Lisa Goldsand - Steering the Fashion Industry towards Sustainability

[00:00:15] Adam: Hello, welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:18] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. 

[00:00:27] Adam: And I'm here alongside Dominique, the sustainability expert. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact of their job or community and did something about it.

[00:00:36] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:45] Adam: So whether you're turning in during your ride to work, relaxing at home, or walking through the neighborhood. Today Dominique and I are joined by Lisa Goldsand, founder of Circular Thrift, a convenient clothing pick and drop off service that also does community swap events. 

[00:01:00] Adam: So today we're gonna be talking about sustainability as it relates to fashion. And Lisa, after almost a 20 year career at Abercrombie & Fitch, left to start Circular Thrift. She has a unique blend of decades of corporate experience seeing retail in depth firsthand, and actually I'm really excited to see how you've taken that experience to become something hyperlocal. So Lisa, welcome on the podcast.

[00:01:23] Lisa: Oh my goodness, Adam and Dominique, I'm so glad to be here with you today. This is really fun. I'm already having fun.

[00:01:30] Dominique: Good. Well, I'm so excited that you're here and there's no one better to talk about sustainable fashion from like the small side and the big side of the problem. So I'm very excited.

[00:01:40] Lisa: Okay. Alright. Where do we start? 

[00:01:43] Dominique: I'd love to hear just a little bit of your own journey into how you became aware about sustainability and started caring about this stuff.

[00:01:49] Lisa: Sure. I'll start with a little bit of my backstory that kind of led me to start this crazy, crazy startup about 14 months ago. So I have lived kind of all over the world working in apparel retail operations right out of college. I lived in China in Shanghai and taught English, and I definitely wanted to be in a manufacturing setting just 'cause that was a time when China was really emerging. Its economy was growing so, so fast and there was a ton of opportunity in light industry. And so, after I came back from teaching English for a year, I started working in the garment center in New York. And so I was employed by a very, very large denim manufacturer. So denim, I know we'll probably talk about later, is one of the most tragically impactful products in terms of its production on the environment.

[00:02:48] Lisa: So anyway, that company was one of the largest vendors of denim to Abercrombie. And so I moved to Columbus from West Texas to work for Abercrombie Fitch. And I was with them for 20 years, and they're a great company. I had such a great experience there. I did a lot of change management. I did spent a lot of time in mills, in laundries, in cut and sew factories, really understanding soup to nuts, the whole traditional linear supply chain process, which among sustainability professionals is referred to sometimes as take-make-waste or extractive. And we can, you know, I can share a little bit more about why it's that and what my vision about how we should think about this in the future looks like. 

[00:03:36] Lisa: But, so anyway, one thing I say a lot, and I might as well say it here, recording this podcast with both of you, Adam and Dominique, is I think it's really important to remember that there are no bad actors, like any complicated problem, right? You should probably stop listening to the person who says there's one singular cause of the problem. There's one singular thing that we need to be mad about, and then the problem will be all better, right? And so I have a pretty deep understanding, right, of the fashion supply chain, and it's really complicated, right? So, one thing that we think about, I need to think about when we talk about what the solutions are, is that it's gonna be collaborative, right?

[00:04:21] Lisa: And so I would say that there's a system that makes it really difficult for brands to do something super disruptive and, you know, and move to a much more sustainable way of thinking about, you know, product design, et cetera. But the way in which for-profit companies, publicly traded companies have to function, it makes it tough for real major sustainability, innovation to happen. So I mean, pretty much, I guess if we just get rid of capitalism and the patriarchy, all of our problems will be solved. 

[00:04:50] Dominique: Easy. 

[00:04:51] Lisa: Right. Um, so during my time, at Abercrombie and spending a lot of time in factories even before that, I love how things are put together. You know, I love being able to chase down a process from a macro to a micro level. But from a sustainability standpoint, I definitely sort of felt like I was living two lives. At home, I would compost and my teenage children were so mortified when I would force them to attend their Chinese lessons at Starbucks and we would take our own cups and one said Zach on it, and one said Lee on it, and they're mortified that like they weren't allowed to have actual cup, right? And they'd be like, "nevermind, I don't need anything. I don't need a beverage." You know, very, very sustainable, very aware of what the impact of everything that we do is on the world. 

[00:05:35] Lisa: But it's hard to see that in a big for-profit setting. It's just hard, right? So, after I left Abercrombie, I continued to think about a couple of things. One is I feel as though, especially as it relates to sustainability in fashion, because fashion production really since the eighties has been so globalized, right? 

