← Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Episode 237: Billionaire Boycott List, with Ariel of Cobbled Goods
02:03:10
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- [00:18]
Amanda
Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that literally woke up at dawn to record because, well, it's really, really hot here in Pennsylvania right now. Every day this week it's been about 100 degrees and I can't have my air conditioning or a fan on in order to record. So what I have to do is close all the curtains and record as fast as possible before it starts to get too hot. So that's what I'm trying to do today. We'll see how it goes. By the time I finish this, I might be just like sliding off my seat because I'm sweating so much.
- [00:50]
Ariel
We'll see.
- [00:51]
Amanda
Anyway, hi, I'm your host, Amanda, and This is episode two, 237. Would you be surprised to hear that your favorite shoe brand is neither as like counter cultural slash punk as it portrays itself to be, nor is it even family owned? What if I told you that wealth inequality and shoes are directly connected? What if I told you that your latest shoe purchase may have subsidized lobbying efforts to fight a rise in the minimum wage or maybe, I don't know, reducing taxes for the wealthiest people? Well, my guest this week is Ariel, the founder of Cobbled Goods, an incredible online resource for finding ethically sustainably made footwear, which can be a very difficult undertaking. Ariel recently launched a billionaire boycott list that shows and names popular shoe brands that are actively owned by billionaires, along with other details about the company's CEO pay, political involvement, wage theft, and so much more. And I have to say, when you dig into who owns what shoe brands, it's way murkier and way more surprising than apparel. So we're going to share all of the bad news about shoes this week. You gotta learn the bad right first, because then we're gonna tell you how you can make better decisions about the shoes you buy and why that matters. We will also explore how, where, when and how often you shop are actually hyper political decisions. But before we jump into my conversation with Ariel, I have a big announcement. Clothes Horse is coming to the west coast in October and I'm doing two live shows. First, I'll be in Seattle on Thursday, October 23rd at Hereafter. And then I'm coming home to Portland, Oregon on Sunday, October 26th at my favorite venue in Portland, Holocene. I'm going to tell you right now there are only about 100 tickets available for each show, so I would highly recommend that you do not procrastinate on this because my hope is that we can sell these shows out. Furthermore, if we sell these shows out. I'm likely to get booked for more shows so I can come back or do shows in other cities. And actually, if ticket sales are strong leading up to these shows, I will probably start working with my. My touring agent on a much bigger east coast Midwest, hopefully coming back to the west coast set of tours for next year. So these are kind of the run for, like, will people come to a closed horse show? So please help me out. Help out your friends who live in other cities and can't make it by buying tickets to these shows and doing it, you know, in the not so so distant future. So what's it gonna be like to come and see a closed horse show? Well, I will tell you, I already did receive a message asking me if the shows would be free, because you can hear the episodes of the podcast for free online, which I get. But I promise I'm doing a lot of work. I got a lot of plans to make a live episode of Clothes Horse so much more exciting than listening to the recording. So a live Clothes Horse episode follows the classic 90s talk show format, minus the paternity tests and the rip shirts. Here's hoping we get to talk to a variety of cool guests. We take audience questions and comments. That's like a really important part of it. Basically, if you've ever watched Sally Jesse Raphael, you know what to expect at a Clothes Horse live episode. But I do have a couple other tricks up my sleeve as well, so stay tuned. And of course, that sleeve is a puffy sleeve. So I'm still finalizing the guests for Seattle, but I will just say that the tentative theme is how you as an individual can make a difference in your community. And as soon as I have all that finalized, I will let you all know, you'll be the first to hear. But Portland is officially finalized. Ready to go. I'm so excited about this show. I think it's gonna be so good. The theme of the Portland show is rebuilding and reimagining. That name, really, coming from my own experience moving to Portland right after the death of Dylan's father and using that move, moving to that city. I guess I would say to rebuild and reimagine my own life after some very traumatic stuff. Right? So we're not going to be talking about my life and that episode. We're actually going to be talking about how we can bring back sewing as a common skill, how we can rebuild and reimagine sewing here in the United States and really, you know, Canada, everywhere, the world, the universe, whatever. This episode will get started with a little walkthrough of where and how sewing became a less common skill here in the United States. And why Slash how the removal of home economics education from school curriculums actually fueled increased consumerism and maybe, just maybe helped fast casual restaurants become massive chains in this century. I'm just saying, among other things, trust me, it's all connected. I'm really, like I said, excited about this conversation and I am just beyond excited about the guests. So first guest is going to be the best sewist I know, and that says a lot because I know a lot of really incredible, talented sewists. But it's my stepmother, Karen McCarty. She's going to tell us about how she, as a baby boomer, learned how to sew and how that skill has impacted her entire life. Next, we're going to have the owner and designer of Alter, which is a clothing brand and boutique based in Portland, maker of my favorite swimsuit and skirt, by the way, Cassie Ridgeway. She's going to talk about how and why she learned to sew and the challenges of manufacturing clothing here in the United States. There are many. There are many obstacles. Don't worry, we'll be talking about all of them. And then my final guest is Frances Andonopoulos, the founder and director of Sea Sincere Studio, Portland's first and only nonprofit sewing studio. Sincere Studio is on a mission to educate everyone about sewing and Frances is going to explain why they were motivated to start Sincere Studio and why teaching sewing in 2025 is an extremely important and very radical act. Also, just throwing this out there, Frances and I are working on a Halloween themed sewing event at Sincere Studio that'll be happening on 25th of October.
- [08:19]
Ariel
Stay tuned for more details.
- [08:21]
Amanda
We'll have all that for you as it develops, but we're committed on that date for the event, so it's definitely happening. I am in the midst of trying to figure out an after party for the Portland episode and also perhaps if I can find a place to do this that isn't going to charge me money to do it. A exciting evening or afternoon of Brenda, AKA Slow Fashion Trivia Bingo. It's so much fun. We played it at the Clothes Horse Jamboree and I would love to get a bunch of people together to play it in Portland. So while we're not officially having a Clothes Horse Jamboree in Portland, I think we can have a little mini modified version that weekend. So stay tuned for more details. If you have a space where we could do Brenda the Bingo Game, not the cat. Let me know, because I think this would be just, like, another really fun thing for us all to do together with all of that. Please, please, like I said, go get your tickets soon. My hope is that we can, at the bare minimum, sell out Portland, because that is, like, what I identify as my hometown. And I know so many of you live there, and I know so many people who live there who would be very excited to talk all about sewing. So get your tickets now. All the links are in the show notes, and of course, they're always linked in my profile on, like, every social media platform. All right. I can already feel I'm starting to sweat a little bit just on the insides of my elbows. But, you know, that's where it starts. So let's jump into my conversation with Ariel. Okay, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone?
- [10:09]
Ariel Fabro
Hi. Well, first, thanks for having me. My name is Ariel Fabro. I'm the founder of Cobbled Goods Slow fashion platform for footwear. So we showcase alternatives to big business, which are small and independent brands, and they come from all around the world. And I'm based on Vancouver island in Canada.
- [10:27]
Amanda
And, you know, did you, like, know from the time you were just a child that you were going to be getting into shoes or what happened?
- [10:37]
Ariel Fabro
No, I've always been, I guess, into more, like, environmental concerns. I spent a couple years as a child on a sailboat in the Caribbean. So you're pretty watchful of your resources and your surroundings there? Yeah, so I think that was pretty formative for me. And so I've always had an interest in kind of, like, social and environmental issues. But the shoes didn't come until, I guess after I finished my master's in sustainability. I was looking for to kind of follow my own values and look for shoes that were more responsible. And I found there was. There was a lot out there. And that's kind of what sparked my interest, is wanting to other people to also know about what's out there.
- [11:20]
Amanda
So I have a question for you about going to school for sustainability and how you feel now that you're done with school. Because I get a lot of messages from people who are like, I'm passionate about the planet. I am passionate about a better world. I just finished a degree in sustainability, and now I feel just completely hopeless or disappointed or jaded or. I just don't know where to begin. Did you feel that way at first? Do you ever feel that way now?
- [11:55]
Ariel Fabro
I would say when I finished, I was pretty optimistic. I mean, I Think there's a certain amount of, like, yeah, there is a bit of, you know, you see behind the curtain on a lot of things how hard it is to change things. But yeah, for a long time I was, I was quite optimistic and it's more recently that I've started to have a lot more doubts.
- [12:14]
Amanda
Oh, interesting.
- [12:16]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, so, I mean, maybe people that are graduating more recently kind of are in the same, same situation.
- [12:23]
Amanda
I mean, I want to hear like, what are your doubts? And there's no wrong answer because I listen, I feel this way every day.
- [12:30]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, well, I guess it starts like my background. Like I, I, from school, I basically went straight into corporate sustainability. So.
- [12:38]
Amanda
Okay, so I already get it.
- [12:41]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah. Yeah. So the idea was, you know, big, big or small changes and big companies, you know, that that is a way to, to drive progress. But after doing that for quite a while, it is just a lot of incremental change and it just doesn't seem like it adds up to kind of the, the crisis that we're facing now. You know, we're starting to bump up against some of the limits of what the planet can hold and what the, I think societies can sustain as well. So yeah, it's definitely getting harder and that's kind of what's channeled me into thinking about alternative routes, more bottom up approaches.
- [13:22]
Amanda
Yeah, I think that's really interesting, this idea that like when you're in corporate sustainability, it is about these like small incremental changes. And I, I think that, you know, for people who haven't worked within a corporate structure, it's sort of surprising because you would imagine that these companies have such like a wealth of resources, namely, you know, money, that they would be able to make fast changes. But my experience is it's sort of like, I mean, listen, you have an oceanic background, so you've seen, surely you're familiar with those massive cruise ship that have like, you know, a mall and like 10 pools. And you know, there, there's one that keeps showing up on my Reddit feed that is just, it's the world's biggest cruise ship and it's like, I don't, I can't even wrap my brain around how large it is. And a few years ago I learned that for these large cruise ships to just even turn around, it takes a full day. Like a full day of the trip is just the ship turning right. And I feel quite often that that is the similar situation when we look at corporate sustainability initiatives that they just can't do things fast. And you know, while I Am like obviously, like I understand that. Unfortunately I feel like we need faster change right now. Like the time to wait for the cruise ship is long to turn, is long over because there's like a, an iceberg right there that's going to run into you. And what we need is this faster, more significant change happening. And I agree with you that I think a lot of this comes so called bottoms up from all of us. I would love for you to share how you think that works, how we get involved.
