Episode 20: Talking Fast Fashion with Brett Staniland

0:00Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Pretty Busy. Today I had on the incredible Brett Staniland who is a huge advocate for sustainable fashion as well as a model, also an ex-Love Islander who pioneered a new sponsorship strategy in the reality TV space. We spoke a lot about starting a brand, the taboo of Made in China, what brand owners could be doing differently and also what us as consumers should be looking out for. I really enjoyed this episode and I hope you do too.

0:41Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Pretty Busy. Today I have Brett Stanleyland with me. Welcome to Pretty Busy. Thanks for having me. Do you have your what's keeping you pretty and what's keeping you busy or would you like me to explain? Go on, explain. So, Anita, what's keeping you pretty? So like a product that you're just loving recently and a what's keeping you busy? Because our listeners are very much both pretty and busy. Okay, cool. So what's keeping you pretty? What's keeping me pretty? I think at the moment I wake up and put a moisturizer on. It's called like the savior for men or the cure for men.

1:16Okay. It's not quite cured me, I'm still a man, but I just live by that. And that makes me look awake even when I'm really, really not. Okay, nice. Especially because most mornings I wake up and just stick my phone up and beef someone. So I've got to look nice. Absolutely. Okay, so we love that. And what's keeping you busy? Everything at the moment. I am working with British Wall on loads of campaigns at the moment. And then the next thing is the Good Clothes Show, which happens in November in Manchester. So all full steam ahead for that. Now, I basically wanted to have you on because I feel like my listeners are somewhere in between either wanting to start a fashion brand or they just love the industry.

1:52they're shopping fashion quite often and they want to be a bit more aware of what they're buying and I'm so interested in your take as well so give us a whistle stop tour of kind of who you are and how you got into sustainable fashion. Well I'm my name is Brett Staniland otherwise known as Twin Brett online. I started in fashion from a modeling perspective so I was basically just plucked off the street and was told I was going to be a model and a couple of weeks later I was at the time I was at university and had no exposure to the fashion industry other than buying Yeezys and hypebeast stuff at the time but yeah it was just it was from being on set and being around clothes so much after a few years that I was just like where is all this stuff coming from and like where's it all gonna go I remember seeing my first ever like really big sample set like rails and rails and rails of clothes and just asking like oh what happens to all this stuff after the shoot and the company was like oh it just disappears I was like well it doesn't it has to go somewhere and they're like yeah we just chuck it away we send it to another department and then it either gets binned or burned or whatever I was like geez um and that was literally the catalyst of me going down loads of rabbit holes and um at the time I think Instagram was kind of in its infancy and I was just posting pictures of modeling shoots and me going out and playing football and stuff and it was at that point where I started to really think about my role in the industry and my role as a consumer as well and it kind of coalesce at the same time where I'd be like right I want to shout out good brands I want to shout out things that are well made and made to last and at the same time I need to stop buying so many things myself so I kind of went on a journey of both an educator and as a consumer at the same time which was kind of nice because like not like the come with me's that you see now but literally come with me I'm learning as well and we can all learn together and then yeah fast forward a few years and I went on Love Island in 2021 I think which is crazy it's five years ago now yeah and I was the first contestant to take all my own clothes so the sponsor at the time was I Saw It First which was the last of the fast fashion sponsors they basically in the contract I realized that they owned my image forever and could use it however they liked so my kind of way out of the contract was to just take my own clothes.

4:13So I just packed a suitcase of all the stuff I usually wore, didn't accept any stuff. And then was a bit of an anomaly coming out, ostracized myself from work and that kind of side of the industry and where every lucrative deal is. But then fast forward to the season after and they changed the sponsor to eBay, was involved in a few protests in that gap. And then, yeah, it all changed. I feel like that is the point where the online sort of stuff kind of blossomed as well. so your season was the last season where they sponsored fast fashion yeah wow I did not know that yeah I was it was very flattering like I think when I came out that winter there was a pretty little thing show in London in that September and we staged the protest then and that was like all over the news and then ITV would like call us every like Friday to check in and little by little they'd start asking me about work and sustainability and stuff and then I remember getting a text off someone who worked at Vogue saying like can I call you this evening because we've got an exclusive that goes live tomorrow and we want to do an interview with you and they told me the news then on the phone and they were like we think it's you know partly due to all the noise and fuss you've been causing over the last seven or eight months yeah I don't think people quite realize like how much work and all the conversations we were having at the time and obviously ITV would never say oh because of Brett we're doing this but it happened anyway which was really really good and then I was involved in the first eBay and Love Island campaign the next summer which was cool.

