My Blog

It was around the time that Chou had her kids, she says, that she understood the value of making a brand name that was both environmentally sustainable and inclusive.

Veronica Chou’s household has actually made its fortune at the leading edge of the quick fashion industry through investments in business like Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger. Today, the heiress toan approximated $2.1 billion fortune is releasing her own business, Everybody & Everyone, to prove that the style industry can be both environmentally sustainable and profitable. There’s no argument about the negative impacts

The brand-new brand name, which sells women’s clothing for every single size from 00 to 24 and at rates ranging from $18 to $288 (most fall in the $50 to $150 range, given a quick scroll through the business’s new site) partners with business like Naadam and Ecoalf for sustainable cashmere and recycled materials made from plastic.

“For our brand name, recycled is a huge story for us,” states Chou. “Our t-shirts, our socks, our product packaging, our mailers, our labels, our sticker labels are all made from recycled materials that can be recycled again.”

Some clothes are likewise made with materials that have recycled silver in them– so that the clothes can be worn numerous times without smelling or the need for a wash.

For Chou, an understanding of the ecological toll that the family service was taking on the planet began six years ago– a couple of years before Iconix Brand Group acquired the China subsidiary she had co-founded with her father in a deal supposedly worth $56 million.

well. About 20 %of commercial water contamination globally can be traced to the dyeing and treatment of fabrics– and microplastics from polyester, acrylic and nylon are contaminating the world’s oceans. The rise of fast fashion has actually encouraged customers to accelerate waste. Approximately one trash truck filled with clothing is landfilled all over the world every second, according to a 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That implies consumers are throwing away around $400 billion worth of valuable goods every year as low rates and more “seasons” create an illusion of disposability.

Since that revelation, Chou dove into the world of sustainable production head-first. Through her family’s investment lorries she has worked with companies like Modern Meadow, which utilizes bio-engineering to make leather items in a lab. Chou has also led financial investments in Thousand Fell, a soon-to-launch producer of fully recyclable shoes; Dirty Labs, which is establishing more sustainable laundry cleaning products; and Carbon Engineering, which is developing a direct air capture innovation for carbon dioxide.

Everybody & & Everyone has likewise partnered with the organization One Tree Planted to plant a tree for each purchase that’s made with the business. In addition, the business has determined its carbon footprint from all of its pre-launch activities and has purchased and retired offsets to balance its emissions, Chou says.

“I started developing Everybody & & Everyone from the ground-up, first by getting the best team in location then by finding the right vendors, makers and partners who were already making strides in the sustainability area,” Chou stated in a declaration. “I wanted this brand name to be for every single female, so body inclusivity, positivity and sustainability were going to be the foundation of everything we did. We then constructed the brands sustainable & & technical pillars, which include activation, recycled, coloring & & printing, naturals done better, bio-based fibers and end usage to guarantee our products would reduce negative effects. We are sustainable to the labels sewn into each garment.”

“It was 6 years ago I started discovering sustainability and five years ago that I stated that I required to have a sustainable brand,” says Chou.

Image courtesy of World Resources Institute

And her dad, Silas Chou, made millions as a financier in Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger. As an executive at Iconix Brand Group China, Veronica Chou contributed in the velocity of the market– bringing American brand names to Chinese consumers. Chou also served as the co-founder of the Beijing-based private equity fund China Consumer Capital and as a director of Karl Lagerfeld Greater China.

Everyone & & Everyone applies the lessons that Chou has actually discovered sustainability to a brand-new fashion brand that she hopes can work as a model for how to weave sustainability into every element of the market.

of the fashion market on the environment. The textiles market primarily utilizes non-renewable

resources– on the order of 98 million lots per year. That includes the oil to make synthetic fibers, fertilizers to grow cotton and harmful chemicals to color, treat and produce the textiles utilized to make clothes. The greenhouse gas footprint from fabrics production was roughly 1.2 billion lots of CO2 equivalent in 2015– more than all international flights and maritime deliveries combined(and a lot of those maritime deliveries and global flights were hauling clothing). The litany of disasters that can be attributed to the clothes market encompasses contamination, as

Digital printing is utilized in place of screens to prevent lots of water waste, the company said, and numerous of the company’s fabrics are not colored at all. rather, the company depends on an upcycling procedure by separating recycled fibers mechanically by color.

The company’s attention to its ecological effect likewise extends to its supply chain. “Most of our fabrics are knit near where our garments are made. That is absolutely decreasing our carbon footprint,” says Chou. “I put a focus on having factories in America … our denim is made in America and in the future we’re taking a look at tee shirts and sports to be made in America.”

As the fashion company has actually broadened, so has the wealth of the Chou household. South Ocean Knitters, the knitwear maker begun by Chou’s grandfather, was accountable for among the very first foreign financial investments into mainland China in 1974. It is now among the largest suppliers of knitwear in the world, and, together with the Hong Kong manufacturer Li & & Fung, is behind the Cobalt Fashion Holding corporation.