- [15:18]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, well, I definitely agree with the slow change. I mean the corporate sustainability or CSR corporate social responsibility work has been around for about three decades since like triple bottom line was coined as a framework. And you know, a lot of the major metrics, if you look at inequality or emissions are continuing to trend the wrong direction. And that's so even when you see like there's, you know, I've worked with a lot of great sustainability teams and they're doing a lot of great work. They're very smart people. But the bigger picture is still trending the wrong way. And that's, that's what really is concerning. And so that's where I've been super inspired by a lady named Marjorie Kelly. She's an author of a few books where she talks about like next generative enterprise design. And so she really gets to the heart of the design of a business as where decisions stem from. So who is it serving? Who's making decisions like where's the power in the business? And so the dominant corporate model today is all about shareholders. And I think we all know that. And that leads to perpetual drive for increasing profits. And that's where I'm really trying to get to the root of is kind of shifting away from that model. And so I think for large corporations that's really hard. But for smaller businesses, they already have a lot of that just inherently they're not trying to take over the world. If you think about your local barbershop, they're not trying to, most likely they're not trying to expand across the country kind of thing. They're just trying to sustain their business. And I think that's kind of where it starts is businesses that have a different purpose and it's not about being as big as possible.
- [17:15]
Amanda
Yeah, I mean I often, I try not to be like too negative about this stuff, but I mean I would be interested in hearing what your thought on this is. But I tend to think for these big corporations it's like too, it's too impossible or too late for them. To turn it around. Like, I know that sounds so negative, but just with most of my career background being in the corporate environment, working for some really huge companies, something that I noticed year after year is, you know, these companies have all kinds of targets, right, for sales and profitability. And you know, ostensibly not all of them, but many of them say that they have goals for, you know, reducing their carbon footprint and other sustainability measures, like how much reused materials they're used is, you know, virgin materials, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But what I, I have noticed just in my career is that like hitting those revenue and profitability targets is pretty much non negotiable. And if the company misses them or your department misses them, people lose jobs.
- [18:23]
Ariel
Right.
- [18:24]
Amanda
But when it comes to these sustainability goals that at least a few years ago, many of these brands were speaking about quite a bit, if they miss those targets, they don't really care and no one holds them accountable for it really. And so what has happened is I feel like actually as I dig through a lot of these brands and their, you know, like sustainability pages on their websites, a lot of them are gone or haven't been updated since 2021. And I just think not only is it too late for them to fix it, most of them don't care anymore. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?
- [19:05]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I mean, there's been a really big swing, I guess, kind of like the ESG backlash kind of, I think has a lot of like political aspects to it and I think a lot of big businesses are just kind of running with it. They're like, we're kind of off the hook a bit here and you know, maybe it'll swing back again. I, I don't know. But yeah, it's definitely, definitely concerning to see that. I mean, I've had the same experience. I've seen, you know, I've done some like a lot of benchmarking on corporate goals and seen them kind of just disappear from the Internet over time. Yeah, I mean, one of the big ones that I think Nestle set a goal to end like child labor and their cocoa supply.
- [19:50]
Amanda
That's my favorite actually.
- [19:51]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, 20 years ago and they kicked it down the road for 10 years and then it just kind of disappeared. And I think we kind of let companies off the hook and then they set a new goal and then we're like, oh, that looks great. And then we're kind of behind them again and we forget that it's kind of a pattern of behavior that is ongoing. And yeah, I think we let Them off the hook a little too often.
- [20:15]
Amanda
I think you're so right there. And I will tell you, I'm coming up on five years of making a clothes horse and you know, think of, I don't even want to think of how many posts I've done on social media in five years. I'd probably be really sad if I totaled up the time I spent on them and also the time I spent responding to comments. But I'll tell you, like anything you do, you start to see patterns and the same sort of comments show up over and over again five years later. You know, still, someone will show up inevitably to say, for example, that it's not our problem as people, as individuals, to fix this situation. It's really on the corporations and like, we don't need to be involved because it's too big for us. It's their problem. And my pushback on that always is if we don't hold the corporations accountable, who will? Right?
- [21:12]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, yeah. That's kind of the crux of it is like, you know, individual agency is very little. It's like I can make this one fair trade purchase and it doesn't seem like it adds up too much. But that's where I think about kind of having some boundaries about what's acceptable and what we should be supporting. And that's where I think you can really bypass a lot of that. Trying to analyze every single decision, every single issue that you make when you, when you jump ahead to look what, what type of business are we supporting?
- [21:49]
Amanda
Right.
- [21:50]
Ariel Fabro
So like small independent businesses are that, cooperatives are that. There's other, some newer alternative ownership models like steward ownership that also fit, fit that and are, you know, charting new paths. So that's where I think people should, should kind of think more as a collective being part of a movement towards, you know, different purchasing decisions.
- [22:13]
Amanda
Absolutely. I mean, I'll tell you, like, I make my living by working with small brands and almost all of them manufacture in the United States. Bare minimum, they're manufacturing ethically. And the issue that they face time and time again, that really holds them back is money.
- [22:31]
Ariel
Right.
- [22:31]
Amanda
And the money comes from customers. And so their big challenge is selling to customers or getting in front of customers, having people aware that they exist because obviously they do not have the marketing budget of say, Nike. Right. And it's essentially like lack of customers or lack of customer awareness is what is preventing them from really becoming the predominant model of how things are made right now. And to me, just working on that side of it and doing the math for these brands, I see how actually individual contribution, like our own consumer behavior is incredibly impactful. And you know, one customer turns into 50, turns into hundreds, turns into thousands. And this is how we actually can be an active part of a better future. I mean, there are many other things we can do too, but this is one where actually, yeah, you as an individual, you really matter. And you know, there are a lot of situations in which I don't necessarily feel that way in my life where I'm like, oh, what can I do here? But that is one that is real. So let's talk a little bit about shoes and sustainability. And I get really hesitant to use the word sustainable at this point because, you know, I'm sure you feel the same way. It's been ruined a little bit by a lot of greenwashing. I can't think of a better term. So we're gonna say sustainable in our conversation, but know that as we're talking about this, this is for the listeners really, like we know, okay, we know about the word sustainable. So one thing I have heard from many listeners over the past few years is shoes are the hardest category for them. Both from like finding sustainable brands, sustainable options for shoes, but also just like knowing who to support. Right. So is it true that there are very few sustainable shoe brands out there or are there some we're just not seeing?
- [24:44]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I mean, it really depends on how, how you're, you're evaluating them. So I've kind of set out some criteria for how I evaluate them. So first is that they have to be independent. And so that means they're not owned and controlled by outside investors that are just seeking profits. So there are a lot of brands like that, but they don't have much exposure because they don't have much money. Then the other kind of limit or requirement for my directory is they also have to be small because once companies do become bigger businesses, they tend to kind of fall into conventional practices. Veja is a very popular sneaker brand that I think kind of fits this. When I started looking into shoes in 2018, they were like the ideal model of sustainable shoes. But over time they've given up or kind of shifted away from some of their good practices like using vegetable tanned leather and natural dyes and gone a more commercial route. So I followed the OECD definition of small medium sized enterprise, which is, does leave quite a bit of leeway. Up to 250 employees I think is the limit. But the idea is to draw a line in the sand somewhere and so for me, it's majority control. Ownership has to be by insiders and the business has to be a small, medium sized enterprise. And most of them are much smaller. They're run by just a handful of people or solo procureurs. And so yeah, there are, I have a list of a few hundred that I'm adding to my directory and I'm sure there's probably, you know, thousands around the world that, I don't know, I haven't discovered yet.
- [26:34]
Amanda
Something that really stuck out to me that you said was that they couldn't be large. Right. I mean, do you think a large shoe company could be truly sustainable and ethical? Even if like, let's say they started that way, do you think they could get to a point where they're doing like a billion dollars in sales and still be ethical and sustainable?
- [26:59]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah. Well, I mean, this brings me to something that I've been thinking a lot about more recently, which is kind of totally left out of sustainability conversations. And that's power. It's when you amass that much economic power, you also amass a lot of political power as well. And you can, you can start to influence, you know, sustainability standards. You can, you know, suppress workers. You can do a lot of things to all different stakeholders to, to serve your interests. So I, I'm very skeptical of, of a brand like a company that is that large. I mean, like, even if it's like there are some large worker cooperatives that, that are quite inspiring. Like there's one in Spain, it's like a cooperative of cooperatives called Mondragon. And that's great because they're distributing wealth evenly to all their employees. But they still have a profit motive. So it can still be problematic if they're still cutting corners on environmental side. So yeah, I think maybe there could.
- [28:08]
Amanda
Be.
- [28:10]
Ariel Fabro
Like a steward owned, shared ownership, large corporation. Like maybe it's possible, but I'm very skeptical of it when it, when there is that amassing of power.
- [28:22]
Amanda
Yeah, I think so too. I mean, obviously right now in the United States we're feeling this in a big way where billionaires are having like this. And to be honest, I mean, obviously I hate this timeline, I will preface it with that. But maybe if we're trying to find a silver lining of what we're dealing here with, the United States right now is that maybe people are finally seeing how that kind of money equals a level of power that is just not okay. And that no individual, human or company should have that level of power. So I don't know. I mean, like even if we're just talking about, just talking about Nike, who I'm sure will come up many times this conversation. I mean, Nike for one, is infamous in Oregon where its headquarters are for lobbying, like spending a lot of money to support support candidates who will ostensibly prevent that Nike or help Nike not pay any income taxes. That alone is not okay.
- [29:23]
Ariel
Right.
- [29:23]
Amanda
And I think there are plenty of people who would hear that and be like, well, who wants to pay taxes? Fine. That's a more innocent use of your money and power, I guess. Although, you know, I don't want to go into why taxes are important. But I mean, you live in Canada, so you know, you have a better state safety net. Right? But you know, like that's just the beginning. Like I know for a fact that Nike was also, I want to say this was in 2021, might have been 2020, was lobbying pretty heavily against any legislation around the forced labor of weaker Muslims in their supply chain. Like any US Regulation preventing that product from coming into the United States, to me that's a way more sinister use of your money and power.