5:41That's so cool so what actually to you makes a fashion brand fast? Production volume I think I think Zara are like the godfathers of fast fashion I think they created the model in which everyone else kind of started to subscribe to and then other businesses took that and put it on steroids but it was essentially like speed to market and pure production volume i think zara is actually some we've actually had a few conversations about zara in the past um they are incredibly good at what they do incredibly good and they're they just will never be held to that standard because i mean you've i think you told me previously that they've invested so much into having these photographers that are like on big level luxury campaigns and they really from the outside make it seem like you are shopping luxury yeah you are but behind the scenes the volume is yeah I think we saw it most recently with the Galeano and Zara collab like the campaign is unbelievable and if someone had said it's the artisanal 24 Margiela collection by John most people would have believed them because the photographer is an incredible photographer all the models are the best models in the world like it is as a production the same as going and doing a high fashion campaign it's just the product is different but when it's shot in an incredible way you don't really see what the product is until it arrives um so now i think a couple of weeks later when people are getting their deliveries they're like oh my god i paid all this money for this and it's actually not what i thought it was going to be and there's a premium on you know that production as well i actually do feel that way when i'm walking around the shops when I am if I if I do stumble into Zara the prices are going up and the quality is going down like why is that well I mean margins is always one thing um and it depends it depends how your business is set up but I also I remember like when we were probably a lot younger you'd go into a shop and you'd feel an aesthetic I think the best example is when you'd go into like a Hollister when we were young it was dark it was moody there was a certain smell you could like subscribe to that even all the shops like wooden fronts and stuff like that and many other brands like that too but when you go in them now they're really clinical there's an enormous amount of product on the shop floor and it's less about a feeling and a sensory reaction to the brand that you're buying into and it's more just like just buy it because there's loads of it and there's an abundance and I think we've moved especially from you know wanting things that mean something to us to wanting something for just the next day or the next weekend and then throwing it away but the reason I think brands have lowered quality and upped price is because one they want you to believe you're getting the aesthetic as much as you're getting the product so if they make it expensive ultimately you're thinking you're getting a good product straight away but the quality has gone down I think mostly because the cost of natural materials has gone up but the cost of synthetic materials has gone down a lot and um you know i think it's up around 70 percent of all fashion now is relying on virgin polyester and lots of it is low grade it's not like a good even grade of polyester and it's not built for utility or performance either it's built purely for aesthetics um so yeah that's what happens when you combine the two yeah and when we talk about so what makes a brand fast fashion but it being volume what kind of volume is that because i don't i really don't think people understand the scale yeah of brands like zara and h &m that they just don't understand yeah how much product they're pushing how much product they're wasting how much money they're putting into marketing versus production like i just there's they just are not understanding the volume yeah i mean a third of stuff that's manufactured is never sold for once there's a load of waste immediately the other stats i mean over 10 years ago now um h &m had a two billion pound inventory problem so that's just stuff that they haven't sold and it's just sat in warehouses and then recently just to add fuel to the fire a recent video of mine in the research i was doing for it found out that on vintage there's 120 million items from Zara on Vinted and that's just one brand on one secondhand platform never mind eBay or Depop or anywhere else there's 120.

10:09And also all the people that don't sell aren't selling stuff that's just in in wardrobes too. So the scale of that immediately is like there's so much already in circulation and if you go to landfill sites like I have you'll see it all there as well it's washing up on shores it's polluting everything around them but there's a really really good graphic from the business of fashion a couple years ago called an incomparable churn and it makes Zara and H &M look like a corner shop to Shein and you have production volume numbers for Shein compared to these other there's the Boohoo group H &M and Inditex and I think the figure for Shein was something like 366 ,000 new styles added to the website in one year and I think the others are around 30 40 15 000 um so immediately it drowns out some of the biggest fast fashion brands on the planet i mean i used to think fast fashion was dying and i definitely feel like since i started odd muse i definitely feel like in the uk yeah a lot more people are buying things to keep and then they are kind of definitely away from brands like boohoo and pretty yeah 100 but on a global scale sheen has just taken all that business and then multiplied it yeah yeah i don't really know like how sheen works because they steal our pictures all the time yeah they advertise our pictures like what can brands actually do it's it's really hard and especially with like loads of ai campaigns coming out now but if you go on sheen the way that they work is they don't actually it's weird saying they're not actually a brand they're just like basically middlemen so they connect you directly with a factory rather than connecting you with a brand who then sources from a factory so they're literally this massive middle ground which means that they're not really doing many shoots themselves they'll do some campaigns but in terms of e-com and like their website not a lot of the stuff on there is owned by them it's stuff they've even stolen from brands like yours and just manufactured a new top on the on the girl or whatever it is um but that's also how they can be so cheap because they don't have that many overheads they're not producing anything themselves they're literally just saying you can get this for two pounds because we can just get it straight from the factory and ship it from the factory straight to you so it doesn't even go through any of those stages either so it ships straight from like wherever in the world yeah i did not know that so it's kind of like it's like an alibaba or like um those sorts of websites i remember the campaign they did ages ago where they had like all the influencers go to like their their good factory and their like really shiny office that must have been quite a few years ago but yeah I don't really feel like anyone ate that up for longer than 10 minutes that was an epic fail that was I think that was the first video of mine that hit like a few millions in the numbers I think was the first thing I ever posted that got over a hundred thousand likes and I remember the reaction was just people like come on we're not really serious about this there's literally nothing they could do to convince anyone that something selling for five pounds is ethically made no it's impossible and this is what like i think a lot of the work i'm doing online now is trying to get people to think about how many people that item's been through and how much they were paid for you to be able to buy it for five pound and then add a profit margin in there as well like it's just not physically possible but i do think it's interesting how when going back again to fast fashion being based on volume because people have so many opinions on this they might think that fast fashion is purely brands that make in china yeah fast fashion is a brand that sits that is successful and maybe does 30 million pound yeah but actual to push that amount of volume you're into the billions yeah yeah it's like 30 50 millions a drop in the ocean for a brand that's truly fast fashion.

13:59There are some like, at some point there is a tipping point between like how much volume would be too much and how much wouldn't be considered as fast fashion. But there's other ones that kind of skip by it because of aesthetics. And it's brands like Uniqlo. Obviously they're renowned for making like pretty okay basics. But their production, like I think someone told me their amount of SKUs that I think it was Claire Waite Keller's Uniqlo C collection. it was something like 26 SKUs and that was it I was like it's not a lot of actual items but the production volume of those SKUs is unbelievable and they're huge all over the world so with Odd Muse I have at the very beginning of Odd Muse I'm like planning this brand when I'm like 20 years old on the way to ASOS all I know is that I don't want to be like ASOS design that's good internship for you that's the only information I have I'm fresh out of uni and I really loved what you said at the beginning of the episode where you was like i'm just learning along the way because i feel like that was me at the beginning like i remember working with this supplier over the phone because it was covid i couldn't get to china i just met this lady that i really liked and i run the same fabric it was a polyester that we've kind of moved away from it used to be like the most part of our website when we had like maybe 20 skews on site and now we're kind of like moving into cottons and stuff like that but i didn't even know much about fabric so i just kind of like run with this fabric that like felt nice how can someone like really expand their fabric knowledge beyond it feels nice i know there's a lot more resources out there now but how can someone really tell the difference between that balance between natural fibers and synthetic because it is a real balance because commercially yeah yeah there's also ones that sit in the middle hard to find that balance like i remember thinking i remember feeling like the slightly glossier fabrics and being told well that's got a 3 000 unit minimum now i've got 10 000 pounds in the bank to start this brand i can't yeah risk taking i can't even pay to ship that many units and i really don't want to waste anything that doesn't sell i'm making 50 units across these seven skews yeah how do people kind of balance that because I wouldn't even know how to advise someone on that this was um this was literally the journey I went on like it was looking through I was wearing a something on set and I remember looking in like the label and it was a really long one because it was a sample and it just said like polyester acrylic viscose and nylon and I was like I don't really know what any of those are it felt amazing like it felt really really soft really silky and smooth um And I was like, right, I'm going to have to go home and Google what animal acrylic is.

