Full Disclosure in Eco-Fashion
When you’re shopping for clothes, do you ever look at the price tag and think, Sweet mother! Is this thing made of spun gold? What could possibly justify this price? Well one fashion retailer, Honest by, is trying to bring the hidden infrastructure behind fashion costs to the forefront with a shocking amount of transparency. You’ll never look at your closet the same way again.
Honestyby.com was created by Bruno Pieters with the goal of fully communicating the fashion market supply chain so that shoppers can know the full story behind what they are buying. As the About page states,
Those we collaborate with share their personal production information from yarn and button origin to fabric and manufacturing details; information which honest by then communicates to the client. Every part of the collaboration process is transparent including the store mark up calculations. In communicating all information regarding a garments production process; Honest by wants to shed light on the questions: where is it made and by whom.
For instance, if you were to click on the Men’s Recycled Wool Caban Coat pictured above, you could scroll to the bottom and click on Material Information where you would see the name of the company that spun the wool, the company that certified the organic bias tape, the printer who printed the bag that the extra buttons come in, and even the info for the safety pin supplier.
Click on Manufacturing Details and you learn that Mr. Yvan Vanbockryck is the owner of the factory that made this coat. His 24 employees took 20 minutes to cut out the fabric for 13 of these coats, took 68 minutes to assemble them, and 12 minutes to iron them. That’s on top of the 32 hours and 4 fittings it took just to design the coat.
Click on Price Calculation and you can find out the wholesale cost of each yard of fabric, stitch of thread, button, even the hang tag and size label. You then can see the markup and what that markup affords (like the salary of the person who has to enter in all of this information).
Finally, click on Carbon Footprint and you can see that making this coat produced 4.74kg of CO2 and a handy reference of how that stacks up against driving a car or just turning of a lightbulb.
This may be an example of extreme transparency, but in a world where everyone knows about sweatshops and unfair labor practices, yet no one knows how to avoid them, this type of honesty is refreshing. Buyers of the Honest by fashions have the opportunity to purchase something that hardly any of us ever will – full knowledge of exactly what went into the making of that product.