[00:06:00] Lisa: Regular consumers have a hard time understanding how they can make any kind of a difference 'cause whatever the handful of problems are that you wanna meditate on and talk about, they're pretty far away. They're either enormous or they're pretty far away. That's one thing that I've just continued to think a lot about, knowing that I do see people around me who care very much about many things. And so figuring out how to harness that caring into something that conceivably could move a needle, is something that I found sort of intriguing. I've thought a lot about that. 

[00:06:27] Lisa: And then the second thing that I've taken with me from a couple of decades of experience in big global for-profit companies is, companies that are really successful have one very consistent thing that they share, right? And that is they keep their customer at the center of all of the decisions that they make and at the center of everything that they do. And I think it's really true that if you really looked closely at when a company got even better at doing things or when it lost its way, it's when that relationship with their customer has somehow been damaged or imperiled or strained in any way, right? 

[00:07:05] Lisa: So I really have been thinking about how to take those two things, like the idea that problems in sustainable fashion, problem period, I guess you need to think about who's your customer and really try to think about what problems do they have that you can help them to solve? 

[00:07:23] Lisa: And so those things are what led me to start the crazy labor intensive, but very, very fun startup of Circular Thrift.

[00:07:33] Dominique: Cool That's awesome. I really like what you said about, like, there being no bad actors. I think just like even this podcast, our hope has been taking this topic of climate change and spinning it a little bit to focus on what's being done about it, because it's really easy to discuss what's not being done in the sustainability space. So it's nice to talk about like the positive side of it. 

[00:07:54] Lisa: I'm curious like, from that perspective of knowing there's no bad actors and the problem is really complicated and people need to understand the complexities of situations like this of the world of fashion to really understand why it's so hard to create a change. What's like one thing you wish people knew? Just as a first stepping point to getting into understanding sustainably as waste of fashion.

[00:08:17] Lisa: One thing that I think people should understand is that consumers really do have a lot of power and influence. And the reality is today, and this could change very quickly, right? The reality is today that consumers aren't yet voting with their dollars for something that is sustainable, well ahead of two equal products, and that one's sustainable so I'll go ahead and buy it, right? 

[00:08:45] Lisa: So the reason that's really important is I think the work that all of us face and it may be a brand agnostic work that's kind of where I've been led is we really just need to think about a very simple thing, how to shift consumer behavior. It's the easiest thing in the world, right?

[00:09:01] Dominique: No big deal.

[00:09:03] Lisa: But really once consumers ask the brands that they love to do something different, the brands will. It's just, I think it's very challenging. It can feel frustrating, but it's challenging to expect a brand that's publicly traded, that's for profit, to do the things that have a much longer time horizon than their shareholders are allowing, right? 

[00:09:28] Lisa: If you have a CFO of a large company, successful company and they start the earnings call and say, "Thank you all so much for joining this call. I'm the CFO and I'd like to pledge the next six quarters of degrowth. And the reason we're gonna pledge degrowth is because we are really gonna stop, 'cause we care, and we're going to incorporate only regenerative or recycled raw materials into our supply chain. Hope that's okay with all of you investors, right? And oh, by the way, Dominique, I know you were planning to buy Adam a Fair Isle sweater for Christmas, but do you think you could just plan to give that to him in March because the factory is a little backed up and we would never ever air instead of both that item because that's a 49x carbon footprint, right?" 

[00:10:13] Lisa: That person, that CFO, he or she, they would not have a job at the end of that earnings call, right? And so I think it's really important just to keep all of that in mind, right? The two companies, if you Google for eight seconds, right? Sustainable companies, companies that are doing something, you know, really groundbreaking in circular economy. It's Patagonia and Eileen Fisher. And the things that set those two companies apart from all of the others, is that Patagonia is now owned by an ESG fund, right? So their mission, they are duty bound to do these disruptive things that we, you know, love them for. And Eileen Fisher is privately held and it's easier structurally for those two companies to think much longer term than most of the other brands. 

[00:10:59] Lisa: So I think that's just one thing that I want people to really think about is that how we spend our money and how we think about consumption really can have an impact. It actually really, really can. We're just getting a lot of, we're being fed by our phones, by whatever sources of incoming information we choose or choose not to filter out. We're being counseled to consume, you know, so I think that's just where it gets a little bit tricky.