16:45Turns out it's not an animal at all. But yeah, it's just one of those things like going down rabbit holes and understanding what these fibers are, where they came from, why they're used is probably the most important now. Because obviously clothes I have have bits of plastic on them. Of course they do. And I have fully plastic garments. But it's understanding why they are plastic and not over consuming those items too. So if like some of the best examples of clothes that I have that I've kept the longest might be 100 % plastic, but it's because they're utilitarian. It's they're built to function or they're built to provide a certain property and things like that.

17:24My best friend at the moment is actually going through this as well. He's relaunching a brand called Nicole Fahey, which was huge in like the 80s and 90s and 2000s. And he's doing it now. He's going to factory saying, we just want 50 units or we just want 30 units. and all of a sudden your prices just go through the roof and I'm like how do you get a viable business with a decent accessible price point and not just swallow loads of costs before your business has even begun so it's just making those kind of playoffs between like do we need this item do we have to sacrifice something at first and then when the business starts making money we can improve it and I think at the end of the day it's just honesty with your customer like if you say I'm on the journey too you're on the journey with us but this is what we believe in then I can go on board with a lot of things like that we are very much experiencing that kind of like commercial versus that what people want versus what people actually want to pay for and it is so hard because we run a lot of kind of we run that polyester fabric throughout a lot of what we were doing and when we had the conversation this year where we're actually going to up our skews a little bit we want we don't just want to be a dress brand yeah we want to be we want her to buy her like favorite winter coat from us everyday clothes we want to go into knitwear and stuff and i'm like okay this is the perfect opportunity to kind of hit the reset button so a lot of our knitwear has been either 100 cotton or wool but again then we hit the we have the the comments on social it's too expensive yeah yeah and it's so hard to find that balance between you know keeping you know the price is okay and move gradually moving into these do you know i think the problem for me is that people will blame you for the clothes being too expensive yeah but realistically the people to blame are your h &ms your zaras and your fast fashion brands who've taught people that clothes can cost less so we've gone through a period where i remember going and shopping at top man in the 2000s and I had to save up to buy stuff from Topman and I would save for a couple of weeks and get something I really liked and it wasn't cheap cheap yeah a t-shirt might have been a tenner but like I remember getting my suit for graduation from there and it was like 140 pounds and I was like at the time you're talking 15 years ago that was a lot of money for me you look now if I want to suit I can go on many many websites and get one for about 20 or 30 quid and so immediately you've just subconsciously taught a consumer that why would I spend over a hundred pound on suit when I get one for 40 quid yeah and then that breeds into other brands who are trying to do something differently and do something better like you're getting a really good product I've had it with brands that I've worked with where I'll say like yeah here's a t-shirt and it's 40 quid and they're like 40 quid for one t-shirt and I was like but that's a fair you can go on the website and look all the garment work has been paid fair the transport has been covered the fibers the farmers everything and they have a very small profit margin in the grand scheme of things and that's how much it costs yeah but subconsciously we've been taught this for so long that people just don't aren't receptive to it yeah and i also one thing that i really tell my team and tell other brand owners is you really have to take comments with a pinch of salt and this goes beyond this conversation we're having right now beyond fashion oh yeah everything but i'd say i always call polyester the p-word it's definitely a buzzword i think i call them the polyester police yeah because i honestly think that whenever someone comments on my tiktok about polyester i'm so sure that they have a wardrobe full of polyester and they don't spend more than like 20 pounds on anything it has become unfortunately a buzzword but what i do like is it it has definitely opened the conversations i've definitely learned so much and i feel like odd muse especially in the last kind of it does genuinely take us like 10 months to bring any kind of strategy to life because contrary to what some people might believe we're definitely not fast fashion i wish it was kind of a little bit quicker but it takes us a good eight to ten months to get anything to market so i feel like the way in which i've been speaking about the new fabrics that we're doing and the new stuff that we're doing back in like january december now people are seeing it come through because production and shipping just takes that long but i think where am i going with this answer i just think it's just a real big battle between what you can do what people want what people are actually saying versus if they're actually your customer like it really takes actual focus groups of people that are your avid followers or your avid customers and learning there you cannot learn about your customer in the tiktok comments also i think first of all i think it's great to have conversations with customers about that because then they learn about fabric and composition and it's brilliant that's because that's what the journey you want them to be on it is ultimately and then you can go on to construction i'm like a really great natural fiber garment that's poorly constructed is just as shit as 100 poly thing that's crap yeah ultimately they're both last the same thing they won't withstand a wash or even be able to be repaired the other thing is it doesn't stop at polyester because whenever i talk about wool i have people in the comments absolutely bashing me.

