braLET making fashion circular

It is undeniable that the fashion industry is one of the most polluting in the world. Fashion industry numbers are outrageous. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned.  braLET is a Brazilian Underwear Circular Fashion business model, that operates within fair trade principles, that can be scalable in mass-market clothing and apparel systems. We work as agents of transformation in the industry by using scraps and discarded pieces from other fashion brands to design our beautiful and trendy products. And as circular thinking designers we have to be responsible for these products during their whole lifespan. By being scalable globally, one in six people in the planet work in the fashion industry and would benefit from fair trade practices, mostly everybody wears clothes every day and also reducing carbon emissions  is a major mankind problem, therefore we would potentially impact positively everyone. 

“Fashion’s environmental footprint is one of the largest of any industry in the world, although it’s nearly impossible to measure the true scope of its impact. (The oft-quoted stat that it's the second most-polluting industry in the world has been disproven several times over.) However, according to a 2018 report released by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the apparel industry produces 20 percent of global water waste and 10 percent of global carbon emissions, while 85 percent of textiles — 21 billion tons — are sent to landfills each year. (The Business of Fashion, 2019)” These textiles are composed of discarded garments and industry scraps, since fashion is far from being a zero waste industry. Getting a little closer to our community, in São Paulo, Brazilian greatest city, that has the largest garment district in the country, 12 ton of textiles is landfilled per day. Industry experts estimate that anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of material used to produce clothing ends up “on the cutting room floor” because it’s cheaper to toss than recycle. Ultimately all this landfilled textiles is releasing GHG that are contributing to climate change thus affecting everyone’s lives.

The shift from linear economy to circular economy depends on companies and consumers. Our initiative impacts locally our employees, recycling partners, our customers and our suppliers, fashion brands that collaborate with us providing our raw material. Fashion brands need urgent change and that is where we can help. We convert their linear operation into circular. With our business model, that fosters R&D, technology and education we provide the change and disseminate circularity thoughout the industry. Applying and spreading Fair Trade principles is another commitment that we are making and that will for sure improve fashion workers’ lives and transparent communication with customers. We believe that as designers we are responsible for the whole lifespan of the products we create, so we are accountable for them not to end in a landfill. By talking directly to our customers, educating them with our philosophy (extending the use of the garment pieces as well) and giving them some financial reward, we want to maximize the devolution of our pieces. Blockchain technology is key to all these processes. We also believe that competitive prices and beautifully co-created design are mandatory and our products will be exactly what contemporary customers need and are looking for.  

Our solution is braLET which is a women’s underwear brand that uses textile scraps from other fashion brands to make garments so that the fashion industry can become a circular value chain. We are ready to transform this great material that would end up in a landfill or burned into beautiful zero waste designed underwear.  If we could only design clothes with compostable materials from now on, we would be living the C2C dream, but fashion still relies on synthetic raw materials like poliester, polyamide, elastane, among others (specially for trims) and they will literally not disappear from day to night. We need more research to replace them.  In the meanwhile, when constructing underwear, the pieces that are sewn together are smaller so it is easier to use scraps in a zero waste pattern. We engage our customers by explaining mainly through social media about the fashion system in the most transparent way. From the beginning they know they are expected to return the pieces when they are finally done with them. Besides that we think co-creation is a powerful tool to connect customers to their pieces in a more emotionally lasting way. Customers are supposed to help us with their preferences in the creation process resulting in a unique creation that should fully please its future owner. We also believe and practice the 10 Fair Trade Principles. Our production is on demand because pulling products according to consumer’s needs is a much more sustainable way to consume. Packaging has to be recyclable or compostable as well. As designers we have to be responsible for the products we make till they are discarded and put back in the system. We have to think circularly and be accountable. Elongating the life cycle of a garment is our duty specially by educating the customers on proper care and by providing ways to repair each garment, which can be another source of revenue besides sales. When the bralette is ready to be discarded, we will offer some rewards to our customers to teach them that returning a piece should be compulsory and then we will see which is the best way to put it back into the loop. We need blockchain technology to share all the transparency with our customers and to track our products anytime. We firmly believe that our business model is scalable and that it can be diversified.  

