Saint of Killers wrote::lol:
Uniqlo may be fast fashion but I wear the *absolute strawberry float* out of my clothes. Half the problem with fast fashion is the wear-once-buy-something-new culture. I am not guilty of that. The only ones I will not wear are ones where the print has started to fade (which is why I will now only buy all-over prints from Threadless - all their regular prints went to gooseberry fool after Nth number of washes) but everything else gets worn to death. And once I'm done with them I'll either sell them, give them away or rag them. I don't just bin them or whatever it is the likes of Boohoo buyers do with their clothes.
Yeah I wasn't talking directly to you btw. Because it's my work I think about these things all the time.
I found it interesting the discussion around prices going up, and sales being less deep cut and less frequent. Possibly signs the industry is trying to address some of these problems - and in some of the trade news sources etc I read, it is constantly a subject of discussion and fervour because of the rise of environmental awareness but also the reality that if the industry doesn't change it will self-destruct.
Unfortunately what is more likely is that prices go up because of a combination of supply chain logistics being massively impacted by coronavirus and other things, or to just maintain or yield higher profits - with none of that money going to the people making the garments or printing them.
Say prices go up £1 per unit. Uniqlo could suggest 90p of that goes into factory floor wages and 10% goes to shareholders/executive level, by saying something like, "we aim to be sustainable with our pricing", in some PR puff copywriting stuff. In reality 90% of that is a shareholder/executive profit increase but this is justified because workers earned 1p more per hour or something with most going to higher levels in the production chain (such as factory owner, foremen, QA leads etc who's job is to just drive the shop floor harder).
I would class a faded print as a serviceable commodity and one that is inevitable depending on the method of print. The image is the same but with precedence given to the image the primary function of the item as a T-shirt remains. So I'm glad you don't throw them away, but they are still replaced when the item is functionally the same. Lots of people do this and I partly blame manufacturing methods for that.
I'm not sure on the Uniqlo aren't fast fashion. I think they sit somewhere in the middle, however it depends on where you look. I know they are better quality than the proper bottom of the pile stuff, but the model is the same, only the price shifts up or down a bit. The issue with fast fashion isn't entirely the speed per see, or even the cost, but the overproduction model itself.
There's very much a culture in the industry of, if this product doesn't sell, it doesn't matter, we'll just do deep discounts and everyone will be all over it. Feed the poor or whatever. If not, they essentially destroy the stock and cannot make even a fraction of the cost back (and never recover the human cost, even at the full sale price) on the method of destruction, even if it's recycling.
The thing is that's exactly what they expect. It's because of that expectation that they can justify over production to meet the lowest possible production cost. I'm talking under £2-2.50 or under per shirt, and that's only when it gets to here. In overseas territories, we're seeing a real cost to a business that holds assets in those currencies even less than that.
Also if say 20% of your stock volume is in transit, to people who can't be arsed to measure themselves, you have that asset tied up while it is essentially on loan to the customer to return 90% of their order value. This ties up not only cash assets, but human resources too - again, it's overproduction to meet a consumer need that shouldn't exist.
Every shirt, at 3.99, 4.99, £7.50 etc is still making a profit. At scale, that is considerable revenue based on a model of overproduction to get the lowest possible cost per unit and thus still make a profit on the sale price. Because the sale price, is - in essence - the normal price, outside of your "whale" type customers.
If they were not overproducing, there would not be any need for sales! Or they would lower the RRP. But they can't do that to maintain price positioning in the market segment, where they are perceived as a premium brand for what are basically average T-shirts with good (100% automated) printing.
Uniqlo offer nor use any sustainable method of decoration or construction. Organic, re-cycled, or other. They have a new recycling program but they likely sell this recycled cotton product to other brands, or leverage it as a CSR initiative to build the brand itself and appear ethical - known as greenwashing. That will amount to a pitiful amount of their overall business activity. What it amounts to is appeasing the tiny % of customers who need to hear those notes to buy into the brand and feel OK supporting the scale of any of the big name decorated basic/essentialwear brands.
They don't disclose their factory locations, or certifications, and are suspected of violating local labour laws, using cheap production facilities mostly in mainland China.
And honestly I just straight up don't get at times my own clients' loyalty to the brand. I can show them an identical shirt in every way - material, construction, size, shape, and far superior ethical criteria, and they will say the Uniclo one "fits better". One client will even go and buy blank Uniqlo shirts at the full RRP to print, which is strawberry floating nuts (as well as slowing everything down). I do respect that but I find it interesting the power a brand has over its perception as anything but a tawdry mechanism through which to extract value from image on relatively cheap T-shirt.
As an aside, 1% of cotton grown globally for apparel is organic, largely to maintain the low cost of cotton farming needed to offer such low prices, at the cost of soil depletion and forest/other land depletion or habitat destruction. Eventually it will not be possible to grow cotton anymore.
By the way, a soil association certified, or organic content standard T-shirt costs £2-4 at wholesale.
Why aren't Uniclo T-shirts or other large brands using sustainable materials and something barely better than modern slavery standards? 100% profit motive by exploiting the overseas territories that either don't care or can't do anything about it. Until some of the big names start changing the supply chain for the better all of these issues remain the burden of the consumer who is pretty much getting ripped off, because a better made garment lasts longer, and organic cotton is generally of a higher quality because it is fed well and matured at a normal rate (no artificial fertilizers that create inferior fibre grown too quickly).