More than a hundred billion pieces of clothing are made each year, such a large number it is difficult to imagine, isn’t it?
But more importantly, did we stop and think about where are those clothes coming from? Are the workers getting paid fairly? Are they using sustainable materials? Are the brands treating well their employees?
In a high-speed world, sometimes it is complicated to actually have a moment to think about it. Luckily, more organisations, activists and brands are doing the exhausting job to expose the issues around the fashion industry and the problems about overconsumption and overproduction.
About this, there are some interesting bullet points included in the Fashion Transparency Index 2021 done by Fashion Revolution that give us some insight about these problems:
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The UK consumes the most clothes in Europe yet major British brands are falling behind their European counterparts in terms of transparency.
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97% of brands do not publish the percentage of workers that have lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
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Only 7% of brands disclose worker representation on their own corporate board of directors.
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95% of brands do not disclose their annual water footprint at raw material level.
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Only 27% of big brands disclose their approach to living wages for workers in the supply chain
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Just 2 out of 250 brands disclose data on the number of workers in the supply chain who are actually paid living wages.
Information is power, and especially your purchase is powerful when choosing your clothes.
At Mayamiko we always aim to show you who we are, what we do and where our clothes are coming from. We believe it is important to be transparent and it is one of our core messages as a business.
That’s why we commit to our promises and we are able to answer to the questions where, who, and how, without smoke screens.
As it happened to a lot of business, the pandemic hit us hard, but we didn’t compromise our workers’ rights or our mission.
As you know, our clothes are coming from Malawi and they are made by our amazing team of women who are paid fairly for their work. Moreover, we empowered those women through The Mayamiko Fashion Lab, which was designed to provide training, education, nutrition, sanitation and fairer trade practices to all of those involved.
We also think that circular is the only way forward, so alongside our Zero Waste Goal where we turn all the scrap fabric into something new, we have introduced a tracking and transparency system for products, which means you know who made them and what went in each garment.
We use solar power in our workshop and, because we care about the impact our materials have in people and the planet, wherever possible, our materials are sourced locally.
We don´t need to hide behind the words “recyclable”, “sustainable” or “ethical”, because we are absolutely honest in our production chain.
As a customer you have the option to check who are behind those clothing labels and make a decision. And as an ethical business we have the responsibility to deliver what we promise.
We believe it is time to demand accountability for those fast fashion brands who use those labels to greenwash their non ethical practices and that contribute to our mother earth destruction and the poor working conditions to their staff.