The vast majority of fashion brands was born linear and becoming circular is a real challenge. We cannot ignore reality and change is imperative.  Inspired by Eileen Fisher and Stella McCartney (companies that are succeeding in this transition) we want to propose a new business model that provides a circular solution to all sized brands. We will partner with them and use their “waste” as raw material in our natural-born circular business model. In that way we work as agents of transformation in the industry by eliminating waste and helping all the companies on going circular in a very innovative initiative. We offer a B2B solution in a B2C model. By providing consultancy as well, we intend to catalyze the mandatory switch from linear to circular fashion. So, besides being an innovative B2C solution, our model is 100% circular which is also groundbreaking in one of the most polluting industries in the world. We are taking in the textile waste from other companies, making zero waste underwear designs out of it that should last more, within fair trade practices, we will teach customers about extending apparel life cycle, and then when pieces are finally ready to be discarded we will take them back, forward them to upcycling, recycling, downcycling or composting therefore closing the loop. Our goal is to make fashion a 100% compostable or recyclable, fair and a zero pollution industry. We at braLET believe that by eliminating textile waste we are off to a good start. 

Blockchain will help in making transparency and “on demand” manufacturing a reality. We will Interact with many partners along our value chain so blockchain will track our product in real time. We also want to use IoT and AI, which together with  Blockchain are not hermetic technologies and one can improve the performance of the other. Besides that, IoT is a great tool to understand more precisely customers needs, product usage and assortment that can help with optimizing a pull supply chain strategy; it can also help in customizing products (incorporating smart sensors in a bra for example) and improving design, pattern and shape; it can lead to more insights in innovation; and RFID implementation that allows us to track and trace our pieces (helping tremendously in the reverse logistics for instance). As for AI, it also brings uncountable possibilities. It can provide a more customized shopping experience to our customers and enhance the co-creation possibilities. It can improve the communication with customers as well. And it can speed up pattern making and cutting as well. There is already a Japanese company (Synflux) that uses AI to pattern making and cutting aiming to minimize textile waste. Partnering with them would be great. 

Our desired state is to drastically reduce the fashion industry carbon emissions and thus mitigating greenhouse effect and climate change. Although, fashion pollutes in many ways, we have to start tackling the problem at one point of the chain. Discarded textiles are incinerated or end up in a landfill, both releasing methane. In order to accomplish that mission, we intend to be facilitators of this change. With braLET we want to promote transparency, sustainability and ethics throughout the fashion chain. We are almost launching our first collection, in collaboration with a small local fashion brand, we will be selling mainly via e-commerce and it will all be done “on demand” with our customer’s inputs under fair trade principles. We are using social media to directly communicate and show our process. Therefore, besides giving customers a new product that will be trendy but also sustainable and co-created with them, we can help other fashion companies in going circular by transforming their textile waste. So, we will impact positively customers and fashion brands as well. We understand that being circular and sustainable require efforts in every point of the supply chain specially when raw material is chosen. Therefore, in short terms, we should be able to promote behavioral change in customers and fashion brands. By partnering with bigger fashion companies, we can help them with the change and this change is inevitable. Our expected medium term outcome should be partnering braLET with as many companies as possible to maximize the impact. 

Since our project is still in the pre-seed phase we can only estimate how many people we are serving. For our first collection with Re Mussi Atelier (a microenterprise like us), we are producing 100 pieces thus potentially serving 100 customers. By the end of the fist year, we intend to partner with small to medium sized businesses, by using their scraps and by educating them on how they can accelerate their shift from linear to circular, therefore we will be serving at least a thousand customers. In five years, we plan to be working and consulting with all sized companies, including large ones, consequently we will be meaningfully improving labor conditions. And we hope to be serving at least close to a million people around the world. It all depends on how fast we will be able to spread our business model. Considering that 150 billion garments are produced in the global fashion industry per year, the ideal scenario is to reach as much people we can. 

