Fair Trade Fashion and Design

Bettina, SF, storefront

How does the fashion industry work?

Who buys clothes, and who sells them?

What do people like to buy and sell in stores?

What different types of boutiques, shops and fashion corporations are in California, and how do they differ?

How do you make clothes and fashion accessories?

What makes a product “Fair Trade” and how are those products traded and sold in the world?

“Hello, my name is Jasmine, I will be working for a fair trade organization of indigenous weavers in Southern Chile to help them design a line for contemporary boutique audiences. May I ask who buys for your store, how I may contact them, and how they choose the products here? And by the way, what do you look for in design?”

Ecoboutique Ladita, SF. Eco-friendly fashion.

These are some of the mind-bogglingly large questions I asked as I began walking down bustling sidewalks of the San Francisco Bay Area shopping nexus. My little sketch book had a map-like checklist of all of the shopping streets I had come to memorize growing up as a girl here. To the South there was the Peninsula: University Avenue Palo Alto, Castro Street Mountain View, Santa Cruz Ave in Menlo Park, Saratoga. The East, there was Berkeley: Fourth Street, Telegraph, College Avenue, and Oakland and Emeryville coming up now. To the North, Marin: Mill Valley, Sausalito, Larkspur, Tiburon, San Anselmo, Fairfax, downtown Novato.  Even further North, the wine country: downtown Sonoma, Napa, St. Helena, Calistoga.  And then of course San Francisco: Mission/Valencia, Castro, Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, Hayes Valley, Union Street, Filmore Street, Haight Street, and Union Square if I dared.

The goal was to traverse as much of this territory and meet as many people as possible in two weeks, figure out how to design products that would sell in this community, and learn how to get my future fair trade products distributed in the United States.

The Store, Mill Valley

While walking door to door in search of answers and further questions, I specifically sought out these types of stores: mid to high-end contemporary boutiques (fashion, home-furnishing, and industrial design), import stores with more traditional/exotic foreign products, and eco / green / fair trade / new age stores which concentrated on social principles.  All three target markets could comfortably host products crafted in modern style which exhibited foreign aesthetics and social consciousness.  In effect, this product line will strive to bridge the gap between these three types of audiences in a new way: bringing not only uniquely interesting shapes to foreign and fair trade stores accustomed to traditional aesthetics, but also socially responsible products to the mainstream. In addition to looking for venues for the contemporary line, I also wanted to help the foundation find more places that were appropriate for their traditional products.

I wanted not only to meet these vendors for future contact, but also to hear their take on the project and any ideas they may have had to contribute. After all, they are they experts on what sells to whom.  I was also interested in seeing what sort of fashion, accessory, and product trends are appreciated most in these places and how much everything sold for. Once I explained the nature of my humanitarian-aimed project, most people were happy to offer contact and advice between customers.

In every store I deemed even remotely relevant I would follow a certain routine.  First, I would pretend to be a customer: taking particular interest in any bags, scarves, or woven/knit items in the shop that were aesthetically relevant to what I had in mind for our innovations.  When things struck me as interesting or if I wanted to figure out how they were made, I would innocently try things on in the dressing room to study them. I was interested in the shapes of soft bags, and things that looked great in textile.  The sorts of things I could imagine in Mapuche weaves. Then, depending on how welcoming the staff was or how appropriate the store fit seemed, I would strike up conversation. After a little description of my work, I would gauge how receptive the employees were and ask questions appropriately. I took note of how my design line could fit in, what sort of styles worked, who the clientele were, how much things cost, and by what process that store obtained products.

The Store in Mill Valley, CA

Through nearly a hundred of these casual interviews I learned a tremendous amount about commercial fashion, how the system works, vendors, buyers, markets, gift and fashion shows, accessory manufacturing, consignment, wholesale, profits, fashions reps, intermediaries, taxes, seasons, sizes, brands, whew!  It’s pretty complicated.

(Almost as complicated as making the multi-pocketed handbags the system operates to sell: buckles, hinges, structure, types of stitches, weight capacity, volume and lightness, lining, magnetic clasps, zippers, fabric tactility and durability – what fun!)

In general, people in the Bay Area (hippies, yuppies, hipsters, new agers, dot comers, students, professionals, etc.) were very receptive to the idea of modernly fashionable Fair Trade, and also seemed excited that indigenous people would be profiting from the designs instead of corporations. Vendors were happy to hear that the project could make the Mapuche’s hand-woven products more complimentary to their fashion selections.  A series of allies revealed themselves in this process; some store owners would get so excited as to sketch ideas that came to mind, others pointed me to interesting websites relevant to the project, others gave me cell phones numbers of people to talk to, and many were open to seeing my products once developed.

Mill Valley Hat Box, a lovely place for Mapuche scarves?