand didn’t keep up with it. After fast fashion dupes started to appear online, customers started to move on. To hold Gen Z customers’ attention companies have to show more personality to build a strong online figure that wouldn’t need to hop on every trend (Criales-Unzueta, 2021).

Lirika Matoshi Strawberry Dress

Savage X Fenty as an Example of a Successful Diverse Brand

As human equality is one of the values shared by Gen Z, diversity is vital when building a corporate culture and image. One brand that has succeeded in creating an ethical and diverse image is Savage x Fenty. When Rihanna launched Savage X Fenty in 2018, her collection already featured bras in sizes ranging from 30A to 46DDD (McKinnon, 2022). Savage X Fenty fashion shows feature models with curvy hips, tattoos, shaved heads, and prosthetic legs. The brand has gained a large audience by creating a positive diverse image and contrasting with brands such as Victoria’s Secret which has been lacking in representation and diversity and dropping in sales (Fernandez, 2020).

Savage X Fenty Spring 2019

Important Skills for Running a Fashion Business

For each brand to be successful it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of your customers, therefore research skills are vital for running a fashion business. By being able to find customers’ deepest wishes and by quickly reacting to them, brands can build customer loyalty and trust which would make them willing to purchase new products that would be coming out. Another important skill to have is collaboration skill. There are many successful examples of brands collaborating with other designers or artists that achieved cult status. A perfect example is Vintage Louis Vuitton Takashi Murakami bags, which were first released as part of the Spring/Summer 2003 collection under then-creative director Marc Jacobs (Mondalek, 2021). In an age of social media, it is natural that brands have started to share more ideas which leads to them gaining attention and recognition in the fashion and art industry. 

  • References:
  • Erica Kagan: Takashi Murakami x Louis Vuitton: The Fashion Collaboration That Defined A Generation (2022). Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/takashi-murakami-x-louis-vuitton-the-fashion-collaboration-that-defined-a-generation

Images Sources:

  1. https://lirikamatoshi.com/products/strawberry-midi-dress-black?_pos=2&_sid=9e195c2ce&_ss=r
  2. Getty Images
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Planet

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The Planet Pilar

The fashion industry has been called one of the most polluting industrial sectors. It has a long supply chain consisting of a variety of production steps, with each of them harming the environment due to water, material, chemical, and energy use. As fast fashion has gained massive popularity since the early 2000s, fashion brands are now producing almost twice the amount of clothing today compared with before the year 2000 (Niinimäki., Peters, G, Dahlbo, H. et al., 2020). The planet pilar’s main focus is to understand how exactly the fashion industry is affecting the environment in order to build a strategy that would limit the amounts of textile waste and pollution.

Vogue Portugal September 2019

Circular economy

The circular economy is a model where products, components, and materials continually flow re-entering the production cycle which decreases the effect of a company’s operation on the ecosystem. This simple definition can be further explained by four main principles:

  • Focus on green technologies and minimize the use of raw materials.
  • Maximization of the utilization rate of assets.
  • Circulate flows of products and materials at the highest rate.
  • Minimization of negative environmental externalities. (Tonelli, Cristoni, 2018)

Environment-conscious economists insist that the traditional linear economy has to be replaced by a circular economy due to the linear model’s implication of using natural resources in an unsustainable way and producing large quantities of toxic waste which creates pollution thereby negatively impacting the environment (Jørgensen, Petersen, 2018).

Sustainability in relation to fashion

The process of sustainability persuades the fashion industry to change and turn into something that would be less damaging and polluting, and more efficient. A more sustainable approach can be achieved by a series of small changes made by fashion brands (Fletcher, Grose, 2012). One perfect example of a brand adopting a more sustainable approach is PANGAIA. Launched in 2018, it generated $75 million in revenue in 2020 (Nanda, 2021). PANGAIA follows a variety of eco-friendly practices but what made it stand out the most is the next-generation sustainable materials created by its group of biologists and scientists. Examples of the materials produced by PANGAIA include FLWRDWN which is made using a combination of wildflowers, a bio polymer, and aerogel (pangaia.com).

pangaia.com

Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to create solutions to massive problems such as poverty, hunger, and climate change by 2030. One SDG that has a massive impact on the fashion industry is Goal 12: ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. In today’s world of fast fashion, the wasteful and polluting impacts of the industry are set to dramatically increase by 2050 (Ellen Macarthur foundation, 2017), therefore it is extremely important to make changes now.

Sustainable Development Goals-the United Nations

References

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