For the next year, our short term outcome is to firmly stablish our circular business model and grow locally with our customers. We will prioritize partnerships with small and medium sized companies.  We can also sell consultancy services. By incorporating state of the art technology, we can optimize our local operation and be able to work with larger fashion companies. With our hopefully growing production and thus crescent revenue, we want to increase our reach; by improving our marketing strategies; by being always more and more transparent; by disclosuring circular economy and fair trade principles; by fostering new discoveries in science that can make our industry greener, such as new biomaterials; by enhancing our return policy and improving recycling technologies in the field.  For the next five years, we want to expand our collabs with fashion brands and spread our initiative throughout the fashion industry. We should be able to diversify our products as well, by introducing swimwear, loungewear and activewear. We can sell our format to large fashion companies and they can either work with a braLET unit or have an internal department that will emulate our business model. Concomitantly, we will insist and promote that they should apply circularity to their value chain, by choosing sustainable raw materials, by using greener processes, by changing consumer’s  mindset, by employing fair trade principles, by being transparent and by being responsible for reverse logistics as well. 

We have an initial financial barrier so we have to start slowly. Technically, our team is small and we are responsible for all the departments in the company and that can be challenging as well. Specially because we are not experts in all fields. At first, we also think we have to overcome a certain resistance from customers that are used to traditionally linear ways of consuming . We also need to obtain recognized certification for circular economy and fair trade associations, such as ABVTEX (Brazilian Association) and FLOs International.  We need preferably state of the art technology to optimize our model and to be able to access and measure our social, economical and environmental performance indicators to better quantify our impact. With all this information and infrastructure, we can expand through sustainable growth and be able to reach more and more partners within the industry to enlarge our positive impact. 

At first, to overcome the financial barrier we are starting slowly, while looking for support such as investors, acceleration programs or crowdfunding. In order to surpass our technical shortage, we are reaching for partnerships specially for the most complex operations such as blockchain implementation, accessing performance indicators and reverse logistics. Hopefully, by becoming a SOLVE finalist we can overcome these barriers more easily. So, we, as designers can focus on what we know best, partnering with fashion brands, helping them with the circular transformation, developing zero waste products from scraps, marketing them to a broader crowd that should feel empowered by our underwear, educating customers with circular practices and getting all the designs back to refering them to recycling or composting practices.  We believe that through honest communication via social media, fostering transparency we will be able to do it. People are eager to consume sustainable fair priced products. The more profitable our brand is, the more fashion companies will be interested in working with us and that is how we are expanding our business. After that, with ever growing revenue,for the next  five years, we hope to be stablished, with a slightly bigger team made of experts in each department, associated with other relevant companies that can perform tasks that we cannot such as recycling and  partnered with as many fashion brands as possible, including global companies to keep maximizing our positive impact by reaching more and more people and expanding the change to circular economy in fashion.

Right now, we are two fashion designers/enterpreneurs that are performing the design related activities, e-commerce, packing, delivery, marketing and managing the whole process. We are leading and executing the project together. We have part-time staff to help with manufacturing, cutters and seamstresses (6 people). For this first collection we are teaming up with a small fashion brand called Re Mussi (2 people). And we are reaching for partnerships for reverse logistics and technology implementation.   

As fashion designers we both have a large network in the field and experience in working with all sized fashion companies and we know pretty well how the system works, so that gives us a huge advantage. Fashion industry has a lot of idiosyncrasies. We have been working on braLET for more than a year and we are prepared to turn it into reality. Leticia Galatti is pursuing an MD at University of São Paulo in circular economy and sustainability. She has been working in the fashion field for 13 years as a business consultant and as a manager as well. She has also an MBA in Marketing Management from Getulio Vargas Foundation. She is expert in pattern making and management.   Clarissa Santos has been working with fashion for more than ten years. She has worked in all sized companies as a fashion designer, as a researcher and also as a business consultant. She also has an MFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design (BSMP fully funded scholarship recipient) and a post-graduation in Fashion Management from SENAI. Even being both designers, we complement each other what makes us a very qualified duo. Brazil, right now, does not have a fashion brand that is 100% circular and unfortunately our current government is going backwards in terms of environmental issues, so we really need to do something in our own community to foster sustainability and spread the word asap. 

