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#WISDOMWEDNESDAY WITH LOOP - JUNE '24

June 25 2024

A Dose of Eco Wisdom Every Wednesday

☀️ Dear Loop fam, as promised, on the last Wednesday of each month we will recap all insights from our weekly 🧠WISDOM WEDNESDAY🧩 posts right here in an article so they are all archived for you if you want to spread the word.

Thank you again for being here and welcome to our monthly round-up - this time for the month of June.

#WisdomWednesday 06.05

For June’s first WISDOM WEDNESDAY, World Environment Day (June 5) and World Ocean Day (June 8) we shared a brilliant video by our co-founder, Heather Kaye, which explains how the fashion industry directly impacts life below water.

Life Below Water is a part of UN’s SDGs (United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals). It is SDG #14, and it aims to prevent and reduce marine pollution significantly by 2025.

So, what’s the problem? Watch now to understand and take daily actions to help reduce marine pollution.

Loop Co-founder, Heather Kaye

You can read more about UN SDG #14 - Life Below Water here.

🏝️We also shared some photos of Loop fan, Ha Chuong, in her Loop Swim bathing suit at the Sun and Sea Opera in Singapore! The setting of the opera is a beach where the vacationers contemplate their lives and how climate change has affected it. It won the top prize at the Venice Biennale and had a successful run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has been hailed as “one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years.”

Loop’s first opera appearance and a noteworthy message - we're thrilled! 🤩👇🏽

Ha Chuong in Loop Swim at the Sun and Sea Opera, Singapore

Image Courtesy Ha Chuong

#WisdomWednesday 06.12

This week our WISDOM WEDNESDAY was an ode to a bastion of sustainable fashion and founder of eponymous label, Mara Hoffman, who shuttered her brand after 24 years. Founded in 1999 Mara Hoffman’s namesake brand of brightly patterned swim and resort wear was one of our earliest inspirations for Loop.

Mara Hoffman won the CFDA Award for Environmental Sustainability in 2023

In 2014 she pivoted the label towards being completely sustainable. She overhauled production, fabric, and raw material choices, and brought fully recyclable and fair-trade garments to the frontline of fashion. A female founder with an incredible work ethic who was never shy of making tough choices, she went from being an inspiration to a role model for us at Loop. In 2023 she won the CFDA Award for Environmental Sustainability following powerhouses like Patagonia and the United Nations for her contributions to sustainable fashion. The news of her closure a mere six months after the win lay bare the weight and complexities of bringing about a genuine transformation in our industry.

🧩 One of the biggest pieces of the sustainability puzzle for independent brands like hers (and ours) is figuring out how to tackle the issue of over-production. We have talked at length about how fast fashion brands overproduce and literally dump billions of cheap garments each year - first into their stores and finally into our landfills. When brands try to solve this issue by producing less but better-quality garments the price reflects the relationship to this value - that things have value. As simple as it may sound, it is a very tough code to crack in the current fashion and economic climate.

We recommend reading Mara’s letter published on her website, and a bonus read of the comments on Vogue’s Instagram coverage of a string of recent closures of similar brands – the comments from discerning readers and customers are not to be missed!

#WisdomWednesday 06.19

This week the spotlight was on one of the biggest issues in our industry - OVERPRODUCTION. We have talked a lot about how many garments are produced, purchased, and finally, how many end up in landfills around the world each day. Following up on this and the recent closures of a slew of small sustainable labels we wanted you to find out how much overproduction are we really talking about?

🛍️ On average the most successful fast fashion brands like Zara will bring new items to their stores every Thursday evening for weekend shoppers and their average time for an item from design-to-retail is about 5 weeks. The new “Ultra-Fast Fashion” brands like Shein and Temu have completely upended this already unrealistic timeline. Clothes are now being made at an unprecedented rate - see below stats and infographic to assess the scale of the issue.

Image Courtesy Vox Media

😨 Gap – 12,000 styles per year.

😰 H&M – 25,000 styles per year

😱 Zara – 40,000 styles per year

🤯 Shein – 1.5 MILLION styles per year

These are not the number of items produced, but just the number of styles (Nov 2023). Now multiply this with sizes and colors in each style to understand the volume of clothing being pushed down to the consumer with the narrative that it is, according to Temu’s Superbowl ad, helping us “shop like a billionaire!” 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

So, what is the answer to this problem of overproduction in an industry (and the world at large) that only values cash profits and not the longevity of products it creates? We have heard a lot about what consumers can do, but our co-founder, Heather Kaye, shared the idea of 📉 DEGROWTH ↘️ with us. Degrowth is a systemic change that can be applied to fashion companies and offers a chance for a full reset. Read our piece to understand more.

That's it for 🧠WISDOM WEDNESDAY🧩 for June and we will see you back here in July! We know that you align with our goal to reduce the impact of our consumption patterns by making better informed choices and we hope to help you with this - one #WisdomWednesday at a time. Please connect with us on Instagram @loopswim for weekly updates.