- [30:13]
Ariel
Right?
- [30:14]
Amanda
And for everything we hear about, in my opinion, there are probably a thousand other cases like that that we've never heard about that involve that kind of money and sort of manipulation of policy, of human rights of so much.
- [30:38]
Ariel
Take a moment to thank some of the incredible small businesses who keep Clotheshorse going via their generous Patreon support. Slow Fashion Academy is a size inclusive sewing and pattern making studio based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- [30:51]
Amanda
Designer and fashion professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills.
- [30:59]
Ariel
Of making, mending and altering their own.
- [31:01]
Amanda
Clothes several times per year. Ruby offers her flagship Sloper Workshop, an in person two day pattern making retreat where you will learn how to drape.
- [31:11]
Ariel
A set of basic block patterns that.
- [31:13]
Amanda
Capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block.
- [31:17]
Ariel
Or sloper patterns as a foundation for.
- [31:19]
Amanda
Infinite styles of garments that are custom made to your body's one of a kind contours. Or compare your slipper to commercial patterns to see where you might need to alter the shape. No more guessing at full bust, flat seam or sway back adjustments. Start with a foundation that fits.
- [31:37]
Ariel
Ruby also provides professional design and pattern.
- [31:40]
Amanda
Making services to emerging slow fashion brands and occasionally takes commissions for custom garments and costume pieces. She has also released several PDF sewing patterns for original designs under her brands Spokes and Stitches and Starling Petite Plus. I just want to also add here on a personal note that right now Ruby is actually working with me to create a one of a kind, unique to me special dress that I will be wearing for all future clotheshorse events including live episodes later this year in the Pacific Northwest. I am so excited to work with Ruby because she is so talented and so knowledgeable about all things clothing creation. Check out the schedule for upcoming workshops. Download PDF Sewing Patterns and learn about additional sewing and Design Services at www.slowfashion.academy. and it's important for me to tell you that that's slowfashion.academy Selena Sanders a.
- [32:38]
Ariel
Social impact brand that specializes in upcycle clothing using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum Style Minimal Carbon Footprint Shift clothing out of beautiful Astoria, Oregon with a focus on natural fibers, simple hard working designs and putting fat people first. Discover more@shiftwheeler.com late to the party Creating one of a kind statement clothing from vintage salvaged and thrifted textiles, they hope to tap into the dreamy memories we all hold. Floral curtains, a childhood dress, the wallpaper in your best friend's rec room. All while creating modern, sustainable garments that you'll love wearing and have for years to come. Late to the Party is passionate about celebrating and preserving textiles, the memories they hold and the stories they have yet to tell. Check them out on Instagram 8 to the party people vino vintage based just outside of LA, we love the hunt of shopping secondhand because you never know what you might find. Catch us at flea markets around Southern Californ by following us on Instagram. Vino Vintage so you don't miss our next event. Dylan Paige is an online clothing and lifestyle brand based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Our products are chosen with intention for the conscious community. Everything we carry is animal friendly, ethically made, sustainably sourced and cruelty free. Dylan Paige is for those who never stop questioning where something comes from. We know that personal experience dictates what's sustainable for you and we are here to help, guide and support you to make choices that fit your needs. Check us out@dylanpage.com and find us on Instagram Ylanpage Life and Style Salt Hats Purveyors of truly sustainable hats, hand blocked, sewn and embellished in Detroit, Michigan. Find us on Instagram at Salt Hats Gentle Vibes Vintage we are purveyors of polyester and psychedelic relics. We encourage experimentation and play not only in your wardrobe but in your home too we have thousands of killer vintage pieces ready for their next adventure. See them all on Instagram entlevibesvintage. Thumbprint is Detroit's only fair trade marketplace. Located in the historic Eastern Market. Our small business specializes in products handmade by empowered women in South Africa making a living wage creating things they love like hand painted candles and ceramics. We also carry a curated assortment of sustainable and natural locally made goods. Thumbprint is a great gift destination for both the special people in your life and for yourself. Browse our online store@thumbprintdetroit.com and find us on Instagram thumbprintdetroit. Vagabond Vintage DTLV is a vintage clothing, accessories and decor reselling business based in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only do we sell in Las.
- [35:55]
Amanda
Vegas, but we're also located throughout resale.
- [35:57]
Ariel
Markets in San Francisco as well as at a curated boutique called Lux and Ivy located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jessica, the founder and owner of Vagabond Vintage DTLV recently opened the first IRL location located in the arts district of downtown Las Vegas on August 5th. The shop has a strong emphasis on 60s and 70s garments, single stitch tees and dreamy loungewear. Follow them on Instagram vagabondvintagedtlv and keep an eye out for their website coming fall of 2022.
- [36:34]
Amanda
So you're saying there's like a lot of sustainable shoe brands out there. Why don't more people know about them?
- [36:44]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I think it really comes down to like their marketing budgets like Nike I think might be like 4 billion or something.
- [36:51]
Amanda
Can you imagine?
- [36:53]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, it's really, it's really incredible.
- [36:55]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [36:57]
Ariel Fabro
And like there are some smaller brands that maybe or not, maybe they're not small anymore but like more sustainable brands. You've heard of like Allbirds or Karyuma and those are venture capital back brands that have had a lot of money put into it to get to get it out there. And so you will hear about those. But they also grow like their whole goal is just to create an exit for the investors.
- [37:20]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [37:21]
Ariel Fabro
So they just become basically the status quo and continue business as usual. So yeah, I think it really comes down to marketing budgets. I mean something else I've seen which I found pretty interesting because I've been doing focusing on showcasing alternatives and so popular brands like Blundstone Stock, Martens and Crocs and all these brands have had kind of like their ups and downs and a big like a trend is before they got popular there was like a celebrity endorsement or there was like a number of Celebrity, like sightings with them, wearing them. And so I think that's something I wasn't really attuned to, is just how much celebrity culture can also support and create these, these trends and enable these brands to become so popular.
- [38:12]
Amanda
Yeah, I believe that it almost feels like, I mean, obviously celebrities fuel consumer behavior, like in so many different categories of products, but it almost feels like in shoes it's more necessary than any other category, maybe, cos. No, not even cosmetics, I would say definitely shoes. And, you know, especially in the athletic realm, it's all about these, like, endorsements, right. With athletes and whatnot. It makes you wonder, like, you know, going back to Nike, like, what if they'd never started working with Michael Jordan? Or I'm. I already ran out of athlete names. But what if, what if the athletic shoe industry wasn't so tightly bound to athletic endorsements? Right. How would those, how would their trajectories be different?
- [39:07]
Ariel Fabro
What I found also interesting noticing in like, the athletic shoe space is these brands are also. It's really hard to find brands that aren't venture capital backed or already owned by big businesses. And I think that is because it is, is kind of like a trending area and it's kind of like where investors see a lot of profits to be made. And so that's the strategy, if you want to stand out is you need to have those celebrity endorsements. So I think they really are paired together.
- [39:34]
Amanda
Like, a year or two ago, my husband and I watched a streaming series that was essentially about Phil Knight in the early Nike years, trying to get a celebrity endorsement basically so that he could run his brand. And I was like, wow. I'd never really thought of it that way because my entire time I've been growing up, Nike and other sneaker brands have been synonymous with specific athletes or musicians. Like, I'm thinking of, like, Kanye with Adidas or, you know, other celebrities of some sort. And, you know, like, whether we like it or not, we admire celebrities. And when they see, say that they stand for a certain shoe or wear a certain shoe, we're more interested in that shoe. And it's hard for me to imagine any of these small brands ever able to get a celebrity involved. So I also thought it was really interesting to talk about, like, VC being a big part of, of many of these shoe brands. I mean, Allbirds is definitely a great example. And just my experience working for brands that took VC funding, profitability and like, just sales growth became the number one priority within those brands. And honestly, we had to start making Decisions that did not align with our original values. So I was wondering, do you know any shoe brands who have been able to grow obviously not to like the billion dollar mark, but a, maybe like a more medium sized shoe brand without VC funding?
- [41:20]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, there's definitely a number of them. They tend to be a little bit older. Older. Like normally they started as like a family business like you know, maybe 50 years ago or something and they've kind of continued to stay and maintain like a modest level. I mean there's one you maybe have heard of like Okabashi, They're.
- [41:39]
Amanda
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:41]
Ariel Fabro
They're one that was founded by Iranian immigrants some decades ago, I can't remember exactly. And they have kind of maintained they're in like the medium sized business range, but they're not that large and they're maintaining production in the US and doing quite a lot of good things. So that's like the upper limit of the types of brands I would include. And there are a number of examples of them.
- [42:11]
Amanda
Yeah, I mean that, that's so gratifying to know. It does seem like when we'll get to this later. There were a lot of shoe brands that were started as family owned and you know, have been around for 50 plus years that at some point sold off in this century, which we'll talk about later. But it does like if you have time, brands can print, brands can grow organically without losing sight of what matters. But for a lot of these other large shoe brands, it's kind of impossible. Right. And that's why we see a lot of greenwashing. And I, I will say that I think that green washing is not as prevalent right now. Not because shoe brands have fixed everything. Right. But more that they seem to think from. I, I can't tell if this is like a cynical like marketing decision or because they realize they haven't actually been doing anything to meet their sustainability goals. I'm not sure which it is, but I'm seeing a lot less greenwashing now because brands are just speaking to it a lot less. Do they think customers have stopped caring about sustainability? I'm not really sure. But that said, there is still greenwashing in the shoe world. Could you give us some examples of the most common greenwashing you see?
- [43:30]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, for sure. I think just from what I've seen, like big businesses especially are very good at hiding things in the details, so it can be quite difficult to kind of assess them. But I think some of the common strategies to look for is taking a very fragmented Approach. So Allbirds is an example that comes to mind. They really focus on their carbon footprint. So they measure the amount of carbon it takes to produce a shoe and compare it to other brands and you know, let's say it's well that we're doing less carbon so that they really highlight that and then they don't really focus on a lot of other aspects of sustainability. And you'll see that for a lot of brands. Like Nike also does a lot of like ocean plastic or recycled plastics in their shoes, which they have dubious qualities as it is. But even, even the plastics they are using, they only make up a small fraction. I think they have like 2,000 products roughly, and maybe 200 of them incorporate any plastic, like recycled plastics, and then that's only one component of the entire product. So it's, it's kind of like you take a good thing and then really highlight it and make it seem like that's kind of the whole brand. Yeah, I see that quite a bit.
