Sustainability has become a bit of a trend in recent years, with many people making a conscious effort to reduce the impact that their lifestyle has on the planet. With more and more people cutting meat out of their diet, vegan and vegetarian alternatives are becoming much more readily available. Yet despite the increasing demand for more sustainable and affordable fashion options, there really aren't that many out there. As a teenager myself, who doesn't have lots of money to spend on expensive clothes from ethical brands, searching for affordable yet environmentally friendly clothes that I would actually wear has been a challenge. There just really are not that many brands to choose from. And despite wanting to be more ethical in our choices, that's why many of us just resort back to fast fashion.
The lack of affordable and trendy options isn't even the only issue when searching for sustainable clothing. Many companies aren't even authentically ethical, and use a marketing strategy called 'Greenwashing' to promote false sustainability in order to attract attention. Greenwashing is used by organisations to deceptively persuade the public that their product is sustainable, and can be hard to spot at first glance. In a world where many of us are desperate to do our part in saving the planet, It's a trap that's easy to fall into, with huge businesses using this exact strategy very successfully.
In my search for sustainable clothing, I came across Lucrezia (or Lucrezia Chloe as she is known online), a teenager from the UK who created her own sustainable clothing brand at only sixteen years old. Despite growing up in London, she now lives in Dubai where she is a full time A-Level student. As well as having started her own brand and managing school work, Lucrezia also has a successful youtube channel with over 50k subscribers where she posts health, lifestyle, sustainability and fashion content. Her ethical clothing brand, TATO, sells tote bags and t-shirts (which are now completely sold out!) that are vegan, carbon neutral and made from 100% organic cotton.
"TATO was a huge passion project for me, and it is an ethical and sustainable clothing line I started when I was 16. I was really frustrated by the fact that there were very few sustainable options for clothes I actually wanted to wear and, as i kept educating myself about sustainability and the clothing industry, I wanted to play my part by providing people with a more ethical way to dress." Lucrezia adds.
The lack of ethical, yet trendy clothing options on the market lead Lucrezia to create her own brand in order to fill that gap.
"As I said, my inspiration came from the fact that I did not see many options for teenagers like me who wanted to wear nice clothes whilst also caring for the planet. Although we’ve only released a few products so far, I really hope to develop the brand and expand it to get it to where I want to be in terms of both looks and sustainability because ethical clothing is the only way forward!"
But starting a clothing brand is no small feat, especially at such a young age. Ensuring that each stage of the creation process is sustainable, from production to packaging is highly complicated, so much so that many brands struggle to remain completely carbon neutral. As a consumer, there are many elements to the process that we often don't even think about.
"The process began with trying to find manufacturers which were actually ethical, which was in itself a challenge. I ended up choosing a company based in London to reduce the carbon footprint of the garments, and I loved the fact that they were certified climate neutral. I then worked on the designs, had various samples go back and forth, and launched with t-shirts as the first product!"
"Packaging was a huge concern for a brand like ours because so many clothing businesses produce a lot of waste in the form of packaging. We were able to find ways to package our garments in completely recycled *and* recyclable materials which was definitely difficult and more expensive, but we could not compromise on reducing our waste."
"There're so many things we did not think about at the start which weren’t immediately obvious however we always tried to do our best to find viable solutions which did not compromise our morals. For example, we found out early on that the thread to embroider clothes is often made with non-vegan dyes. In the end we found manufactures who could use completely vegan threads, but this is definitely not something I had thought of at the start and it would have been easy to cut corners if we did not value the brand’s ethical and sustainable ethos."
And obviously at sixteen years old, a clothing brand is even harder to manage, especially when trying to balance it with school and your personal life. And unfortunately, young people aren't considered with as much respect as they should be.
"To a certain extent yes (it was more difficult as a young person) because as I was communicating with brands and manufacturers I think a lot of them were surprised to hear my age, and I don’t know whether that made me seem less credible in their eyes. However, if anything, I just saw it is even more of a challenge to succeed and try to make my vision a reality despite my age."
"It was definitely hard to manage everything at the same time especially because at the time when TATO first launched I was doing my GCSE exams so there was a lot going on in my life! I would also call myself a perfectionist so I always want to make sure that whatever I am doing is done to an excellent standard, so time management is again the most important way in which I was able to get everything done in time and to balance all my hobbies and side hustles with school and exams."
Her 52.2k YouTube subscribers and 25.5k Instagram followers definitely helped with the growth of TATO with fellow sustainability and lifestyle YouTubers such as Ruby Granger and Isla Brewer promoting the brand.
"Having a small platform online without a doubt helped the initial growth of my brand and helped to get my products out there because I already had a loyal following who was excited about TATO and was willing to support it. I really couldn’t be more grateful for that and I know that having that initial platform of unwavering support definitely helped me out as a young entrepreneur!"
I was curious to hear if Lucrezia was planning on continuing to build the brand in the future or if this was just a stepping stone to a bigger goal in her life.
"I would love to continue to expand TATO in the future. We have been out of stock for months now, and for the last year or so things have been paused with the brand. The reason for that is that I recently relocated to Dubai which has a very different postal system to the UK and, since I was managing all the postal and packaging process myself, it would be impossible to do that from a country which is so far from where the majority of my audience is based. I will wait to be back in the UK for university to continue working on TATO, bring out more products and hopefully grow even more to the point where we can make sustainable fashion accessible to more and more people!"
And as a young person who has successfully made her own clothing brand completely carbon neutral and environmentally friendly, Lucrezia is proof that it is totally possible, and not a distant dream. Other businesses should work towards following in her footsteps.
"Recently I’ve seen a lot of green washing in the fashion industry, which is when companies are profiting off of the fact that sustainability is a very popular term right now and many people are looking to buy more ethically. It’s somewhat misleading for consumers because a lot of the products which are branded as ethical or sustainable are actually quite the opposite. Instead, I think that brands need to focus on reducing the amount of clothing items they are creating every single year because that is what is creating a wastage of resources in the world. The mindset of the fashion industry needs to move away from its current fast and rapid nature and instead towards seeing garments as a lifelong purchases which we will reuse many times. Firms also need to make sure their products are being made in factories which treat their workers fairly and pay their workers a fair wage - even if that does mean higher prices for their clothes."
Thanks so much to Lucrezia for taking part in this interview. If you are interested in seeing more, then make sure to follow @lucreziachloe and @tato.co on Instagram or 'Lucrezia Chloe' on YouTube by clicking the link below.
Lucrezia's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmNumAL7rbXCD_VfYjeDocA
Interview and article by @poppymaeg
All photos from @lucreziachloe on Instagram
Comentários