[00:11:25] Adam: I would love to hear just from your perspective a brief overview of things that a general consumer might not know about the sustainability supply chain. Like what are some of the big hurdles that exist?

[00:11:35] Lisa: So the first thing is how products are designed is really important if you as a consumer wanna think about what's gonna happen when you're done using that product, right? So, in the United States, it's unlikely that there's gonna be some mass EPR, extended producer responsibility legislation, right? So a consumer should think about how many different fibers are in a product that they purchase, right? Because if it's what's referred to as a single substrate, so it can even be a hundred percent poly, but a hundred percent something, right? There's a better chance that that thing will have a recycling channel at some point in the future. Even if the technology's not scaled today, that's one thing that I think a lot of consumers may not know. 

[00:12:20] Lisa: What I think consumers do know, but maybe it would be great if they thought about it a little bit more, right, is that there's just too much shit. There's so much clothing. There's just too much of everything. I think consumers know that it would be great if we all consumed less, but I mean, data shows that, right? Americans shouldn't buy more than five new items a year. New, like produced just for them. And that includes shoes and merino underpants, you know? So that's a big deal, right? if you are a consumer and suddenly you have to think about only buying five new things a year, even if you don't do it starting tomorrow, I think that's a great thing for a consumer to just know and think about, right?

[00:13:02] Dominique: You think about like holidays, you know? Like, let alone thinking about, I just think about like. even just Christmas, you know? Like the buying new things for people and thinking about everyone only need five new things.

[00:13:14] Adam: Yeah. Well also what the impacts would be to the economy if people only bought five new things a year?

[00:13:19] Dominique: Also true. Yeah.

[00:13:20] Adam: How would that affect people's livelihoods and company's ability to thrive and support you know our economy as a whole?

[00:13:28] Dominique: Yeah. And one thing I wanna ask you too is I think I can imagine someone listening and being like, "Wow, okay, great. I'm a consumer and it's really empowering to know that like it is me and in my role as consumer that has a place in the sustainable fashion change." And then they're like, "Okay, I'm gonna start caring. Let's just pretend we're them." You know? And you go online and you start searching for, you see Patagonia so scroll past Eileen Fisher, and you're

[00:13:54] Lisa: Mm-Hmm.

[00:13:55] Dominique: Gonna start looking around for what you need, like the next pair of shoes or something. In the world of greenwashing and some companies knowing they can use the word sustainable because it will sell or can come along with a higher dollar amount, people will pay more for it, how do you advise people to be an educated consumer?

[00:14:13] Lisa: That's such a good question. One thing that I think it's great for people to think about, right, is that, 65 to 70% of all of the resources needed to make something are in that item once the raw materials have been either grown or drilled for and once all of the water and chemicals and other resources have been spent to make the fabric, right? 

[00:14:40] Lisa: That's pretty much the same if you buy a t-shirt at Walmart or at Sack's. So the cost of the item is kind of immaterial, right? So I think as far as consumers being mindful of greenwashing and sort of navigating around that, just purchasing fewer things, certainly fewer new things, regardless of how much money you spend on those things is pretty impactful. 

[00:15:05] Lisa: I think it's really challenging to ask a consumer to know, don't buy something with a plastisol print, or don't buy something that can easily be deconstruct. I mean, let's leave that all for somebody else. I think just being, nobody's saying that we don't love to adorn ourselves. I mean, that's a tale as old as time. Nobody's gonna say, don't care about how you look, don't love how you 

[00:15:26] Lisa: look and 

[00:15:27] Dominique: Don't express yourself.

[00:15:28] Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. But I know that I could do that with a 10th of the objects that I own. 

[00:15:33] Dominique: We've all bought something that we thought was going to bring something to our lives. And then bought it and been like, "Uh, yeah, I was tricked." I am the same or I'm over that thing. And yeah, it's human to know we've experienced it, but it's not, yeah. Like what are we doing it for? 

[00:15:49] Lisa: Totally. I presented the hypothesis of my startup at a sustainability conference in Fort Collins in April of last year and it was absolutely fantastic. Like, these are my people. I had like lived my best life, I didn't wanna leave. But one of the case studies that we did at like a workshop toward the end of the conference was looking at a couple of different business models. One of which was basically we will send you a work suit and when your work suit is worn out we will just send you another one. I do think the idea of like one outfit for infants, like, you know, I think that actually could be really interesting, but maybe not for grownups.