- [44:56]
Amanda
Yeah, yeah, I definitely would see. I mean, like I said, I haven't been seeing this as much lately, but in that period between say like 2020 and 2022 specifically, quite often with Nike, I would see, you know, what Greenpeace calls it, ad bluster, where it would just be this massive like marketing campaign and showing like one collection of shoes, maybe even one shoe that was a very tiny percentage of Nike's total production every year and painting it as like, this is the future of shoes, this is made of like fully like post consumer content, blah, blah, blah. But, and it would be easy to fall for that, right? Like, wow, here's a company that's really innovating and like really making a difference out there, right? But then you like, if you took another minute and thought like, wait, this is just like one shoe, you know, like if they really had a commitment to this, why aren't all the shoes made this way? And when we talk about sneakers specifically, like, that's a category that is like really rough from an environmental perspective. Like I said, I don't see that as often now. But the other thing that I would quite often see, and I'm curious, like for your thought on this, you know, is we might see something that is like has some sort of post consumer material incorporated in it. But we rarely see people talking about the leather content of shoes or leather component of shoes. And I just wanted to know like your thoughts from like the sustainability of leather, like what are the issues there and can it be done better?
- [46:47]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, for sure. I think well, leather is, it starts with the sourcing, like where is the leather coming from? And a big, a lot of leather is coming from Brazil and it's like the leading cause of deforestation of the Amazon is clearing forest for our new land for grazing cattle. So that's super problematic. And there's actually a report I was just reading from Stand on Earth that kind of tracks the supply chains of like a few dozen companies that are all linked to leather coming. It's mostly jbs, I think is the, is the owner of a lot of those cattle farms. So yeah, so what a lot of leather is, is causing deforestation. And then the other stage is tanning the leather to make it so it doesn't rot and biodegrade. So that traditionally that was used with like vegetable tannins and that's a very slow, you know, month or two long process. So in I think the 1800s, they invented ways to called chrome tanning, which is basically heavy metals and it's much faster and much cheaper and it makes up more like waterproof leather. So that's kind of the industry norm now is by far is chrome tanning. And that is if, if the wastewater is unmanaged, it's super toxic. So a lot of it has been outsourced. Like leather production has really shifted away from like North America to places with low, lower standards where it can be done cheaply. So one of the big places that actually an author, Tansi Hoskins, she's like a journalist, has written a lot about footwear. She really highlights this in her book Footwork about the, the Buriganja river in Bangladesh as it runs black because it's so polluted. And it's because it's kind of the industrial zone for leather tanning is along it and all the chemicals and effluent comes out of there. So the river's like biologically dead and the workers that are working in those factories, they're being exposed to carcinogenic chromium 6. And that's I think shortened their lifespan to like 90% of those workers die before the age of 50. Oh my gosh. It's extremely, extremely hazardous. And I don't know like the percentage of leather that comes from there, but I know it's, it's a, it's a major, a major sec. A major production sector. So yeah. And then, and then there's the finishing the leather where a lot of leather, especially chromium tanned leather, can be cut into quite thin sheets and then they will layer like plastics often on top to make it shiny or smooth. So a lot of leather that you buy couldn't really biodegrade anyway because it's covered in plastic.
- [50:11]
Amanda
I mean, this whole thing is just so devastating to think about. Okay, so we're talking about a black river that is biologically dead. We're talking about workers making this leather and not living beyond 50. And that. That's depressing, right? I will tell you that, yes, people over consume clothing for sure. I think that people actually over consume shoes even more, which is not to say probably in the average closet there is more clothing than shoes as there should be. But I would ask everybody who's listening to this, how many pairs of shoes do you have in your closet that you've worn once, five times maybe? How many shoes do you actually wear on a daily basis? Because I've worked as a buyer in shoes, and let me tell you, our whole goal was to get people to buy as many shoes as possible all the time. And there is no sustainable way to buy more shoes than you need to make more shoes than we need, because we're talking about leather here. And yes, there are more. Less harmful, let's say, ways to make. Make leather shoes. Vegan leather shoes, for the most part, tend to be plastic as well. And they're deeply problematic as well. Like, there's just no reason that we need all the shoes that we need, but we sure are being sold a lot of shoes all the time. And also, like, there is this whole, you know, like, I don't know, like, social trope that women are supposed to have a lot of shoes all the time. You know, like. Like there was an. Actually a time when there were people were making tchotchkes that you would give someone as a gift, like a greeting card or a wallet or some sort of little ceramic thing that basically were like, a whole joke about how you have so many shoes, you know? And, like, I think. I mean, all of the stuff that we over consume has a negative impact on this planet. But, like, shoes just, to me, are like, next level. Because, I don't know, like, there's just generally not a happy ending for shoes when we're done with them. And the production of them tends not to be. Now, obviously, there are brands out there that are doing a better job than others. That's where we want to prioritize when we need new shoes. I think that most of us don't need as many shoes as we think we need.
- [52:36]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, absolutely. There's actually. I think for me, it kind of helps to think About. Well, there's a great report from the Hot Air Cool Institute that's kind of quantified how much each person like fashion or clothing items they should consume in a year to align with like planetary boundaries. And it's five items a year. And so I think if following a benchmark like that could be really helpful. So then you focus on, okay, well if I'm only going to buy maybe one pair of shoes in a year or maybe every other year, then I want to make sure it's like a high quality pair, I'm going to invest in it. And that's really kind of what it comes down to is you need to invest in higher quality materials. And when it comes to vegetable tan leather, it does tend to last longer. You need to take care of it. But like full grain vegetables and leather shoe can last 10 or 20 years if it's well taken care of and resold. So it's like a totally different way of thinking compared to buying like a cheap pair of shoes off Temu or whatever.
- [53:45]
Amanda
Yeah, yeah. Also just like real talk, like a lesson I've learned the hard way is that like the cheaper the shoe, the more it just totally destroys your feet and the more miserable you are and the shorter lifespan they have. Which is not to say like, I'm not saying you need to go buy thousand dollar shoes, but like Trust me, a $25 pair of brand new shoes is $25 for a reason. And I swear I have like scars on my feet from wearing just the most egregiously cheap shoes for a very long time. Just like wearing away the skin of my feet. We're talking here about like a lot of environmental issues with shoes and they really are also ethical issues. But I think we also need to talk about the supply chain issues that the ethical human issues with shoes. I want to hear like you know your thoughts as an expert here on like where are outside of the environmental impact and shortening people's lives with leather production, etc. What are the additional like human impact ethical issues of shoes as they exist right now?
- [54:51]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, well, I guess going back a little bit, shoes are like a very complex to make that you have a lot of different components. They have to be durable. They use a lot of glues usually. And so it's very labor intensive and for that reason it's mostly done in areas where there's cheap labor. So I think 90% of shoes are made in Asia, mostly in China. And it's, it's a race to the bottom for, for shoe Brands that are looking to like looking to contract a factory to buy the cheapest shoes possible. And the governments don't want to increase the minimum wages because those, those brands don't own the manufacturing. So they can up and leave to the next country very quickly if they want. So it kind of, that's a race to the bottom that keeps, keeps wages really low. And so the average wages for garment workers in general is half of a living wage. So it's just a lot of poverty and a lot of the work is subcontracted from these factories beyond what the brands even know. So there's could be a lot of like home based workers where like a mother might be working gluing two like components of a shoe together from her house and have like pails of toxic glue that are, you know, flammable and possibly dangerous to breathe like in the hoe. So there's, yeah, it's a really, a really big problem is that there's a lack of transparency or even knowing or wanting to know what's going on at the very end of these supply chains. And then there's other issues like modern slavery is not talked about that much, but it is still out there. Like especially the big one right now is the Uyghur Muslim minority population in China. They're involved in a lot of the cotton production. 20% of cotton around the world is like tainted by weaker forced labor. So there's, I mean the more you look, the more you're going to find a lot of unfair practices and poor labor conditions.
- [57:20]
Amanda
Yeah, yeah. I mean when you and I were preparing this for this, I told you about Jim Keaty who was an activist and he was quite young in the 90s who was kind of taking on Nike with their wages and just a lot of other issues within their supply chain. He like moved to Indonesia and lived amongst the factory workers making Nike shoes. And then he tried to live off of the same wages that the actual workers in the Nike factories were being paid. And he effectively starved. That was like 30 years ago at this point. And the improvement is just not there. And I get frustrated personally. Like I don't really watch the super bowl, but obviously I hear a lot about the commercials. And it was either this year or last year. Nike did a big halftime commercial. I mean I can't even imagine how much money they spent on it. But like you said, they have billions of dollars in marketing budget and this whole commercial was about empowering women. Right. And like through women athletes and buy, if you bought these sneakers then you too could be an empowered woman. And when I see commercials like that, I mean, I, I get it. I may be the person who ruins everybody's fun, but are you like, sorry to be blunt here, but like, are you fucking kidding me? Because I know the people making your shoes, a lot of them are women and they are not being empowered on any level level. You know, it's just like so the hypocrisy of it all or the number of years that Nike and other sneaker brands too, not just Nike, have used women or people of color to be like, listen, we are like so woke and we care so much about people of color and social justice. And then like, yeah, well, what about the people of color who are making your shoes? You know, like, where's the care there? Where's like lifting up people there? No, it's just, it's woke washing. You know, it's a marketing campaign. And I think while we see a lot less greenwashing right now, we actually see so much of that woke washing. Still continuing feminist washing, if you want to call it. If you're enjoying this episode, then this.
- [59:46]
Ariel
Is the a great time to remind you that my work here at Clothes Horse is made possible by the support of listeners like you.
- [59:52]
Amanda
Just like NPR and these great small businesses.
