2019 saw a number of new initiatives launched at Adore Me. 2020 is when many of these will hopefully explode to life in a valiant effort to fight off the forces transforming the industry (Facebook! VS Discounts!). When the hard work quietly done will hopefully pay off and the puzzle pieces will fit together.
This made me think about how bamboo grows.
I know we’ve all been recently hearing about bamboos 😀, but a bamboo forest’s growth trajectory is really quite something.
Let’s first look at an individual plant:
For the first three years of a bamboo plant’s life there is no sign of life above ground. Underground, however, a complex root system is developing, gathering nutrients and preparing to explode when ready. Then, in its fourth spring, a little shoot will pierce through the ground.
And then it’s off to the races. It’s officially the fastest growing plant on earth.
Bamboo can grow up to its full height within 60 days, growing up to 2.91 feet in a single day, or 1.5 inches an hour! After three long years of patient, quiet, diligent, invisible growth, the bamboo stalk shoots up like a geyser.
And that’s just the individual plant. The entire forest is a spectacular thing as well.
The way bamboo spreads means a bamboo forest can double in size in just one year: The entire system is connected. It’s how roots can remain hidden underground that long but still obtain chlorophyll from the overall ecosystem. The group growth rate of bamboo is so strong and fast, it’s why the plant has often been thought of as a weed when it enters into an ecosystem, unplanned.
Years of invisible hard work, then the fastest growing plant on earth. An ecosystem that multiplies thanks to its vast interconnectedness.
I’ll just leave it there.
Happy night-before the ELDF Challenge,
Ranjan
WHAT WE’RE READING
Zara’s ‘sustainable’ hoodie is anything but
A brutal takedown of Zara’s sustainability efforts, covering how Swiss investigators followed the money through a sweatshirt’s supply chain.
Stella McCartney’s Vogue Cover: How The Designer Became Fashion’s Conscience
This month’s Vogue features the sustainable fashion icon Stella McCartney on the cover, with a piece that begins with McCartney saying, “I’m so off my tits on coffee.” It’s a great piece covering both her career and life story, as well as the progress of the sustainable fashion movement since the 1990s.
Why Do We Still Know So Little About How Our Clothes Are Made?
Another piece from the Vogue edition which explores the current state of fashion supply chain transparency.
Dressing sustainably is almost impossible as a plus size woman
Blogger Stephanie Yeboah on the challenges of dressing ethically as a plus size woman.
TECHNOLOGY
Unmade: Is on-demand fashion the key to sustainability?
Kirsty Emery-Laws, co-founder of the fashion software platform Unmade, discusses how on-demand is one key to fashion sustainability:
the supply chain of the industry is still a legacy supply chain, which hasn’t really changed much since the late 1980s to early 90s with globalisation, where a lot of production moved to the Far East, with two production areas really concentrating on unit costs and high volume. Supply chain and infrastructure has long lead-times to get unit costs down – so we are still working with that.
At the front of the industry, everything is moving very quickly, so there’s a complete disconnect between the front and back end. On-demand is a way of bringing those two sides closer together, so they can work in unison and appropriately.
Zara Owner Adopts Sewn-In Tags and Other Ways to Track and Slash Inventory
Zara claims to be leveraging technology to battle oversupply (as a reference point, H&M holds over $4bn in unsold inventory).
“Our business model has always been based on very low inventory,” Inditex Chairman Pablo Isla said on a conference call. “Thanks to RFID and full stock integration, now we are able to run the company with even less.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here’s Who Has the Greenest Cloud
We often forget that every time we refresh Instagram, there is a tiny carbon cost. This newsletter mostly covers the visible elements of sustainable fashion, but any large-scale cloud computing effort, even ecommerce, carries a carbon cost as well. Sorry Bogdan!
This WIRED piece does a good job explaining exactly what the carbon footprint of digital bits looks like, as well as how the big cloud players are doing.
This App Is The Google Of Vintage Shopping
Go to gem.app and click around. It’s a really well done (and fast) visual search engine that scours ebay and other resale sites.
Above is a screenshot from searching “adore me” and it does turn out some people are selling used bras on ebay.
A VIDEO
This six-minute NY Times video captures the entire crisis in recycling incredibly well. For a longer, newsletter-y version I had previously written on the problem, click here.