22:46Whenever I talk about cashmere, I get people bashing me about goats as well. So ultimately, and cotton as well, loads of farmers that are exploited and water and pesticides. So it doesn't just stop at polyester. And the thing is, what you then come back to is, regardless of innovation and fibers and all the things that are going on, the answer actually to all of the sustainability problems is less. So if you're helping someone cut down on consumption, that is the number one best thing that we can all do regardless if i can grow a t-shirt on a fucking tree and sell you loads of those it doesn't matter because we still need you to have a lot less stuff than you currently do so yeah i would say like my intention with old music has always been to kind of like create pieces that women keep and repeat like repeat wardrobes is major key um but intention and impact aren't necessarily the same thing as a founder you're constantly learning and i want to understand what a meaningful impact improvement actually looks like I think this is where I when people ask me for brand recommendations or when they'll ask me to do an Instagram job I always send people to an about page and a discover page rather than a product page so I'll obviously through years of being online I've taken influencer jobs and the brand was like right can you do a swipe up link to this product and this product and this product and I was like can I just send them to your about page because then they know what changes you're installing the brand your origin story why you do what you do and what things actually matter to you and then if they subscribe to all those things they can go on the website themselves and buy something from you when they need it so um I think having having goals that are clear and being honest about them I remember working with a brand a few years ago and they were like we've missed our goal and I was like tell everyone like it's brilliant tell everyone because telling people when you fall short is so meaningful to them so intimidating like it is it's a mean world out there it is they'll anyone will take i feel like we shied away from really like bill it's actually a big regret of mine because i feel like the way in which we've grown odd muse has been like slow and steady even with our knitwear supplier they become our second supplier like we've never gone between suppliers negotiated we've always grown within their capacity and because i for so many years found it so terrifying to talk about the little things i was doing because they weren't big things and we weren't able to achieve like the big milestones like fully changing our website to natural fibers doing all these different things i feel like it's such an intimidating thing to do because everyone will pick at what you're not doing and what people don't understand is sustainability is a journey and you're going to make mistakes it's even when you just spoke about knitwear yeah when i went into knitwear last year that is the reason why you only saw like one wall fringe card some minefield i could not build out a full range like even now we're having to get like full-on industry experts in because i want to be a knitwear brand and i want it to be a luxury sector of odd news and i really want to do it kind of the reset button and not mix too much like polyester and stuff in there but it's so crazy like where you get your wool from and all the different certifications and like it's wild and it's terrifying it's terrifying it's terrifying there's also some certifications were great five years ago and now they're falling into disrepute so it's like you're on the website of your supply and you're like i don't even know which certificates look out for um they'll also then ramp up moqs and then you turn into a brand you didn't want to be it's it's never ending um but it's a battle that's worthy and i think if you can communicate that to like if you get to your one product and you do that one product really really well you then become known for it and so people will be like asking their friends like i just want like a merino polo from somewhere and they'll be like i'll get the odd muse one it's great yeah because you're renowned for making one really really good one um so i think you know it's hard because you want to be almost like filled out all of the needs in one go and it just doesn't it's just not really viable doing it that way it also just doesn't exist no it doesn't what do you think that question this is not even on my list but what do you think about the brand reformation you look into them yeah i've looked into them a few times they've got a punchy tag line they started off sustainable we're the second option yeah sustainable is naked we're the second option something like that yeah they started off i think with a lot of it was kind of one of those journeys where like load of brands went on it where they shouted loads about sustainability right at the start and then realized that actually the world moved on quicker than they did and so they had this reputation for being like a sustainable brand and then it's really hard to then keep up with that and keep up with that and then say it honestly and then the more kind of green claims that come in oh shit we can't say that anymore we can't say that anymore but i think um i actually really like i think they come from a good place i think it comes from a good place i don't think they're trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes yeah i actually the reason i say that is because when we're like really thinking about how we can like build out our pages next year and on their page you can like every single year download their sustainability report and their impact and stuff and i just really want to get to a point where we can do that yeah that is who do i need to hire to help me with that that is one of the things actually whenever i work with a brand i'll see if they've got a sustainability report and i think one of the most interesting ones i read recently was kering which is huge obviously um obviously own gucci sanaron bottega but their reports each year are really really interesting and for a group that turns over a few billion you can almost like oh my god i'm actually excited about what they're doing and their targets and stuff like phasing out virgin leather um even though they've got some really big leather houses as part of their group and then when i went to milan recently for fashion week i spoke to a director of sustainability who works for a caring group uh brand and he was like you know when we do a fashion show i have to make a list of how everyone comes to the show and put it in a report so whether they've taken a private jet or like the bus or a line bike it all goes into a list and equally nothing around the show is allowed to be like single-use plastics or stuff that we're just simply going to throw away like the level of detail is insane for a brand that big yeah i think that i think that's the main thing like i learned over the last couple of years is it actually takes a village to yeah to get your brand to that place and then it takes a whole other village to present it in a clear amazing way to your customers do you think bigger brands get because i really feel like bigger brands that are more part of the problem get way less scrutiny is this just because they're better equipped to kind of like absorb it and move on or they've just got such a business where people kind of don't care uh they've got business where people don't care they the one recurring theme that i find is that they're all ran by men who are immediately questioned less than any women founder that i know as well especially when they're not like even an independent brand when they're part of a group no one really looks into it or cares I've done this a few times when I've done like reviews on brands I think I remember doing one on odd muse and you were like happy because it was fair like I wasn't yeah unnecessarily evil I wasn't unnecessarily um like applauding things that you do but I was like it's a good medium-sized brand they seem like they care what they do and then when you look into other ones and like your origin story even like you just in your bedroom trying to juggle your job with starting something that you were passionate about you look at other ones and they're like oh they had four failed businesses and they came from banking because you know they've always cared about women's leggings what the fuck are you talking about um and now they make 50 million quid a year and you know i'm like you just make tons and tons and tons of crap and you're here because that's the only reason you're here um or equally the extremely wealthy people who land in fashion after years of doing nothing or something else and you're like you're here because you think having a fashion brand makes you cool and it's i do think actually going back to that video that that's what i want to see online like i love constructive criticism i've built my whole career and my whole business on constructive criticism i can recognize constructive criticism versus wanting to go viral like in that same in a same week period i can have loads of other people tag me in a video where I just know the intention is to maybe go viral and online negativity wins um but like literally I remember watching that video like we need an about me page and we need to like show off that we're we've got this supplier story and we're doing what we can but then you know we got so terrified of the p word which is polyester and I think the way in which I always I'm kind of glad I run into like a little bit of trouble with that because it really kind of taught me to not only diversify from polyester but just diversify my fabrics I was running one line of fabric and I want to learn more about walls and cottons and how I can actually make a jacket and how I can actually make a jumper and not just kind of these mini dresses like it changed the brand all over for me but yeah I just think it's you don't know what you don't know and yeah of course you have to keep learning but that's that's the difference between like someone someone like you who runs a brand of your nature and your size compared to a brand that's been around for like decades who turns over hundreds of millions and they're still just rolling out the same crap when i reviewed the last um o poly show in new york so you've been doing this how long and your one material is mesh and that's vague as well at the best of times i was gonna say i looked on the website not too long ago to see how they would describe it just says mesh it says mesh and i don't know so i had loads of comments i'm like it is against the law in the uk to not list full composition and it's the same on labels it was like a textile garment act labeling act from the year 2000 and something 2007 maybe and then i don't think it exists in america so they can skirt around it by just putting like satin or hot mesh or like stretchy mesh and i'm just like they're just descriptive words so yeah it really it really threw me and And I was like, I don't know if anyone else is doing this or if it's just something no one's ever looked into.