- [59:56]
Ariel
Please go give them your support. Blank CAS or Blanket Coats by cas, is focused on restoring, renewing and reviving the history held within vintage and heirloom textiles by embodying the love, craft and energy that is original to each vintage textile. As I transfer it into a new garment, I hope we can reteach ourselves to care for and mend what we have and make it last. Blank CAS lives on Instagram @blankcas and a website will be launched soon@blankcast.com located in Whistler, Canada. Velvet Underground is a velvet jungle full of vintage and secondhand clothing plants, a.
- [60:44]
Amanda
Vegan cafe and lots of rad products.
- [60:47]
Ariel
From other small sustainable businesses. Our mission is to create a brand and community dedicated to promoting self expression as well as educating and inspiring a more sustainable and conscious lifestyle both for the people and the planet. Find us on Instagram @shopvelvetunderground or online at www.shopvelvetunderground. st. Evens is a New York City based vintage shop that is dedicated to bringing you those special pieces you'll reach for again and again. More than just a store, St. Evens is dedicated to sharing the stories and history behind the garments. 10% of all sales are donated to a different charitable organization each month. New vintage is released every Thursday@wearsaintevens.com with previews of new pieces and more brought to you on Instagram at Ware St. Evans. That's Ware St. Evens. Country Feedback is a mom and pop record shop in Tarboro, North Carolina. They specialize in used rock, country and soul and offer affordable vintage clothing and housewares.
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Amanda
Do you have used records you want to sell?
- [61:59]
Ariel
Country Feedback wants to buy them? Find us on Instagram treedbackvintageandvinyl or head down east and visit our brick and mortar or all are welcome at this inclusive and family friendly record shop in the country. Republica Unicornia Yarns Handmade yarn and notions for the color obsessed.
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Amanda
Made with love and some swearing in.
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Ariel
Fabulous Atlanta, Georgia by head yarn wench Kathleen. Get ready for rainbows with a side of giving a damn. Republica Unicornia is all about making your own magic using small batch, responsibly sourced hand dyed yarns and thoughtfully made notions. Slow fashion all the way down and discover the joy of creating your very own beautiful hand knit, crocheted or woven pieces. Find us on Instagram @republicauunicorniarns and at www.republicaunicornia.com. picnic Wear a slow fashion brand ethically made by hand from vintage and dead stock materials, most notably vintage THR towels. Founder Dani has worked in the industry as a fashion Designer for over 10 years, but started Picnic Wear in response to her dissatisfaction with the industry's shortcomings. Picnic Wear recently moved to rural North Carolina where all their sewing and accessories are now designed and cut, but the majority of their sewing is done by skilled garment workers in New York City. Their customers take comfort in knowing that all their sewists are paid well above New York City minimum wage. Picnic Wear offers minimal waste and maximum authenticity. Future Vintage over future garbage. Cute Little Ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl and home items in a wide range of styles and price points.
- [63:51]
Amanda
If it's ethical and legal, we try.
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Ariel
To find a home for it. Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram utelittleruin Is there a little bit of Italy in your soul? Are you an enthusiast of pre loved decor and accessories? Bring vintage Italian style and history into your space. With the pewter thimble. We source useful and beautiful things and mend them where needed. We also find gorgeous illustrations and make them print worthy tarot cards, tea towels and hand picked treasures available to you from the comfort of your own home. Responsibly sourced from across Rome, lovingly renewed by fairly paid Artists and artisans with something for every budget. Discover more at theputerthimble.com Deco Denim is a startup based out of San Francisco.
- [64:44]
Amanda
And it sells clothing and accessories that.
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Ariel
Are sustainable, gender fluid, size inclusive and high quality. Made to last for years to come. Deco Denim is trying to change the way you think about buying clothes. Founder Sarah Mattis wants to empower people to ask important questions like, where was this made?
- [65:04]
Amanda
Was this garment made ethically?
- [65:06]
Ariel
Is this fabric made of plastic? Can this garment be upcycled?
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Amanda
And if not, can it be recycled?
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Ariel
Sign up@decodenim.com to receive $20 off your first purchase. They promise not to spam you and send out no more than three emails a month with two of them surrounding education or a personal note from the founder. Again, that's decodenim.com.
- [65:36]
Amanda
Let'S talk about another element of shoes. That is, I think a lot of people might be surprised to hear how much of this is in their shoes, but plastic, right? Like, I can't see a pair of shoes without thinking about plastic, even if the shoes are leather, because there's plastic in there somewhere.
- [65:55]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, absolutely. Most shoes are, are mostly plastic. I mean, obviously there's like a lot of, like, a lot of like flip flops and things like that are just like foam and they make up a big part of shoes that we maybe don't think about that much that we.
- [66:09]
Amanda
Think of as disposable and short lived.
- [66:11]
Ariel
Right.
- [66:12]
Amanda
Like most people will buy a pair of flip flops for one season and then put them in the trash.
- [66:17]
Ariel Fabro
And, and I think we don't think about it that much here because flip flops aren't worn every day. But in a lot of countries in the world, flip flops are like the main form of footwear. And actually I was traveling in India for a bit and I couldn't believe how many flip flops, like single flip flops would just be like on the side of the road and just kind of like like a trash bag or something you might see on the street here. Just like shoes were littered everywhere. It's a big problem because it often ends up in waterways and then it ends up in the ocean. And the other thing is, polyester in general in fashion is a form of plastic that has really risen to become the most common fiber used in fashion. It's grown five times since the 80s. And the reason for that is that it's really cheap and it's really a big part of what's enabled the rise of fast fashion and all this super cheap clothing is because you can just put something together out of cheap plastic. And then the thing is, it's also not very recyclable. Especially when you blend polyester fibers with cotton or with other things, it becomes extremely difficult to separate it out. And then especially with shoes, you have like 30 or 40 different small components glued together. And some of that's leather, some of it's plastic. Recycling that is, is, you know, it's not really viable unless you just kind of crunch it all up and put it into like. I think Nike Grind had the program where they're putting into like playground mats or something.
- [67:52]
Amanda
Yes. But like, how many playground mats does the world need? Yeah, you know.
- [67:56]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah. And still it's, it's more of a down cycling than, than recycling. The big thing that's been a big trend which kind of goes back to the greenwashing, is recycled polyester. So polyester is also called pet and that's what's used to make like water bottles and pop bottles. And so they, in the pop bottle or water bottle industry, they are pretty good at recycling that at least they're able to, if they do collect it. And so the fashion industry, now that it's become an opportunity for sustainable marketing, they've started to pull bottles from that more that were already going to be recycled back into bottles. They've pulled it into fashion where it's not going to end up being recycled. It's very unlikely that it will be. So, yeah, 99% of the recycled PET that's used in fashion is coming from the plastic bottle. So it's, it's not really a net benefit adding it to plastic. I mean, there may be. There's some cases where you're sourcing it from somewhere else, but most of it's not the case. And then on top of that, you can't necessarily trust you know where it's coming from.
- [69:17]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [69:19]
Ariel Fabro
I remember reading a report I don't have. I couldn't find a link to it. This was years ago, but. But I reading a report that there was like plastic bottles being made just so that they could be recycled without even being used, just so they could add the label to it.
- [69:31]
Amanda
That is real, actually. And because it's cheaper to use brand new bottles than to clean old bottles.
- [69:38]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, yeah. It's really broken.
- [69:41]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [69:42]
Ariel Fabro
And then there's another problem is that. So tracking where it comes from. There's Channel 4 is a British like television channel, a public channel. And so they did an investigation following like Nike's partnership with Parley Ocean Plastics. To see where they were coming from. And they end up at a luxury hotel in the Maldives. And this quote, ocean plastic was just coming from like the recycling bins at this hotel and it was being collected within a mile of the shoreline, so.
- [70:18]
Amanda
Oh my. Oh my God. No, I believe it. I believe it. Like, here's the thing. Like, a lot of different brands have jumped on this, like, recycled ocean waste bandwagon. And like, I want to be clear that, like, collecting ocean waste is actually really expensive. And when they're trying to like, protect profitability, the last thing they're going to do is like, pay for someone to take shot a ship out into the middle of the ocean and collect plastic. It is. And even on the like, resale market, like, actually there are companies who collect this plastic. It costs them a lot. Like, it's a higher cost to purchase that plastic for them from them for recycling because their expenses are so high going out to collect it. And so regard. I mean, listen, I would love for it to be real and I would love for it to not be a negative impact, but the reality is that even recycling these materials into things like polyester or shoes is not. Like, it doesn't give us sort of a pass to buy as many shoes and as much plastic stuff as we want because even that process consumes so much energy. I don't know if you've ever watched a video showing how they turn plastic water bottles into fabric, but it's bonkers. And it uses a lot of energy. There's a lot of transport involved, so the carbon footprint of it is quite substantial. And in many cases, it is impossible to make a high quality, durable material out of 100% recycled plastic because the fibers are damaged in the process. They. It's shorter. So these things just sort of degrade. So often new plastic has to be added in anyway. And I don't know, I feel like, honestly the number of times over the past few years who I've had to be that guy on the Internet and be like, hey, FYI, your leggings aren't made out of recycled leggings, they're made out of water bottles. I feel like no one's ever going to invite me to a party ever again.
- [72:30]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely feel that.
- [72:35]
Amanda
Like, sorry to ruin your day, but actually this is. You're being sold a web of lies.
- [72:39]
Ariel Fabro
Yes.
- [72:40]
Amanda
And I will also just say so much women's underwear is made out of this rpet and it freaks me out.
- [72:47]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, well, I mean, that's another big problem is plastic like, they added a lot of different chemicals to give it certain properties and colors, and those. Those leach out of the plastic when they're in the ocean or even they can leach out against your skin. So, yeah, it's. It's a whole nother level that I haven't gotten that far into. But a lot of them, like, are untested and just. Yeah, it's another reason to be really mindful. I guess the one good thing about using, like, polyester in a shoe is that it's not going to be washed very often, so it won't shed those microplastics compared to, like, your leggings. But, yeah, overall, it's like the recyclability is really hard. I do want to mention, though, that there are some innovations. There was. Well, there is a company called New Ocean. They're like a small startup that they're basically taking. They've partnered with an organization that's collecting flip flops in Asia, and then they're grinding them up and pressing them into basically the midsoles of their sandals. And that's actually avoids a lot of, like, it's not totally reprocessing and like, melting it back down. And it's. It is a good fit where you. The use case does. Does match. So. So there is some, you know, some positive things to look at. I've also heard that Nylon 6, a certain type of nylon, can be recycled back, kind of like metal back to the original grade. So. Yeah, but the cheap polyester avenue is definitely problematic.
