Researching the Market: The Inaccessibility of Sustainability

On of my main jobs within this group is to research the sustainable fashion market. This is vital to understand in order to determine the current market, our ethics as a brand and what we feel we align with as well as researching future trends that could end up complimenting our idea.

I started my general research with an overview of sustainable fashion and how in a lot of cases (especially right now at least) sustainable fashion is quite inaccessible. I found an article that outlines how sustainable fashion allows the purchase of clothing with less of a ‘stain on your conscience’ but rarely do these pieces have an affordable price tag attached to them, or inclusive size ranges.

Tkacz then goes on to state that:

‘The inaccessibility of sustainable fashion prevents marginalized people from participating in the sustainability movement that requires participation from everyone’ suggesting that sustainability efforts should and need to be accessible to everyone if we are to make real change. Our idea with Ecosew looks to shift this view as we intend to target the people who may not be able to access ‘Reformation’ dresses at no less than £100, but allow them to engage and benefit from a sustainable way of buying, just with less of a price tag.

This is where our idea of creating a platform that essentially ‘reinvents’ the idea of the charity shop comes into play. I looked into resell platform ‘Thredups’ resale report and they have found that secondhand purchasing is set to grow by 127% by 2026. And in 2021 alone, resale saw a 58% growth. This sudden surge in interest in the secondhand is definitely something that we should keep in mind as we go forward developing our idea for Ecosew as re-diverting waste from landfill and utilising deadstock is the main pillar to our idea as a business.