33:11Who do you think are like the biggest offenders? In terms of like brand, I think there's a lot of brands who are brilliant misleaders. I think Zara are probably the best misleader. I think so too, because even as a consumer, I can sometimes be tempted with a Zara purchase. It looks fucking amazing. Some of the stuff looks amazing. I can do that once or twice a year. I can go in there and buy a few things that I, I mean, the way in which I shop is, I want to wear it like I bought this from Topshop three years ago and I wear it on like a weekly basis yeah so I can be like drawn into that world once a year for things that I genuinely see myself but you have to have that mindset going into the shop otherwise it can especially if you're just walking down and you see the Kaya Gerber or Cindy Crawford in the window like oh my god she looks amazing I'm just going to walk in and get that exact outfit if you stop yourself in the street and go it'll be on vintage in a week yeah i'll just wait a week and you can still get it if you still if you still want it in a week maybe you actually do want it if you still sat home thinking about it maybe you do actually want it and you will wear it but for the most part they're yeah they're master i always think they're master manipulators because they're brilliant their campaigns look like san loran and celine campaigns and it is literally crap what's your view on um influencer halls because i actually don't see i mean i never want to see anyone they've kind of died a bit they have but there are there's still a lot of them yeah there's still a lot of them i don't even think zara are on platforms like ltk or anything so there's no reward in it but there is this kind of if you do a zara hall you're gonna go viral yeah whatever reason people are addicted to zara and people are going in there every single i see people doing videos like every single thursday and like shopping from their new inn like what what is your opinion on that my um so you know like now and then i'll like really bash fast fashion on my on my instagram and stuff and people are like you know not all of us can afford this and not all of us can do that and i'm like first of all not speaking to you if if all you can afford is to shop just what you need from these brands i'm not talking to you my main gripe is the wealthy influencers who are pummeling this towards their audiences um because they have the money they don't buy from there like there's countless influencers who will do zara and h &m and even she and hauls who are let's face it millionaires um they get millionaires from shoveling shit towards their audience and they go and buy really nice things like birkins and chanel bags and like they buy really nice things for themselves but they'll sell you just the worst thing that makes them the most money so my main gripe is with those because they've got privilege of choice um and i've managed to have a okay career online not selling crap to people i couldn't i it could be my full-time job if i stopped doing everything else i would get by so i just think people are just like lying to themselves thinking that that's their only job online a lot to kind of like take that temptation out of it like Like I wrote a piece on Substack last week called Bring Back Pretentiousness.

36:19And it's kind of stems from these comments I used to get like, especially after Love Island, because I was like, oh, you think you're better than all the other contestants because you don't do fast fashion. Or you think you're better than all the other models who have to say yes to all these jobs. And I was like, no, I'm not pretentious. I think first of all, it's a very working class thing to care about the things that I wear and the things I buy. We grew up in Derby. We didn't have everything we didn't have much I had just enough but the things I had were wanted pieces and then became like my fuck around trainers or my dad's gardening shoes or the rag for the car like that's how we grew up so for me to go and buy something and think oh this is made like crap I'm not buying that that's not pretentious that's normal and then I think actually I think the world would be a better place if we were all a bit more pretentious we should care about our image a bit more than being the face of a zara hall or the face of a sheen factory visit i'm i actually am yeah i'm pretentious i don't actually care um and then you lead you into like being an environmentalist and it's like it comes from enormous privilege to be able to be an environmentalist and make choices in your whole life um and again that's like oh you think you're better than everyone because you care about the environment i was like i was like fighting with that face i was like fuck it yeah i am i think i'm better than you because i care about the planet because I care about garment workers more than I care about my need to be trendy yeah absolutely but the influencer thing really is interesting because I do feel I do feel like a lot of the consumers that are engaging with that content they're not the people that are commenting on your videos saying I can only afford x amount these girls are going into Zara and they're spending like over they're spending like three figures a month like yeah yeah just under like a thousand pounds anything above 300 that is literally why i started odd muse because i recognized i was going to pretty little thing every single weekend and on my entry level salary yeah i was still spending like 300 pounds a month on clothes why would i not want to buy a blazer that i'm still gonna have now like five years later why do i constantly why am i constantly buying things that i just don't it's also you just don't value it yeah yeah you just don't Hang it in your wardrobe the same way you are something that you've spent like 200 pounds on.