For manufacturing purposes, we can count with a local network of workers but we also partner with Tecof (https://www.tecof.org.br/), a company that fosters fair trade practices in fashion manufacturing. We need partnership specially for implementing technology and reverse logistics. We are partnering with Retalhar (https://www.retalhar.com.br/)  which is a company that applies reverse logistics for clothing and is located in São Paulo.  For incorporating blockchain and other suitable technologies, MIT Solve would be great for our company and locally there is also Instituto Alinha (http://alinha.me/en/home-2/?lang=en). We also aim for partnerships with all sized fashion companies, the more, the better. It would be amazing to implement a project like ours in a large fast fashion company, for instance, and catalyze the transition of their linear business model into a 100% circular model, amplifying our positive impact.   

braLET will provide fashion without harming the environment. By partnering with other fashion brands, we will transform their textile waste into brand new women’s underwear. The beneficiaries of our idea will be our own employees and our partners (Tecof, Retalhar and Alinha). Also the fashion brands that are providing us with raw material because they are giving a circular end to their waste. Ultimately, in a long term outcome by mitigating GHG emissions we will be benefiting everyone. Initially, our direct customers will be everyone that buy our underwear (mainly local women), that are those conscious and worried  about climate change and work ethics, and as an opportunity we still can reach through education all the ones that are not yet concerned with these issues. We will sell mainly through e-commerce, but the brand that collaborates with us should sell as well, and we should focus on enlarging these sale channels. We should participate in trade fairs to publicize our idea and sell more products.  We also want to partner with Enjoei that provides an online service that elongates clothing life span by stimulating a new sale after people want to get rid of their clothes on the first place. We should promote new ways of trade such as rental and signature clubs. Besides, to grow further our revenue and impacting more lives, we can sell our business model and knowledge by consulting with bigger companies that want to go full circular. 

Our financial sustainability will come from selling products and services. We will sell women’s underwear and services to repair and customize in an attempt to make it live longer. Proper way of taking care of underwear will be taught in our communication channels with our customers as well. We will foster circular models inside our business such as rental for some elaborated pieces, signature clubs, Enjoei account (famous Brazilian second-hand online store) and be always aware of new ways to sell and elongate our pieces life cycle. When the garment is finally ready to be discarded we will get it back through a bonus policy and forward it to the best recycling method. We will prioritize partnering with fashion brands, specially small companies, because in São Paulo it is the vast majority. However, we also want to sell our format to larger companies and even help implementing our model inside their big operations. Our first collection will be a test. Since we will be producing a hundred pieces, we will only be able to cover what we spent. But we should be able to practice a fair price and have a good markup, because we will not spend with raw material since we are getting everything from another brand as a donation and we will share our variable costs with our partner as well, so whenever we have more money to partner with a bigger company, we will produce more, sell more and be more profitable. 

We are applying because we are sure that our business model would vastly benefit from Solve. First of all, we would take great advantage of all the information exchange with mentors and other enterpreneurs. Secondly, we would be able to stage our ideas in front of investors and global fashion companies, which would also bring us invaluable feedback and expand our network. We are also sure that we can get insights and help from tech experts that are going to push our company to higher levels. Certainly, we wouldn’t mind receiving funding from investors as well and this would be a wonderful platform for obtaining it. We will for sure improve unprecedently our chances for succeeding by refining our ideas. Disclosuring our project to experts is probably the best way to get customized help from them. And last but not least, we need partnerships and by showing our model, we would probably be able to attract more companies that would be willing to partner with us therefore enhancing the size of our positive impact. Definitely it will be an inestimable experience for us. 

At first, it would be great to partner with associations that foster sustainability in fashion internationally such as the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Ethical Trading Initiative, Circular Fashion and World Fair Trade Organization. Through these partnerships we would be able to strenghten our sustainable network, share knowledge, advocate our cause, learn more and spread our business model.  As previously stated, we will also apply for the Global Change Award by H&M Foundation. More specifically, regarding our business model, there are some start-ups that could provide us with amazing services that would improve our performance immensely, and we could reach them more easily with the backup of a platform like Solve. There is a Japanese start-up called Synflux that developed a CAD system that by using AI can turn pattern making into a zero waste technique which would save us a lot of time. Also, all these amazing new sustainable materials and processes that are being discovered and commercialized by new brands could be incorporated by ur or by our fashion partners as well. Through these partnerships we would be able to foster new sustainable discoveries. This exchange with other circular companies can be extremely rich and we can all collaborate with each other in many ways. 

We will be employing the money  in three main areas aiming optimization of our positive impact:

1. Strengthening, spreading and inspecting the implementation of Fair Trade Principles empowering fashion workers and our own brand values;

2. Incorporating technology (textiles, pattern-making, blockchain, reverse logistics, etc) to grow in a controlled and scallable way;

3. Marketing to keep on enhancing our reach.