Value, Values, and Accessibility - #WisdomWednesday with Loop - January '26

Value, Values, and Accessibility

The 2026 Paradox: Can Sustainability Ever Be for Everyone?

A client at our Studio recently asked me a question that's been echoing in my mind:  " I believe in what you do, but if sustainable things are always more expensive, how does this ever become the norm?"

It's the central, aching paradox for anyone trying to build a responsible business in 2026.

We champion ethical fabrics and fair wages - real costs that demand fair prices. Yet, those very prices can feel like a velvet rope, excluding the many people we hope to inspire towards a more conscious lifestyle. The mission risks becoming a luxury.

The intelligence sees this. The intelligence asks: If the goal is to protect the planet, why make anything at all?

“You can buy garbage at every price point.”

Image: Business of Fashion

This tension is sharpened by another hard truth: a high price tag is no longer a guarantee of quality or ethics. The recent revelations of sweatshop conditions in Italy - supplying vaunted houses like Loro Piana and Armani - shatter the myth that luxury inherently means integrity. A recent New York Times essay by Isabel Cristo summed it up with the perfect, devastating line:  "You can buy garbage at every price point."

If you can't trust a €5,000 cashmere coat to be ethically made, and a €50 polyester blazer is destined for landfill, where does that leave us? Where does that leave the idea of  value ?

This isn't a puzzle with a neat solution. It's a complex system to be interrogated. That's why I've been guided lately by writer George Saunders, discussing Chekhov: 

"Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly."

My role, I believe, is not to preach from a brand pedestal with easy answers. It's to be a  critical participant-observer  - to help “formulate the problem correctly” from inside the system. The goal of #WisdomWednesday this year is to hold this paradox up to the light, examine its facets, and invite you to look with me.

Image: Loop Swim

A few books that framed my thinking for 2026

• On Systems & Service:
  Who is Government? by Michael Lewis 
  
  A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern
  
  
• On The Forces Shaping Us:
  Empire of AI by Karen Hao (the essential tech read)
  
  Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (on social media's architects)
  
  
• On Craft & Process:
  Prospect: An Artist's Journey by Anne Truitt
  
  Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten
  
  
• Fictional Worlds, Real Questions:
  The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz
  
  Playground by Richard Powers (on legacy, memory, and human systems)

So, here is the question I'm holding in 2026, and I'd love to know what you think:  How do we build brands whose true value - in craft, ethics, and longevity - is so undeniable that their price becomes a conversation about collective investment, rather than personal exclusion?

The answer might not be a single product, but a better, shared story.

Itee 🩵
Loop Co-founder