[00:16:26] Dominique: Yeah, so is it safe to say that some things you would be supportive of are shopping for things that are timeless, thrifting, looking at secondhand options and even like renting clothes?

[00:16:37] Lisa: Yeah, I think rental is really interesting, especially for those, you know, occasion outfits. I think it's brilliant. I haven't done much renting myself, mostly because nobody invites me anywhere fancy. But..

[00:16:47] Adam: Yeah, let's just, I'd love to hear from your perspective a little bit more about this like so, ' cause you say very clearly don't buy new things. So what are the options if you want to buy things that aren't new?

[00:16:58] Lisa: Well, there's just so much stuff already here, you know? 

[00:17:02] Lisa: There's data, right to support the statement that we, as we consume 60% more clothing than we did 15 years ago. I mean, that's really astounding, right?

[00:17:16] Dominique: It's a huge jump for frankly, a small period of time.

[00:17:18] Lisa: And we also, on average we only wear things seven times before we're done using them. 

[00:17:25] Dominique: Really?

[00:17:26] Lisa: Yeah. And this is where I would also like consumers to think about how they feel about fast fashion. I think that there's an artificial line that's drawn between some brands that make clothing and other brands that make clothing. This is the fast fashion line, right? And I think, I think if you really did an audit of Shein, for example, I think you would find that there's lots of Shein product that's crappy and it wears out really quickly. 

[00:17:53] Lisa: But there's also lots of product from other brands that would probably be above that line in our view, that also aren't gonna last for a hundred wears, right? But I think it's got much more to do with a consumer's mentality than what brands they're actually buying or saying no to. That's just, I just wanted to say, I think like sometimes like I said, there aren't bad actors. Sometimes I think fast fashion companies are wrongly impugned as the sole bad actor in the problem.

[00:18:17] Dominique: And that feels like the key thing. It's like sole bad actor, like. Like I think that feels important to identify as like we can't just pick one villain and act they're the only problem. I think what you're saying around the idea of like consume less, like that is the big takeaway anybody listening that wants to take part in sustainable fashion as a movement. I think that's the super, it's the super not pretty answer. Like, because also no company who, which, is the ones who talked to us about fashion. 

[00:18:45] Dominique: No company is gonna help you say that because like it is, yeah. I think that's what's so hard is we're fed information around fashion from companies that still need to sell us something. They're finding little ways to talk about it differently. And I just think it's very honest and real and like, kinda like when your parent tells you like what the real thing you should do is, and you're like, "Ugh, I just didn't. I just like didn't wanna hear that." I think that's what "consume less" feels like, you know. 

[00:19:12] Lisa: Yeah. I think that's really true. And I think what you said is so well articulated, Dominique. I think that it is challenging for brands that need to comp a prior selling period, not to rely on every tool available to them. And you know, marketing is getting, we all know, right? We talk about pizza and then our phone gives us a pizza commercial, right? So

[00:19:36] Dominique: We're gonna get pizza ads after this recording.

[00:19:38] Lisa: Or like a pizza's gonna show up right now. Right, right. I just ordered a pizza and my phone's off and I probably just ordered a pizza. So that is one thing where I think the, you know, the responsibility gets, you know, is a little bit tricky 'cause brands need to protect the way that we're structured today, right? Brands are protecting their earnings, you know, by convincing people that they need things that they maybe sometimes don't. So that's tricky. It's a tricky one.

[00:19:59] Adam: For consumers to shift the direction of how they communicate what they need. What are some of the great actions that a consumer can take to help convey that message to a brand?

[00:20:09] Lisa: So I think that brands are watching what consumers do, And I think that consumers can avail themselves of opportunities to get into something pre-owned.

[00:20:21] Lisa: So even consumers who may be my target customer, right? So my business is a sustainability business, but it's also a resale business, right? My target customer is someone who can afford to buy new anytime they want, and to convince them through, you know, some fun, again, not stabby customer intercept, or a fun swap event where there's wine and, you know, community, et cetera, that it's, it's actually easy and convenient to get something pre-owned instead of only relying on their known sort of muscle memory choices for procurement, right? 

[00:20:56] Lisa: So I think that's where if consumers start to circulate things that are durable and that are well-made and loved and classic, I think that brands will figure out how to stay relevant and respond with different offerings.