38:35And it's not going to last. It's not going to last in terms of style or quality. But I do just feel like the internet that consumes all this content, they are spending that amount. There is a thing where it's like these, even the girls that are the people that we have listening here, like we all have to check ourselves sometimes. Yeah, 100%. Your journey and your experience there is backed up by research. The average Shein customer, again, just one brand, earns more than the average income. It was something like in the$70 ,000 a year in America, they're spending over$150 a month on Shein every single month on average, more than that.

39:20And they come from middle class backgrounds. so I'm like if you add up how much money you spent in that year and bought like 15 really good things you'd have a much better wardrobe that would last you far longer and then you look at like the traditional historical consumption levels and historically how much we would spend out of our income on clothing the amount we've spent of our income on clothes has dropped and we've increased how much we get for that money so in the I think it was the late 80s early 90s we'd bought around 12 13 items a year and now it's around 80 but we're spending far less than we used to and we're getting 80 items it's probably close to 100 now every single year 100 pieces of new clothes and that's the average so obviously some people are buying a lot less obviously like you and I some people buy more than that but they're not they it's like the first thing like well maybe I can't afford it and I'm like I know there's people in that group who can but they don't want to actually look at their consumption and how much they spend or maybe they're just comfortable and they're happy getting loads and loads of stuff because abundance is wealth to them i i do think it is this kind of and i i'd love to hear your perspective actually on the beauty industry yeah because i do feel like that now the beauty halls i get served are insane i think it's the it's kind of the rage that fast fashion was when i feel like i first started odd music i genuinely do see a lot of girls like being a lot more conscious of how they're shopping but beauty doesn't come into that conversation we still have like 10 bloody lip balms yeah it's it's insane but no one's actually talking about that like everyone talks about how the beauty industry is sometimes they talk about the saturation of it and should people keep launching brands but actually the sheer volume of products and how how trendy it's become insane it's insane i think every celebrity musician artist whatever has a beauty range it's like the one thing because it's a gold mine of money or a fragrance um the industry is also completely plagued with plastic like single-use plastic unrecyclable plastics um and i literally today as we sit here i've just posted a video about um hayley bieber's road business and um she's done a podcast about saying she doesn't care about over consumption she's all about you know having one of everything i'm like you really meant one of absolutely everything um but it was just like the the colors of the phone cases alone not even the lip balms the phone cases for the lip balms the colors there's like bronze colada sweet pea hot pick there's so many and i'm like you could have just made one and everyone would have bought it anyway and they're because they're great and the lip balms are apparently really nice too so i'm like you could have made one rather than one in every color i'm with you there i get i do get what you're saying i but i also see the other side of the girls that do want like four different colors of this so here's here's the thing with that sort of consumption change ourselves for me i don't think i don't think that's over on a consumption i think it's symbolic consumption symbolic consumption is basically you not actually caring about the product the galleanos are i think again the same that ellie saab h &m thing you don't actually want the product you want the affiliation with the person who founded the product so if i have every road colored lip balm and every phone case that's not me saying i need those things it's me saying i want to be closer to hayley bieber the same with the galliano i don't really actually want anything of these collections i'm not going to wear it but if i buy it i then have something that's galliano so it's that affiliation i get that i had a moment years ago where i got a little h &m ball man moment when they come out with that in like 2015 2015 so how much of this do you actually think is pr and marketing i think most of it i think 90 of it's fluff um there's the entire industry is built i probably shouldn't have said it but at london fashion week someone asked me for a hot take and i said almost everything's bollocks and that's a boiling take yeah that is almost everything um you see or mark it's mostly marketing and i think the one to maybe 10 is actually good stuff but most of the stuff you see is just it's all it's capitalism that's what you're that's what you're being sold how do you feel about influencers and celebrities bringing out brands i can't remember the last time i saw one that made sense you know like the stanley tucci cooking stuff if he has he got his own olive oil or something like that oh yeah he likes cooking he's brought his own olive oil still a bit of a churn but i was gonna say i love that man yeah lovely you've done like my two people hayley and sandy i love hayley bieber i love justin bieber as well and i'm like watching them like fuck i'm gonna do a takedown video of this these billionaires but um that was like it made sense he'd been cooking for ages all through lockdown the one thing he was doing was posting about cooking so i'm like yeah he should bring out some pans or something that makes sense i like that but for the most part it's just like i don't know we go back to the reason people start fashion brands the reason people do collaborations it's mostly just for them to make money so yeah i think if you're an influencer or a creator and you're bringing out a brand just gotta make sure if it makes sense yeah if it aligns with you like if i was to bring out i don't know what product i would do um and people ask me all the time why i haven't started a fashion brand and i was like maybe i would do a line for someone else's brand but it would really have to be me and this time a couple of years ago when I was involved in a fashion line I was making clothes for me and they were really utilitarian and really a specific shape and all this stuff and I remember just butting heads with something like well it won't fit my 65 year old husband who's a bit of a different shape to you and I was like but if I wanted to make clothes for him I'd have just done a line with like H &M.

45:06That's another thing people don't understand so we always get comments whenever we do a collection like when will you just start bringing everything out in petite when will you start doing tool and it's like if i did that i would be sat on so much stock because yeah i don't have the demand and i've not invested in that demand yet like it's not waiting there for me just because there's like i might have like five gms about it but that's not gonna be a viable business venture a rollout like that um you can you can come into so much hot water yeah yeah when it comes to actually what you can commercially afford as an independent brand yeah and what people expect of you because you are on paper successful and odd muse has a million followers why don't we have a petite range because we're not investment backed there's no one yeah there's no one paying for this yeah paying that forward into the future for us to grow into yeah petite if i want to do something it has to be very very obvious that this is going to work because otherwise Otherwise, you know, everything has to keep working to keep moving because we have no backing.