- [74:27]
Ariel
Yeah.
- [74:27]
Amanda
Yeah. Okay. So now everybody's probably really depressed about shoes, which is great. That was our goal. No, not really. But when we started this conversation, you know, one thing that Arielle mentioned is if there actually is, like, we have power here by shifting up where and how we spend our money on shoes.
- [74:50]
Ariel
Right.
- [74:51]
Amanda
So the motive, that was essentially the motivation behind creating your billionaire boycott shoe database. So you want to tell us a little bit about that?
- [75:01]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah. So I was, you know, I'm always looking to create my directory, add brands to it. So I'm always looking up who owns these brands and who fit my criteria. And so I started tracking that and having a list in my notes of who owns these different brands. And I noticed a trend when I was looking at these bigger brands that it was the same types of owners. So it is a lot of billionaires, which was surprising me. And then a lot of big asset managers, like, people might be pretty familiar with BlackRock now and like, Vanguard and Fidelity, some of the biggest companies in the world. And Another one was like big private equity companies. So I kind of put them all in the. The label of big finance. And I wanted other people to kind of see for themselves what this looks like. Because you hear a lot of things about X number 8. People own more than half the world's wealth or things like that that are kind of hard to believe. And then when you look at this in one specific sector, you can start to see what this actually looks like and see the level of concentration of wealth and assets among a pretty small portion of the population. So basically the idea is to use this kind of as an entry point to understand kind of the bigger systemic trends that we're facing right now and then also provide the alternatives to choose from. So what's on the list is there's right now about 100 of the most popular brands I could find. And then I list their parent company, their top three owners. And then if any of them are individuals, like their net worth, if they're on, most of them are on the Forbes list. And then I'm also wanting to layer on additional kind of telling information about that kind of alludes to how this is like a kind of a. I look at it as like a big wealth funnel that's just sucking wealth up. So I like to mention or add where there's data on, you know, the executive compensation, usually in the millions, their tax avoidance or any offshore accounts they have. Because a lot of this stuff is out there for these bigger brands that is public. So kind of bringing it all into one place and give an overview of kind of, these are the patterns of power that are, that are. That are operating and that we're facing. And then I would love to add more, a lot more data to that. Like, we talked about lobbying and, you know, kind of showing the political influence was a really big part that before, in the last few years, I wouldn't have thought of it myself. But political influence is a huge part of business.
- [77:47]
Amanda
It really is. Yeah.
- [77:49]
Ariel
Yeah.
- [77:50]
Amanda
I think that I'm excited for you to add that because I think actually like the donations, the lobbying, that kind of stuff, stuff is what really blows people's minds and like, kind of shows them the concentration of power in a way that, you know, you can say how much money someone has, but unless you are also a billionaire, what does that even mean to you? You know, and what. I don't know, like, when people tell me the square footage of something, I ha. I'm like, that means nothing to me. I have to know how that compares to like the Room I'm in or something like that. And I think seeing these donations, the lobbying, the money spent on the lobbying, I think that's where you start to see, okay, I can't understand what it means to be worth $3 billion, but I can see the impact of them supporting these politicians, these causes, these lobbying efforts. And once again, going back to the United States here, I mean, like, Target, for example, gave a million dollars to the Trump inauguration. They hadn't donated to a candidate in more than a decade. Right. Like, that was not a coincidental decision. You know, we saw a lot of the tech companies here doing similar over the years. I've seen so many different companies lobbying against, you know, raising the minimum wage or regulation of their industries, et cetera. And this, this is where you're being a billionaire. I mean, well, there are many reasons that I have a problem, people having a billion dollars. But, like, this is where it becomes. Becomes like, incredibly problematic on a massive scale. Right. That it might be invisible to us, but impacts our individual lives every day. So in your research, were there brands that surprised you the most to find were, like, owned by a billionaire?
- [79:43]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I think for me, it was some of the brands that kind of have, like, a counterculture image. So, like, the first one was. Was Doc Martens. They got bought by a private equity company 2013 or so. And like, their history is being a punk icon. And private equity is known as kind of like the Vulture, the vultures of capitalism. Kind of like the antithesis of. Of being anything punk. So, I mean, I guess maybe, like, it's. There's. It's. They're more of a mainstream brand now. It's not really punks that are, you know, buying them. But for me, that was. It's just like a great irony to see. To see that. And then also, like, the company is Premiere is the name. Within about 10 years, they started, like, going public with the brand and selling it for 10 times. Like, not the whole company, but selling portions of it for 10 times the price they paid. So you can just see, like, if you think housing has gone up a lot compared to what private equity is making, it's actually, you know, not nearly as. As fast. So.
- [80:58]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [80:59]
Ariel Fabro
And then. And it's also interesting to look at what other brands they own because they're not into footwear, private equity, they're into anything that they can get a lot of money from. So they own other fashion brands like Golden Goose and Hugo Boss, but they also own all trails, ancestry.com so. And like 90 other companies so of course they do.
- [81:20]
Amanda
I mean, this is the thing that you start to see when you dig into this is they like own everything. It's wild. And the fact that it's all this stuff in these different consumer categories, different industries, kind of proves that there's not really like expertise coming from the top. I mean, docs, I will tell you as, as we list some of these brands, if you really think about it, you will be like, wow. You know, now that you mention it, I did start to see like a lot more different kinds of docs out on the market. I may have heard or experienced firsthand sort of like lower quality in the shoes, which with docs it's like extreme. It's so bad. I may have started to see these brands at like off price stores when I'd never seen them there before. You know, like, I don't know if you have these in Canada, but like TJ Maxx and Marshalls and Nordstrom Rack and whatnot. You know, you may have noticed that these sites for these brands are always having a lot of sales and just constant launches of new products. When you actually start, when you know that something is owned by one of these like private equity firms, like a shoe company, you look back and you're like, oh yeah, they do kind of suck now I see it. It's like very obvious. What's another brand that surprised you? Because you said counterculture brands that are no longer owned by their original owners.
- [82:46]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, so another one is Birkenstocks. I think this one might be a little bit more upsetting for some people. I mean, they haven't sold out on the quality, I would say yet. I mean, I think there's like, they're starting to, they're starting to replace like their, their leather uppers with plastic and things.
- [83:06]
Amanda
But there's so many plastic shoes in their line now.
- [83:10]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, but I mean I don't see the widespread complaints about quality as much as like docs, but, but yeah, they like, they have a long history of like 250 years as a family owned business, which is pretty incredible. And yeah, just in the last decade or so the heirs decided that they would sell. I think they had an executive takeover as the first outside CEO and I think he kind of convinced them to make off with a few billion dollars. And yeah, they sold to the biggest fashion conglomerate, lvmh, which is, is owned by Bernard Alnal who's like the sixth richest person in the world right now. So they've just been absorbed into, into this big conglomerate. And yeah, like, once that happens for me, I just kind of expect things to get worse from there. Yeah. And so that's why I have like these brands have started focusing on writing some guides of like other brands you can support instead. Because, I mean, Bernard Arnault is like a great example of, he's from France and he's a great example of that using political influence that's actually quite public. You can read a lot about it. Kind of similar to Elon Musk in the States where he really has his hand in the government.
- [84:34]
Amanda
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hate it. I mean, he was also at the inauguration. And lvmh, I mean, in addition to owning Birkenstocks, which blows my mind by the way, you know, they own a lot of luxury brands which are also sort of infamously going down in quality over the past decade. LVMH also owns Sephora. I mean, these companies have like really broad portfolios and I, I just find that the moment they come into a conglomerate, this is when the quality begins to decline pretty fast. Because once again, it's about these top line metrics, right? Like the profitability. So you're cutting corners along the way. When you and I were prepping, I told you about how I'd had this like really illuminating moment when I was working on an episode about Forever 21 when I discovered Authentic Brands Group, which is like another like private equity group that owns a lot of brands, like very diverse range of brands. And I was kind of struck by, from both an apparel perspective but also a shoe perspective, how many brands they own that at least here in the United States we might think of as like premium or almost like a heritage brand, like brands our grandparents wore. And you know what, like, they also are kind of like have been fast fashion ified. The quality isn't there. Like Sperry Frye, Hunter, Rockport. Those are just some of the shoes that they own. There's, It's a long list. And I remember having a pair of fry boots in the early aughts that I wore for about five years straight. I got them resold about two years in because the rain in Portland was really like breaking them down. Also, I rode my bike in them every day, so, you know, using my feet as brakes a lot. And I remember taking them into the cobbler to get them resold. And he was just like, wow, this is like a beautiful pair of shoes. Like the insoles on these are incredible. And he was pointing out all the details that made these fry boots so special. And a few years ago I was like, oh, maybe I'll get a new pair of Fry boots. Because that other pair lasted me until they, like, were just disintegrated down to the threads. Like, maybe I could get another pair of those and just wear them every day for years. And I went to a store and tried some on, and I was like, wait, like, these aren't cushy inside and they're really strangely slippery on the bottom and there's something kind of stiff and chemical smelling about the leather. And I didn't think too much of it, but then I went home and was like, googling around and people were like, yeah, Frye boots really suck right now. I don't know what happened. And nobody really knew. And so when I was working on this Forever 21 episode and I saw that Fry was owned by this, this private equity firm, I was like, oh, well, now we know what happened, right? It's just a tale as old as time at this point. Classic, right? A classic of late stage capitalism, I guess.
- [87:37]
Ariel Fabro
Absolutely. I think Authentic Brands is one of the biggest conglomerates. It's one of the most alarming when you just look at the pure number of brands they own. But I have more examples that were also surprising. Like Warren Buffett. You don't really think of him as a fashion investor, but he has no. He has a portfolio of 20 footwear brands, including, like, Brooks the.
- [88:02]
Amanda
Really?