[00:21:15] Dominique: Do you have feelings around that with some brands that have built their own, like resale or repair platforms within their website or services like when you can bring back products and they'll either fix 'em up and give 'em back to you, or they'll just fix 'em up and resell 'em to somebody else?

[00:21:31] Lisa: 

[00:21:31] Lisa: I think that's totally fantastic when brands do that. I'm curious to see how far that goes. Meaning, I'm curious to see what the average unit costs sort of threshold is for where it makes sense for a brand to really invest in that resale model versus where a brand just cannot figure out how to make money doing it, you know? 

[00:21:50] Lisa: So Patagonia is doing a really good job, although I tried to buy something pre-owned from Patagonia for my husband, actually two days ago. And even Patagonia, who I think is, you know, a leader, even in the resale area, I had trouble with the inseam. The inseam wasn't listed for a lot of the items that I was looking for. 

[00:22:07] Lisa: So I think that technology hopefully is gonna be a real help there because I think that the faster that it is for either the brand who takes something back and wants to relist it, or for a local collector who says, "Oh, this is a good value, I wanna sell it," the easier that we make it for whoever has that thing, that pre-owned thing in their hand, to access the product information, that's also what's gonna make resale just a lot more efficient, a lot more cost effective.

[00:22:38] Dominique: Yeah, and I like that as the consumer end, that it kind of brings back into the world of thrift, the level of convenience people do seek and like personalization. Especially when thinking about like, I don't know, like inclusivity for different bodies and I think honestly I fit into this bucket of like, I have a hard time just going to the store and finding jeans, hard enough for me to find like curvy jeans, like in a store that has all the numbers available to them. 

[00:23:03] Dominique: So I think I'm excited about the fact that we're seeing systems shift to showcase secondhand and to turn clothes around to a second life while keeping a lot of those things that help people feel included or like make it just easier. 

[00:23:17] Lisa: Yeah. It's not easy right now. It's not really easy to get something that's preowned that's exactly what you want. And so I think that's where there is an opportunity. That's one of the reasons why I'm intrigued by the idea of this hyperlocal set of solutions, which is what my startup is because I'm testing the hypothesis successfully, I think, right? 

[00:23:38] Lisa: That a community which has shared seasonality probably shared brand affinity and it's still probably marching to that same drum of, "I've used this seven times. I'm kind of tired of it." It seems as though, since we know that things tend not to be worn out when they've been worn seven times and they're all kinda here in our neighborhood, like it could even be somebody who hate, who has the thing that you wanna wear next, right? 

[00:24:04] Lisa: Like the idea of making it easy for people to circulate locally what they bought and put away in their closets, I feel as though should be something that makes those items and even better match than if you centralize everything in, a centralized solution still great, but people in Portland want very different things from people in South Beach.

[00:24:22] Adam: I love it. I feel like we are perfectly set up to dive into circular thrift in our next episode. This is just fantastic. It's been great, you know, having you on and really diving into understanding sustainable fashion at a deeper level. I think at a high level, all of us know buying too much clothes are not good for the environment, but I feel like in this conversation, we really covered, "Hey, what does that actually mean? And where is the power as a consumer to start to affect change? And so thank you for really sharing that, that high level story of that.

[00:24:54] Dominique: Yeah, I can't wait for our next episode where we get to hear more of that success story and really diving into like. I think you educated us a bit in this episode, but hearing how you are a green champion is a lot more to uncover, so I'm so excited. What's one way people could connect with you or be an advocate in the the work that you do?

[00:25:11] Lisa: Well, people can check my website for events that are upcoming. I try to schedule lots of educational content throughout the month in addition to community sorting opportunities and popups. I would say just check my website and get involved. It's circularthrift.org.

[00:25:29] Adam: Thank you.

[00:25:29] Lisa: I'm also super interested to find other neighborhood champions of sustainable fashion to do the same thing where they live.

[00:25:36] Adam: Fantastic. Well thank you for joining us today. Next time we will dive into the story behind Circular Thrift and Lisa's journey to launching and building a mobile hyper local initiative that provides quality and fashionable secondhand clothing while building a community around sustainability.

[00:25:53] Dominique: Thanks, Lisa.

[00:25:54] Lisa: Thank you so much.

[00:25:55] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute to the fight against climate change.

[00:26:07] Dominique: If you know a Green Champion, that should be our next guest, email us at thegreenchampions@gmail.com. You can also find our show notes thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. 

[00:26:20] Dominique: Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We're gonna dig into another episode with another sustainability success story here soon. 

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