46:12Exactly. And that's the thing. And if you took backing on, which could make you expand, then before you know it, you've lost sight of the business you started. That's exactly why we say that we want to become a hundred million pound brand because I want that for my team. However, I don't care if it takes me five years, 10 years, 15 years. like i just i don't care how quick we get there because like literally we're having it framed in the office 100 million without losing soul yeah we will not lose sight of who we are even with our factory we always want them to be our legacy supplier they have to always make 70 of odd news because they have worked with us for the last six years and our business is so important to them like it's literally changed their lives and it's the same with the knitwear supplier we want to people have such crazy experiences going in between suppliers and chasing a cheaper cost price like the fact that I haven't had to deal with that it might have cost me a lot more money over the years and it has actually cost me a lot more money over the years because my supplier started her business the exact same time as me so what she what I didn't know she also didn't know yeah so we've had loads of mistakes that we've had to fix that maybe someone who works with 25 different brands and pushes a lot more volume would have never have come into but i just think people really don't understand behind the scenes and there's no podcast episode one hour two hour three hours long that could ever explain it yeah but you can sleep at night as well and you could have shafted that family years ago and expanded exponentially yeah but and i know the first thing if i was to take investors on the first thing they do would make you separate from that especially with what happened yeah in the us last year everyone exited china and i was like yeah what am i literally what am i gonna do yeah um what is your view on china um china has some of the worst factories in the world and next door some of the best factories in the world yeah i've worked with a few chinese brands this year um in fact the jacket i wore coming into here is from an italian brand called montecor it has lorapiana fabric but it's made in china all of their stuff's made in China.

48:24I've worked with Erdos, Cashmere, Legacy Cashmere brand, vertically integrated business, amazing. But seeing the farms, it's really cool. And yeah, I think FTC Cashmere as well, Fairtrade Cashmere, there's amazing. There's literally amazing factories there that do things that we could never do, or that they've done things far quicker than the development of other places in the country, all over the world. But equally, yeah, of course, like you said earlier, bad news travels fast and it's the most engaged with so if you want to go and look at the sheen village it's terrible there are mattresses in the factory and they're like no this is a good thing because they were sleeping on the floor before and it's just like right okay this is where we're at um so yeah i think there's been this massive smear campaign almost against made in china and we really have to start unraveling it because it's not applicable there was also a friend of mine who set up fashion revolution china over there and has a factory called vishin factory and they're like innovating next generation plant-based leather alternatives and he sends me a sample every now and then i'm like wow this is he's like it's made of cactus leather so let me know get how you got on with it it might have been bad and then i'll send it in back and i was like no it's not ready yet he's like okay cool like there's there's so much innovation going on yeah that's what i always say to everyone like they're working so much harder than everyone else and they've come such a long way in the last 10 years they're going to come an even further way in the next 10 years also look at look at their decarbonization goals and targets they are miles ahead of anyone else from hitting theirs they're so far ahead of the uk and the us and everywhere else probably in the world of becoming like carbon neutral and decarbonizing supply chains they're miles ahead i just feel like a lot of people online kind of dehumanize china 100 and And I think it's a real problem.

50:14Yeah, yeah. I've even, one of my friends, Jenny, she runs a fabulous bag brand called Freya. And she makes in China. She's from China. Her family all live there. And we had a conversation over dinner and she was like, it is so offensive to me and my family. The way in which people assume that my family at home work and the way in which our bags are produced. Like I'm Chinese. I want to produce in China. that does not mean that it doesn't mean it's bad i always just say to people please just go on your maps on your phone look at china yeah look how big it is how can you even assume that like a one opinion fits all to a country of that size it just does not make sense yeah there's there's hundreds of thousands of garment factories in china we can also do the same with leicester if we want to we can go to Leicester and you can see an absolutely horrendous garment making factory who have been shafted by British brands who are played against each other who have exploited people and next door you've got some of the best British makers that you will ever find people who've supplied the Paul Smith made in the British Isles collection people who work with Barber and equally you go up to the north of England in Huddersfield and Bradford there's some incredible factories there's some bad ones here too we we can't just like you know brand all of leicester as bad because of the plt and the boohoo scandal that came out there's some really good factories there too yeah it's just sometimes i don't even think it's education it's just kind of more common sense like every corner of the world there's amazing and then there's really terrible and you just have to be better at yeah going with these amazing people that are treating their workers fairly that are pricing things in a proper way yeah yeah the problem is rarely the product or the factory is people if you've got a factory that's ran by a bad person and the brand is ran by a bad person then you're gonna have bad stuff going on it's the like where the uh peter campaigns at new york fashion week in london this this last month um i like the problem's not the fiber the problem is the farmer or the person running the farm like you will have sheep being sheep being kicked in the head that's not a problem with wool that's the problem with the farmer he's a bad person but equally i know farmers who love their animals and look after them like they are their family so the problem's not the product it's the person the problem really is the consumer yeah because at the end of the day we a lot of people are having these conversations people are getting so much more aware but these businesses are growing year on year yeah and i feel like people are very much caught on to kind of the boohoo of it all but the zaras and the hms and the real kind of like high street bricks and mortars yeah they continue to grow yeah and they continue to kind of like live on releasing all these options i'm a bit hopeful like there's now and then i'll come across someone new on tiktok and they'll be doing videos about composition and about fibers and about construction even like go through if like i said earlier like they'll go through and look at all the seams and how things are finished like this is well finished it will last a long time it will withstand washers um the more we learn from these like educational creators the better and i like to think that that content will eventually and keep being like you know uh benefited in the algorithms so that more of us can see it and learn more about like garments because our parents and grandparents all learned about it at school they all learned how to sew and how to finish a pair of trousers and it kind of skipped us out so we now have to retrospectively learn it from social media I think yeah definitely okay so I've got a little section for us both which is called I want to launch a brand where do I start don't and we don't

