Day 8 - Lets Talk Money

Today we will talk about money. A lot of it.

So, have you ever thought that £1.5 t-shirt is cheaper than your morning latte?

When price of £1.5 t-shirt might include:

1. Fabric production

2. Manufacturing

3. Export

4. Storing

5. Rent

6. Utility bills

7. Employees

8. Taxes

9. Branding and advertising

It is hard to believe that fast fashion retailers make profit at all.

However, since the price is so attractive, millions of buyers add them to the shopping.

Sandra Laville, the journalist of The Guardian shared a Story of a £4 Boohoo dress.

“It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress – reduced this week to just £4 – which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer’s 5 million UK customers to add it to their online shopping bag, click and pay” (Laville, 2019). And here we have 5 million dresses sold. And there are many items such as this dress. £1 bikinis, £5 tote bags, £8 sneakers and so on. It Doesn’t really hurt to pay less than £10 for one item. And also, it doesn’t not really hurt to throw it away, unless you are aware of environment. Some of you might say “I give it to charity”, bad news – charities are so full already, that they take only slow fashion or brand new fast fashion items only. So, everything else purely goes to the landfill and oceans.

Let’s get back to money, fast fashion items such as this £4 dress, mentioned before, have driven Boohoo’s sales to a record £434.6 million in 2019 (Retail Gazette, 2019). And it means they will carry on, they just won’t stop because we give them too much money. As a chief executive John Lyttle said, Boohoo is targeting a sales grown of 25-30% in one year. And then we have Missguided, Prettylittlething, ASOS, I Saw It First, Shein and many others. Then we also have Primark, Bershka, Top Shop, River Island, New Look, Stradivarius, Pull&Bear, Zara and others.

I don’t know how many clothes are sold every second in the world, but I know that the equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is dumped in a landfill every second.

Yes, 85% of all textiles go to the dump each year (World Economic Forum, 2020).

For the ending, let’s have a look at a very short life cycle of a fast-fashion dress: [photo]

Pretty impressive how much harm we can make by supporting fast fashion retailers by buying an “innocent” fast fashion item. What’s worse, we buy many items like this throughout the year.

Today’s task:

Try to go through your bank statements from the beginning of September 2019 until the very end of 2019. I know, a little bit of hard work, but at least you will see how much money you spent on clothes. Most likely, it won’t come up to very high numbers, but just because that’s the main point of fast fashion. What might happen, that more than a half of that stuff is already somewhere in the corner of the wardrobe, kind of waiting to be thrown away but just because it was worn only once, it still has to stay there for a little longer. I really hope that before adding something new to your shopping bag next time, you will think whether it won’t end up the same – in the same corner of the wardrobe and finally – somewhere in the landfill.

- Gertruda Eimutyte