- [88:03]
Ariel Fabro
The Brooks the running shoes, Chippewa, like, boots. So, yeah, I mean, they. It is. There's a big pairing between fashion, footwear and billionaires. And yeah, he's another one in, like, the top 10. Which also surprised me because, like, in the top 10 billionaires, like, Forbes list, it's like three of them are heavily into fashion. So it's like, after you go with the tech billionaires, fashion is right up near the top.
- [88:36]
Amanda
It's so funny too, because people who don't know a ton about fashion or, I mean, I don't know how I would say this is. Periodically someone I know will say, hey, Amanda, I listened to your podcast and it's really good. But, like, you know, fashion is kind of, like, not that important. Why aren't you using your, like, time and your, like, talent on something, like, more significant? And I'm like, are you.
- [89:01]
Ariel
Are you kidding me?
- [89:02]
Amanda
Like, the industry that creates clothing and shoes and belts and bags and earrings and you name it, is so massive. There is so much wealth tied up in it. There is so much human impact tied up in it, and the, the environmental impact is next level. And I would also say, like, Kind of our, like, personal, psychological, social experiences are also really tied up in it. So this stuff, clothes and shoes, are actually incredibly important and, like, hyper political. You know, you just talked about how all these billionaires are buying influence. Well, they're doing that with the money that comes in from selling you shoes and clothes.
- [89:44]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah.
- [89:45]
Amanda
It's dark.
- [89:47]
Ariel Fabro
I have a kind of a similar experience being, like, I volunteer for another group called our Common Market, where we're trying to focus on, you know, participating in fashion culture rather than consuming. And I'm like, one of the only males that is, you know, part of that group. So I find myself also kind of. It's seen as, I guess, not a very. It's a place where. Not. Where men are not as often participating in. But when you look at fashion, it employs like, the entire fashion value chain employs, like, hundreds of millions of people, 8% of the global workforce. So it's like, it's one of the biggest industries and it's often thought of as. Yeah. More frivolous. Which. Yeah. Which is. Yeah, it's crazy.
- [90:41]
Amanda
I know. I mean, people become billionaires off of this stuff. You know, like, it's. Yeah, it's so silly. I mean, also, like, clothing is a human basic need for survival, which I think sometimes people forget because it has this frivolous connotation to it. And I would also argue even someone who says they don't care about what they wear, they 100% care about what they wear and identify with brands or different colors or different, like, silhouettes of clothing and shoes that they go to time and time again that are actually a part of their, like, I don't know, identity as they present it to the world. So I have no tolerance at this point for people who tell me that this stuff doesn't matter, and I tell them so I used to be like, oh, okay, thanks. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. And I don't do that anymore. Okay, so why. I mean, you are doing all this work to pull this database together to steer people in better directions. Why is it important to know the truth about these brands and who really owns them?
- [91:46]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I mean, I think we touched on a bit, but it's. It's really about seeing that this is. There's patterns of behavior behind how these brands operate. And if we just look at their sustainability report and see, oh, they have this certification, I guess I could be happy enough with that. We're kind of missing the bigger picture, and I think it's really important to see that bigger picture. That wealth inequality is increasing Emissions are increasing, overproduction is marching ahead. And for me it really comes down to the types of businesses that we're supporting so we can create, you know, long distance solidarity by, by getting behind a boycott. And you know, it doesn't mean you have to be behind it, you know, with every single purchase you make. And maybe it's hard to find, you know, orthopedic running shoes that you need but, but it's a resource that will help guide you and just very quickly be able to see kind of behind the curtain what's going on. And yeah, I think it just shows like as I add more data to it, there's taxes that are being avoided, regulations are being co opted, a lot of things like that. And it's just as complex power concentrates, it just enables more extraction. And going back to Marjorie Kelly, she, she talks a lot about maybe I'll just pull up the quote really quickly here. As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked in endless growth and widening inequality. There's no amount of rhetoric or external regulation that can turn companies away from this existing mandate. So it's really about if we are trying to expect them to be enlightened and to have non binding, just goodwill that can have some influence. But it's not going to change the heart of what they're doing and we also don't have the power to regulate them. We need to go deeper, we need to go to the heart of the business and that's who owns it, that's the purpose of it and that's who controls it.
- [94:10]
Amanda
I mean, what do you say to people who say like oh these boycotts, they have no impact. What a waste of your time. You could be doing something more impactful.
- [94:20]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I mean I think you might be misunderstanding it but if you think that you're going to make a big financial dent in a hundred of the biggest companies in the world, I think that's probably not going to happen. But you can create a collective consciousness around that. This is an issue. And because I think I said this before in our chat before, it's not really about footwear, it's about a bigger picture of how businesses are operating. And this is a good gateway to see it because it is actually one of the more extractive areas as we've talked about. So it's not, don't expect too much, don't expect to necessarily have these businesses going bankruptcy corrupt. But there's a lot of power and I think I did a little bit of research on historic boycott movements and in some cases they can have that financial impact if it's a very direct. So I think even like this last year people were boycotting Budweiser for some of their commercials is more of like a conservative boycott. And I think that did have enough of a financial impact that they changed. But also like the reputation of a brand is very important for them. And so that's also a lever of change. And you can push on that by creating awareness and addressing it. And then it's just being happy that your dollars aren't just funneling up to the top, they can be circulated.
- [95:59]
Amanda
Yeah, yeah. I mean that alone, like, just, hey, like we all work really hard for our, the money that we have. Why would we give it to someone who sucks if we could avoid it? You know, like, why give it back to them? I guess is what I would say. And I will say like the thing about boycotting, if we're looking at it on like what are the macro effects of it? Not just like the personal impact of. Takes time, you know, and it takes more people getting involved. And you can really lead by example by telling people why you don't buy these, this brand of shoes and instead you're doing this or why you're getting your shoes repaired instead of buying a new pair. Like this is how we start social trends that become movements that create sustainable, permanent, long term change. And you know, we're kind of seeing that right now here in the United States with the boycott of Target. Like I wanna say we're about three months into it and I'm telling you the impact is there. Like foot traffic has been down week after week after week. And the CEO who seems like he's really bad at his job is actually like losing money. And you know, like his compensation for the year has gone down quite a bit. And the press, like the media is picking up on these things and talking about it more, which means then it reaches more people too. And it's like you said, like brand reputation is so important to these brands that it will force something at Target. Like something will happen in the next couple months. Like the CEO might need to step down, they might bring back dei. I'm not sure what they're going to do, but we're reaching a tipping point there. And yeah, it doesn't happen in one day, it doesn't happen in one month, but it does happen over time. And so it's important to stick to it as to the best that you can and get more People involved in it. So now that we've depressed everybody about shoes or freaked them out, I thought we could like end things here. But just how you could give people advice about, like, listen from a sustainability perspective on a personal level, how can you have a more sustainable shoe situation?
- [98:15]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I mean, I think it just comes down to first not over consuming, so giving yourself a limit. And then when you do buy shoes, look for investing in the long term. And if that means paying a bit more, if you look at the broader benefits to your foot health, to the quality to the workers, it adds up and is usually worth it. So I think that's a big thing we miss as we focus only on price and not kind of the total value that you're getting for a pair of shoes and shoes that are resolable, they really can last a long time. And it kind of gets almost back to like a different kind of materialism where you're caring for the craftsmanship that went into it and you have a different relationship with, with a personal item. And I mean, for example, I have a pair of running shoes. They're actually all birds that I bought second hand, but they were pretty much new. I've had them for like five years and I'm starting to now stitch them because they're like a knit fabric, so there's holes. And I'm stitching them with like colored thread and it's kind of like a divisible mending trend. I actually think it looks pretty cool. And it's.
- [99:39]
Amanda
I'm sure it does.
- [99:40]
Ariel Fabro
And you know, it's kind of. You develop a different relationship with your things when you start putting that, your personal time into caring for it. So I think that's kind of a big, a big kind of shift that we can all make and kind of extending the life of things and caring for them.
- [99:56]
Amanda
I think that's so true. So I'm going to tell you something sort of embarrassing, which was that for pretty much all of elementary school, I had to wear orthopedic shoes. And I don't know if they make kids wear orthopedic shoes anymore. I don't even know if you know what they are. But they're basically like your doctor takes a mold of your foot because you have some sort of like misalignment in your ankle or knees or feet or what have you. You might have really flat feet, you might have really high arches. And then they make shoes with an insole that is, is specific to your foot to help correct some of those issues. And that meant That. I mean, it meant a lot of things. One, it meant that I never got to wear cute shoes. Like, I seriously was wearing, like, grandma shoes to, like, third grade. It also meant that they were really expensive, so I could only get one pair of shoes, like, every year, basically, like, as my feet grew, like, that was it. And my mom was really strict about caring for those shoes, like, keeping them dry, but also spraying them with, like, waterproofing and cleaning them periodically and just always, like, not wearing them in situations where they could be ruined, like out in the mud or something like that. And I think that we need to bring those that care for the longevity of our shoes back, like, to act as if we only have this one pair of shoes for a whole year, even if they are weird grandma shoes that we have to wear because they make our feet walk better.
- [101:29]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, I love that.
- [101:31]
Amanda
Yeah, I. I mean, like, I think I learned a lot about caring for shoes from that time period. Now, did I then grow up and buy the ugliest, cheapest, sluttiest shoes I could find at any given point because I was, like, tired of, like, having to wear the shoes I'd worn growing up? Absolutely. Did I totally not take care of them? Absolutely. Did I occasionally lose one of the shoes? For sure. But my relationship with shoes, I brought back what I learned as a kid about making my shoes last. And also, I can wear cuter shoes now, so I'm even more invested in it, you know. Okay. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with everyone?
- [102:10]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, well, there's one thing I didn't mention, and that's, you know, it's a very politically polarized time, and I think that when you start focusing on smaller, independent businesses, it's something that pretty much everyone can get behind. Because I think everyone is concerned about, you know, concentration of power, and I think that's really important because it's. We're not going to make a big sustainability transition with, you know, half the people. So, yeah, it's something. I think that this will be interesting for everyone, and I really hope people will. We'll be making use of it.
- [102:54]
Amanda
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I'll just add on to that by saying that, like, billionaires are not sustainable by nature and we need less of them. You know, I mean, I always say, like. I mean, this is like, a total slogan kind of thing, but billionaires should not exist, and we need to stop supporting them.
