Interview
“I’m working to the fullest capability of my human being”
Eric Jacques meets Summer Rayne Oakes, model and co-founder of Source4Style T
he original “eco model”, Summer Rayne Oakes, is recalling the 2009 world tour to promote her book Style, Naturally, an encyclopaedic overview of contemporary ethi- cal fashion. “I felt more like a publicist than a practitioner. You build up all this enthusiasm for sustainable design yet there’s no infrastructure for it to exist,” she says brightly, albeit some- what vocally hampered by the croaky vestiges of laryngitis. “There’s no infrastructure for people to say
‘hey, I want that, I want to incorporate that into my business, I want to incorporate that into my design line’, and that’s really frustrating.” Oakes’ frustration is set to be the gain of pro-green designers and suppliers on 10 September when she launches Source4Style, the world’s first online mar-
ketplace enabling users – principally fashion and interior designers and suppliers – to search and acquire sustainable textiles. For the 27-year-old Oakes, the venture is a seamless evolution of all that has gone before: Ivy league education in natural science and entomology, published, peer-reviewed papers on waste management, groundbreaking values- based modelling and consultancy, multi-plat- form sustainability thought leadership. An internet start up is an entirely new ball- game, but one that she is ready to embrace with characteristic fervour; timed to launch ahead of the New York and London Fashion Weeks, Source4Style is a fully-fledged attack on the
20 | Sustainable Business | August/September 2010
When we launch it is going to be a game changer for the industry. I can’t emphasise enough how much this needs to happen
fashion industry’s myopic, fragmentary techno- logically luddite attitude to materials sourcing. “The industry is just in dire need for some- thing like this,” explains Oakes, who has taken on the mantle as the company’s CEO. The $300B global textiles market is increas- ingly influenced by a sustainable apparel sector, currently worth around $6B and growing by an estimated $1B a year. Yet despite every strata of the fashion industry – from the behemoths to independent designers and retailers – gravitating toward increasingly sustainable materials, the sourcing process is often a logistical nightmare. One of the main hitches is expense; many suppliers offering sustainable materi- als simply cannot afford to attend the requisite trade shows (which can
cost $30,000 a shot) or maintain fancy websites. This dearth of availability means that well intentioned designers end up spending vast amounts of time on finding the right materials: last year, market research conducted by the Source4Style team among independent design- ers, who spend anything from $5,000 to $100,000 a year on materials, found that sourc- ing took up an astonishing 85% of their time. “Shouldn’t we be able to flip that so they are spending 85% of the time on designing?” Oakes asks.
Source4Style co-founder and COO, Benita Singh, explains that the new company is all about addressing the “sustainable design gap”.
“Once we start getting the word out, Source4Style has the potential to not only change how sourcing works for the sustainable apparel industry, but also for the apparel indus- try at large,”,” she suggests. To this end, Oakes and Singh have surround- ed themselves with an impressive core team, which is also augmented by sagacious input from advisers such as Damon Horowitz, an inveterate tech entrepreneur currently holding the title of director of social search/in-house philosopher at Google, and Maria Thomas, for- mer CEO and COO of handmade social com- merce sensation Etsy.
In its current low-key beta guise, Source4Style hosts 25 suppliers offering over 1,000 textiles as well as150 designers from the US, UK and Canada. Next year, Singh antici- pates a community of 60 designers and around 22,500 registered users. In 2011, 180 suppliers are expected to be on board.
The website is already a sleek proposition: simple, clean, elegant, it looks distinctly busi- ness ready. Users can search by materiality, loca- tion, weave, certification or colour before buy- ing yardages or swatches (samples) from 12 cat- egories of material, including wool, cotton, silks, hemp, rayon, and leathers. Each individual item is displayed using the latest interactive web technology, and comes with a detailed descrip- tion, backstory and ship time.
Product sustainability is broadly defined via four categories: environmentally-preferable materials (i.e. certified organic, rain-fed cotton as opposed to conventional, irrigated cotton);
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44