Professional guide

Getting the message out

Advertising, labels, hang-tags and information: At some point you will want to share your efforts with your customer. How do you avoid green-washing and how can you be honest in the light of the many companies who have been crucified for making claims they could not substantiate?

This is what the Welsh active-wear company howies® write on their internet-pages: "These products have been made to last. So that one day you can hand them down to someone else. And they can carry on their little journeys.

We live in times of limited resources but unlimited desire to consume them. The answer though is real simple: to consume less as a consumer; to make a better designed product as a manufacturer.

Going forward we will have to take more responsibility for our consumption. The manufacturer and the consumer will both have to share that responsibility."

Then they go on to say the following: "Hopefully we are smart enough to realise that everything we do, screws something up. As a company, we have to realise that. There is no perfect clothing company. Let's be honest with ourselves and with our customers about that. What we are doing at howies is trying to find ways to lessen that impact. Where we are now isn't where we want to be. But that will always be the case. As a company, we should always think that we can do it better.

What chemicals are good? What chemicals are bad?

It's nice to do organic cotton t-shirts, but the dyeing process isn't so nice. But that is now our focus to try and find lower impact ways of doing that. We can't say that our products are fair trade because we are not convinced that there is a trusted set of guidelines to follow. So we make no such claim until we can be sure.

That has meant we have to write our own guidelines. For a tiny company that is some undertaking. How do you measure the air quality in a factory? What chemicals are good? What chemicals are bad? How much overtime is allowed? How much holiday should be given? To these questions and more, we will go find the answers. Then we will make sure our factories follow our common sense guidelines. We are always looking for new ways to try to tread more carefully. Because that is what we set out to do: to try and run this business in a low as impact way as we can. If you have any ideas on how we can do it better, we are all ears."

Being honest is the best way to go. Transparency is not the norm in the apparel business today, but in the future it will be. Being ahead of the curve may be your best move. Maybe not as painfully honest as the Diesel-ad here; which plainly is using the irony of the tag-line and juxtaposing it with an image that would be a dime-a-dozen image in marketing without the said irony. Which brings us to a second point: Using blatant sex to sell is not the nicest thing. Especially if the images you use demean women, use under-aged models or models with eating disorders. These are problems that have nothing to do with the exploitation of workers, but is part of the whole picture of who you want to be and how you want the public to see your label. Generation X and Y may get the irony in this ad; their parents probably don't and find the whole thing disgusting. Turning sex in to a commodity promotes sex trafficing and sex slavery. The fashion industry should not be helping in the promotion of this inhumane exploitation. So consider carefully what messages you send out there.

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