Green Cotton

Kenneth Cole pumps at Dig N’ Swap
By Erin Dale

With fall fashion looks hitting stores now, it’s tempting to pop into the Gap, H&M or Anthropologie and supplement your current wardrobe, even create a whole new one. Sure, if you’re craving something new, you can go eco and buy something organic from a more sustainable store. But before you go hunting for brand new pieces, take a peek at Dig ‘N’ Swap.

Trading clothes with someone is an easy way to clean out your closet and give yourself a whole new look. But if you don’t have a trendy friend nearby who’d let you raid her wardrobe, Dig ‘N’ Swap makes life a little easier. First, you gotta dig: find things in your own closet that you’re ready to part with; then take digital photos of them and upload them to the Dig ‘N’ Swap website. Next, browse until you find something you love. The site is simple to navigate: you can search by keyword or click on the type of clothing or accessory you need. You can also click on the brands listed, from DKNY to Prada. Place a bid using one (or all) of the items you’d like to trade. Then, if your bid is accepted, voila! You’ve successfully swapped. Now you can feel great about scoring new fashions without negatively impacting the environment.

That’s the mission behind Dig ‘N’ Swap: to put less strain on natural resources “by allowing an item to go through several lives.” So what are you waiting for? Ready… set… swap!

A few highlights from my “digging”:

“Like new” Anne Taylor heels

Marc Jacobs pink winter coat

Vintage black Prada handbag

Kenneth Cole black leather rosebud heels featured top.

Photosource: grooveygreen.com featuring Nau clothing

NY Times Fashion & Style section announced this morning that the much coveted Nau is going out of business. Sundance Channel did a piece on them this week too in their ‘Big Ideas for a Small Planet’ which I blogged about on May 3rd. Unfortunately Nau’s website posts the sad letter from the team stating that that they are ‘saying goodby for Nau’.

While we knew the company took on significant risk, and that there were questions from the beginning as to whether the model would actually work, I must admit that I increasingly felt confident in the staying power of their brand. I’ve been reading about Nau since last September, and just last month a half dozen people I knew asked me if I had heard about this company. They successfully seem to be generating ‘buzz’ around their company.

Yet at the same time, significant investment went into the company – from its design and manufacture of high tech ‘green’ fabrics to designing and sewing the clothes, to building brick and mortar stores and creating a cutting edge website. Unlike the mom and pop online green boutiques, Nau was positioned as the next Nike from the get go. One reviewer I read last fall noted correctly that the company is postured to either succeed beautifully or fail miserably. Unfortunately, it seems that the latter has won out.

Why? Led by former Nike executives, the Nau team is not lacking in the experience, leadership or management arena. While they are ‘green’ in the environmental sense, management wise, this is not the case. So what is it? According to the team, the economy is cited as the main factor in their decline. Slowing consumption, rising fuel costs, rising cost of goods, decreasing purchases….we have heard it more than once in the last few months. So while I agree that the economy is forcing more than a handful of retailers to change course and downsize, I would also venture to say that a few other things could have been done to help stay afloat. (1) One is that their prices seemed high for what they offered and for who they targeted. While I can absolutely appreciate their stylistic, very green apparel, Americans may not be quite ready for those prices at to buy on the green principle as such. Take a look at Cheapest Dress in the World – with expectations as low as $8.98, can we stretch our imaginations to pay $300 for a spring coat?
(2) Color schemes and styles may have been too muted. Everything seemed a bit too dark. Not enough brightness, freshness and newness. Or maybe they were not geared toward women as much as men? I am not sure, but something seemed slightly off. (3) Finally, with REI and Patagonia ‘down the street’ so to speak, or one ‘url tab’ away on the Internet, one has to have a pretty compelling reason to go to Nau rather than long-established, trusted brands. Both of these companies are increasingly stepping out of the pure outdoor gear space and into more fashion-forward ‘office-adaptable’ clothing as well as are increasingly ‘green.’

Also, Nau mentioned that their stores encouraged people to ship whatever products they purchase to their homes rather than carry away with them. I would have to say that this seems troublesome. Counterintuitive from every angle. Isn’t one satisfaction from shopping the ability to carry the item home with you and brighten your day? Also, isn’t walking home with something intuitively more ‘green’ than having it shipped to your house? From a consumers standpoint, I can see how this policy would be troublesome.

