For a clothing company—or any company that makes physical things—the most sustainable product is often something that lasts so long that a customer doesn’t have to buy a replacement for years. That’s a challenge, of course, for businesses that rely on selling more products to make money. And it’s something that Eileen Fisher, the founder and CEO of the eponymously named clothing company, often thinks about.
The company’s website explains its philosophy:
At the end of the day, we make stuff. Where it ends up is our responsibility. We start by designing our clothes to last, so they’ll stay in your closet longer. And when you’re done with them we take them back to resell. To date, over one million garments have been collected and sorted. As for the pieces we can’t sell? They’re tomorrow’s raw material, to be reborn as new textiles or refashioned as new clothes. It may take longer than 5 years, but we imagine a future in which waste is a thing of the past.
“From the very beginning, the idea about my clothes was that they were not wasteful and timeless, and you didn’t have to throw them away,” Fisher says. The brand’s designers continue working to improve the sustainability of the line. By next year, all of the cotton and linen it uses will be organic. The company is working with ranchers who use regenerative practices to raise sheep, such as grazing sheep in rotation, something that can help sequester carbon in the soil of the ranch and potentially make wool carbon negative. It’s beginning to use recycled plastic bottles to make dresses and shoes. It works with dyehouses to shift to responsible dyes. And it’s also working to improve other parts of its operation, such as limiting air shipments.
“I think that what’s exciting is that customers are waking up and are interested in supporting companies that are trying to do this kind of work,” Fisher says. In an ideal world, she says, businesses would be regulated globally so that workers were always paid fairly and manufacturers always used processes that were safe for workers’ health and the environment. In the meantime, companies like hers can try to push the industry forward, including questioning brands’ reliance on continual sales of more clothing. It’s something that other clothing companies are also thinking about, like Patagonia, which repairs old clothes to sell to new consumers and famously ran an ad seven years ago on Black Friday asking consumers not to shop. The North Face and other brands are also focusing on giving second clothes a new life, recognizing that they have a larger responsibility than simply selling more clothing.
“The future of business is not really just being able to make a living for people, and make more money, and go public, and all those kinds of things,” Fisher says. “But it’s actually the possibility to make a difference in the world.”