54:12right okay yeah go on carry on my friend my friend's launching a brand so yeah yeah but they they do i feel like if you want to launch anything you want to do in life you've got to do yep it's the mission do it busy okay before placing the first production order what do i need to understand your consumer is the first thing you need to understand the best and your supply chain one thing I would say with this is I've been that 22 year old girl that's placed to order fair enough it was for eight SKUs and it was 50 units each but even going back to that I made this brand successful from one jacket so I actually always say to people launch one product yeah do one thing really well do one thing super super well um make sure it lives your mission of your business don't feel the need to i remember when i was first launching odd muse and i was like i just want her to like have an outfit for every different occasion so i did like a sequin shirt for like a party outfit and i did like a leather bodysuit for kind of a desk to dinner situation and then i did the blazer and a shirt yeah um just do one thing the blazer is what taught us that actually she wants something that she's going to wear to all of those things yeah and dress up dress down it has to be super feminine that's how we learned that we've obviously got this brand where she loves a cinch waist yeah and something that is going to last so i actually always say launch with one product yeah that's my main thing what five questions should she ask her suppliers and what credible answers sound like oh my god what do credible answers sound likes tough um questions you should ask suppliers is do they know where everything comes from do they know the names of their garment workers um do they have access to fire exits building regulations health and safety precautions toilets sick pay access to toilets things like that like Like really understand if they know this off the top of their head, I think that's the biggest indicator.

56:24If they know all these things off the top of their head and they don't have to go and look into any of them, that would be the really green flag for me. And ask them if they're flexible with their MOQs. because I think people who are flexible and are willing to believe in what you're doing are more likely to help you in the future and more likely to stick by you and believe in what you're doing because then you can go to them and say look we're here for the long run we're not here to just sell 10 000 of one thing and then we're done when we made our first million I think I don't want to work with businesses who are ran by like businessmen I want to run I want to work businesses are run by real people yeah i agree i would say i always ask i mean i haven't really i always think go like going out to the place is like dating like it's yeah literally it's the perfect person what were the things you asked when you first met yours i basically got told i think it's really bad business advice but it's like old business advice that you should never kind of have all your eggs in one basket with one factory because if something happens to them your hobbies is done there's all your stuff's done but i still prefer working with one factory and i can work very closely with them to make sure we don't foresee anything happening for like the next year but anyway i started i went out to i did a china trip where i went and visited different factories and the main thing that i was found myself asking the most that trip was what's your capacity because where i was kind of coming in as odd news and like this mid-level brand and people really thought that i was wanting to scale it like a fashion brands tent historically do yeah um they would always give me the truth so they would be like 600 we do around 600 000 to a million garments a month a month wow i don't want to be working with a factory that can send a million garments out a month and as i walk into the factory everything's kind of covered everyone's on lunch i'm not really i'm not picking much of a vibe but like it's a nice office that i can see and i go into their showroom gorgeous dresses they've even took the liberty of making up some samples um but they thought i would be impressed by 600 000 to a million garments a month that's insane that that's important like for me that will just never be odd odd muse and i don't want to work i actually always i think a lot of young people and young brands kind of want to work with suppliers that have some like good names on their board yeah you want the affiliation i actually think i actually prefer that like my factory doesn't work with a lot of other brands and i remember feeling that way at the very beginning like i don't want i don't necessarily want someone that's worked with asos or next or anything like that yeah number one let's be honest they're not going to prioritize you yeah true you're not spending your orders are so much smaller than theirs yeah exactly and also there's there's going to be some sort of give there like this there's no way these brands scale at the level that they do without there being kind of like cracks in the story so i found myself asking the most what's your monthly capacity yeah that's good because it helps me gauge exactly it like anyone who's making 600 000 garments a month i'd surely have to go view many different sites like they can't be operating from one side so i don't have like visibility on that so yeah i found myself asking what capacity and then just just for in generally helping people just what is your lead time and and you know how many factory workers do you have and yeah what are your back in the day we always used to look at smita reports we still do but i know that there's so many more creditations now um but yeah the main thing was capacity for me that would also be another question i would ask like what's your lead time and if they start to boast about how quickly they could do something like well we could turn something around in two days and send it to you the next day that would scare me i've never actually had that i've had people say like 10 to 20 days which i still think is too soon yeah yeah we're around like 40 days yeah i was gonna say but that's if we have fabric on the floor yeah so we like run a lot of the same fabrics yeah so we have like this new that's stepped in instead of our polyester we have like a cotton mix fabric yeah we always have that on the floor yeah um so it's ready to go and it's still like 40 odd days yes and then i i don't even want to talk about our knit lead time because it's crazy it's so long and them items are so heavy and i have to ship them by sea and just yeah i'm really gonna grow knitwear category over the next five years it's just yeah if she discovers a problem after launching what should she do honesty is the best policy i will always say this like if you've encountered a problem be honest with your customers a friend of mine did it with her brand she'd ordered something when it arrived realized that it wasn't the composition mix that she'd asked but was sat with all this stock so she went to her audience and was like look there's been a mistake but i'm not just going to throw all this away so this is what we've got we'll reduce it pay what we paid for it but still sell it and still keep it it's still made really well it's not what we thought it was going to be and i think it's always going to be the best thing i'm i think most people are happy to get behind a brand that's honest i absolutely agree with that i wouldn't say anything else um if her budget is limited what should she prioritize first in terms of like starting a brand or in terms of a consumer i think yeah in terms of starting a brand in terms of starting a brand wanting to start a brand that's like got a meaningful impact yeah um i would do what you would do as a consumer anyway is that look at the number one thing that you wear the most and all your friends wear the most and make that product as good as you possibly can even if it's a really small run just to start with make something that you know will completely sell out and that people will love and uh and keep forever yeah i think that's the same as me it goes back to just launching that one product that's all my questions thank you so much for coming on I mean yeah I could chat to you same but thank you so much I really enjoyed that