All in all however, I must say that I am sorry to see Nau go. I really admired their mission, vision and core company principles. Part of me thinks they may be jumping the gun—who knows what could have been possible if they road the wave a little longer? At the same time, in this economy nothing is certain, and if product, price and promotion are slightly off mark, well, there is not much hope for survival. Wishing the team at Nau all the best in their next venture.

Send me your comments to greencottonblog@gmail.com or post below.

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After four years of serving the e-commerce marketplace, Sean and Susan Bartlett recently announced that they will be closing up their Pangaya online shop. According to a correspondence with TreeHugger, the reason is that the company is not returning as much on their investment at this point, as hoped. The company will be missed by many, as a convenient, reliable source for some of the most fashionable, sustainable designs out there: e.g. Stuart and Brown, Ecoganik, Blue Canoe, UNDESIGNED, and others.

While on the one hand, statistics indicate that demand for organic cotton, and organic fibers such as bamboo, in general keeps increasing, the reality is that the green apparel market is still challenging to be profitable. Given the myriad of style, brand, price, convenience and other variables that factor into women’s clothing choices, it is no small feat to get that equation right for on-line shoppers. Being green, does not indicate sure fire success, and even being stylish does not, as Pangaya has proven.

Pangaya is a good example of a company that provided very stylish clothing at a very reasonable price in a convenient manner. If they could not create a sustainable business model, then what does this mean for others starting out or already in the early stages? Time will tell, but as demand for all natural fibers such as organic cotton, bamboo, soy, hemp and even organic silk and wool, increases, hopefully new companies will continue to enter the market and prove otherwise. We must thank Susan and Sean for carving the brave path with Pangaya, making it easier for others to follow in their footsteps.

All inventory will be marked down up to 80% until it is depleted, so buy your favorite designs now at Pangaya.

A quiet revolution is starting in the fashion industry one mouse click at a time, which may chisel away at monolithic brand dominance. Web 2.0 is seeping into online apparel through retailers such as threadless.com which offer products driven by and/or created by the marketplace, e.g. consumers.

With its thousands of users not only creating its T-shirt designs, but also rating designs and eventually buying them, Threadless is a great example of a flourishing e-fashion marketplace. Threadless.com relies exclusively on its web users and customers to create, upload and rate designs. The best designs get produced and sold. Users rate the designs, e.g. anyone can rate the designs for free. With thousands of users, the model is sustainable and effective for ensuring adequate demand for supply.

As such, threadless demonstrates a near perfect supply-demand nexus with demand directly linked to supply and vice versa: the more popular the T-shirts, the more they produce. Incentives are built in to ensure optimal design submissions. Winning designs receive $2000 cash, plus a $500 gift certificate, as well as an additional $500 every time their design is reproduced.

The e-marketplace is perfect for not only incentivizing designers to create the next hottest look, but also for encouraging designers to go the next step and market and eventually sell as many of their shirts as they can. As such, threadless does not own nor contract any fashion designers themselves. Their users are their designers. And they appear to be doing exceedingly well.

What’s interesting is that while I as expecting an ‘itunes’ store, or Amazon.com ratings arrangement, whereby the site informs users which T-shirts are the most popular, the site refrains from doing this explicitly. The only information provided is how many people voted on an item. It does not tell you what the composite (or average) score is. It appears that threadless.com wants you to blindly vote, or rather to vote with your honest opinion, uninfluenced by others.While this is an interesting model, I must say that it also has its downsides.

For someone without a lot of time (a.k.a. myself), who does not want to sift through 379 Tee-shirt designs, I find it very unappealing to not know which ones are more popular than others. It would be helpful to know which are the top hits – and then spend the 5 minutes or so, clicking through those. However, honestly, while there were some really innovative and exquisitely designed Tee’s in the store, there was also a lot of crap, too. It would therefore be useful for threadless to either:

1. Reveal the composite (average) score on T-shirts, or
2. Do some of design prioritizing so that viewers can view just the top 25 or so.

Nonetheless, threadless has created a flourishing marketplace with thousands of interesting and unique designs. The best of the best are produced and sold, and I believe they are the first of many on-line (e-fashion) stores to emerge in this kind of market paradigm. Expect to see more such stores, and likely beyond fashion as well.

Photo source: www.threadless.com