- [103:14]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, that's. That's exactly the idea.
- [103:17]
Amanda
Yeah.
- [103:18]
Ariel Fabro
Make it public and then give alternatives. So so it's easy to choose a better option.
- [103:23]
Amanda
Definitely. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to share everything in the show, notes for people to find, your directory to learn more about who owns what shoes and also your suggestions around shoes. And I just wanted to thank you so much.
- [103:38]
Ariel Fabro
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been great to chat.
- [103:46]
Amanda
Thank you so much to Ariel for spending, spending some time with us. I urge all of you to go check out cobbled goods for one to see the billionaire boycott list. And like I said in the intro, get ready to be shocked by some of those shoe brands because it was really illuminating for me and it has changed my opinion on the shoes I want to buy and wear in the future and more than ever how important it is to make the shoes I currently own last as long as possible. And I'm, I'm also just going to throw in here. I am a huge, huge fan of repairing shoes, just like I'm a huge fan of repairing clothes. And while many of us can learn to mend and repair clothing at home, maybe not the more complicated jobs, but, you know, we can put on buttons and things like that. Shoe repair is a little bit more complicated. I have definitely, trust me, this household always has a bottle of shoe goo. I guess it's really more of a tube of shoe goo around for simple glue repairs. But honestly, some of the best money you're ever going to spend is taking your shoes to a cobbler to be repaired. It's amazing the years of additional wear you'll get out of a repair like that. And how somehow your shoes look cooler and feel, I don't know, they feel like they're like bionic cyborg shoes or something that like were made just for you. So, so also just want to throw out there, get your shoes fixed. It's awesome. Also on Ariel's website, Uncobbled Goods, he has all kinds of more sustainable alternatives. He has resources for finding secondhand shoes and so much more information. I have always found shoes in my experience to be the most challenging piece of the slow fashion way of life. Because as we talked about earlier, shoes are a dirty business, right? And I think that in the world of shoes, we cannot let perfection stand in the way of just progress. You know, as we talk about all the time here. And I think sometimes it's just like, hey, buy less shoes. Try to make the best decisions about where and when you buy them and make the shoes last. That's, that's the ticket to slow fashion footwear. I will Just say all the work.
- [106:06]
Ariel
On Ariel's site is super valuable, so.
- [106:08]
Amanda
Go check it out. Speaking of valuable work, now is the time where I remind you once again the seemingly small things you do every day, like take care of your shoes, are very important. They're super radical and they are most definitely making a difference even when that day's media cycle feels overwhelming and massive and soul crushing and hope destroying and whatever else. Because certainly I have been through it every day this year and in previous years with all of you. I'll tell you, this morning, like I said, I woke up super early to record before the sun started its nefarious, evil, burning work. No, jk, big fan of the sun because it is making my garden grow so much right now. But I woke up early and I grabbed my phone almost immediately after I opened my eyes, which I'm sure you do too. I've tried to break that habit. I just cannot. That's just where we are right now. Anyway, I was greeted by a link from Dylan, you know, my kid. They've been on the podcast in the past. And this link, it was for an article from the local newspaper where I grew up. And the story was essentially about my grandmother's house, my gam Sandy, her house being burned down accidentally or semi intentionally by some children who rolled a lawn mower up to her fence and lit the gas tank on fire. I mean, what a crazy story. I'm not really sure what happened there, but wow, like, what the fuck, right? I mean, this is how lives can change in an instant. Sometimes just innocently. And my family has, in one way or another, lived in that house. A small row home in what was, was once a more like, I don't know, like middle class would be an overstatement, but just like a pretty solid working class neighborhood. Now it's what you would call a not very nice part of town. Someone's always lived in there. My great grandparents, then my great aunt, and then my grandma moved in there. My grandma has lived there since, I don't know, like I was in high school. And now it's gone, you know, and it's. It's. It's just a house, right? But this, reading this article, it was just an overwhelming emotional bomb hitting me.
- [108:38]
Ariel
First thing in the morning.
- [108:39]
Amanda
I've been no contact with my mother since 2019 for many, many very good reasons. And as part of that shift in my life, it meant I can no longer be in touch with my grandma, who, like any good mother, has to be loyal to her child, right? So she is team my mom. That's been really, really difficult for me. I mean, like, those words don't do the feeling of it all justice. But, you know, my. My grandma was the light in my life growing up. I strongly believe that she is the reason I made it to adulthood for many, many, many reasons. And to know that her house is gone, that there is nothing I can really do to help without getting involved in that family again, which I just cannot do. It's a lot. I'm telling you this very private, personal thing. Sorry, Julie, you're gonna hate this. Because one, I want to be clear that going no contact with a parent is neither easy nor a fix. It's just. It's harm reduction, which is very valuable in itself. But there are hard days, you know, it's not like, oh, now my problems are gone. It's not like surgery, right, that, like, cut out a tumor. Well, I guess that tumor could grow back, too. It's just a step toward protecting yourself. Please, please promise me that you will not send me advice about my family or being no contact with them or whatever has happened to my grandma. I am navigating that on my own, privately. But that brings me to the other reason I'm sharing this, and that's because sometimes it is just so hard to get up and do the work of fighting for a better world, right? It's harder than ever this year because, you know this world, but we're also all humans, and we have these lives outside of the bigger cause. Or maybe they're within the bigger cause. It's all intersected and tangled up and complicated. But some mornings you're gonna wake up, right? It's gonna be this wild card situation that pulls the scabs off of your emotional wounds. And maybe you also, like me, have an ear infection that kept you up half the night. Fun times, really. That's how it is, right? Sometimes it's just. It's a hard day. But as I pulled myself out of bed this morning, I reminded myself that the world, including me, is only doomed if we do nothing much. Much like an ear infection will go away if you see a doctor and get medication. But it will rage out of control to a point of no return if you kind of just throw your hands up in the air and say, well, well, I'll just get another ear infection in the future, so why bother dealing with this one? That kind of reminds me of the moments when my depression has been at its worst, when the thought of washing my hair has felt like the greatest chore. Because I know I'll just have to wash it again many, many times for the rest of my life, right? And you're just like, why bother? I'll just have to do it again. And really, these kinds of things our brain does, they remind me of the argument, which is not really an argument that we have debunked here on the podcast over and over again, which is that idea of like, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And then what's in parentheses next to that is, so I'm going to go place this huge Amazon order or what have you. Things are always going to be challenging, right? And things are always going to have to be addressed again and again because the fight never ends. I don't know if life ever gets easy, per se, but it can be better, right? Life can be better for everyone and every living thing. It won't be perfect, right? There's still going to be ear infections and people doing bad things and struggles that the planet faces and, you know, frightening natural disasters and on and on and on, right? There are going to be all of these wild cards thrown our way all the time. And I'm not going to go any deeper into that card metaphor because I don't know much about cards unless it is playing gin rummy, which I used to play with my grandma all the time and I do love, or Uno, Obviously this is a countess card. I don't know. Anyway, I believe that life can be better for everyone and every living thing, even if it will never be perfect and the work will never be done. And that's what gets me up every morning. That's what reminds me that while there will always be something to fix, something to protest, someone, somewhere that needs help, nothing changes if we do nothing right now. So this week, Rebecca of old flame Mending, which is. She was an early guest on Clotheshore, I think it was a three part series about mending. She announced that the business will be closing its doors at the end of August. And it makes sense, right? It was just too difficult to make the math work for the business. In a world where it is shockingly difficult to get people to pay to have their clothing repaired, much less to get them to pay fair price for it. As I saw that news appear in my feed earlier this week, I felt, I felt so sad because I have felt and observed this growing sense of scarcity in the sustainability slash slow fashion world. It's kind of impossible to make a living out of getting people to buy less stuff, whether that's via repair services or teaching people how to do these things themselves or even writing and sharing information about it. And this sense of scarcity, well it ends businesses and it creates a sense of competition in a community that really needs all hands on deck collaboration from everyone. I'll tell you, there's a very well known person in the world of sustainability. I'm not going to name this person, but they've been blocking all of us who share information and education on social media about this kind of stuff because they feel that because they talked about it first that the rest of us are copying them by talking about it now. And here's what I have to say about that. Yes, there is a scarcity of money and paying work in this space. I am only able to do clothes horse because I also work a full time job that supports me and pays my kids tuition and buys a lot of cat food. It's a difficult balance and there are many, many days where I can't make the basic math of time work in my favor. But this is important to me for all of the reasons I explained earlier. And so I want to make it work right? Yes, while there is financial scarcity in the world of slow fashion and of building a better future and of standing up for what is right, there is, believe it or not, no money should be made there. And maybe that's okay, but maybe that's also a problem because so many people work so hard for free. I don't know how we fix that, but here's what I'll tell you. Despite that financial scarcity, there is an abundance of people and passion and community and care. And that means there's also an abundance of power and the strength of many rad, smart, passionate people working together toward a common goal. That means change can happen if we stick with it. And what and how we do that along the way might change, but what remains consistent is that we are there doing it and we need need everyone to join us and doing this. There is no such thing as too many people working to make the world better. No such thing. We need everyone involved. So back to ultimately mending Closing up shop makes me really sad and I want to share what I commented on Rebecca's post about closing. I said I don't see this as an ending at all. More like a turn onto a different but just as important road to the next place that needs your service, your vision, your dedication. You have touched so many people over the past few years, getting so many of them to think differently about the value of the stuff in their lives and why it's worth repairing. I'm excited to see what you do now because I know it will also be powerful and I mean that with all of my heart. I am so proud of what Rebecca has done and how many people she has inspired over the past few years. I know that the work of Old Flame Mending has literally changed lives as people carry Rebecca's message and work into their future decisions and their future conversations. Mending is a radical act in the fast fashion world that we live in right now. What Old Flame Mending was doing was more than just repairing clothes. It was making a political statement against hyper consumerism and quasi disposable clothing. And it was showing people the work, the skill, the talent of sewing. I'm so proud of all of you who wake up every day ready to actively do good things for the world around you. Even when it is difficult and scary or too hot outside or your ear hurts or your family is just like breaking your heart. You get up and you do it. And fighting for a better world by the way, it comes in many forms and some of them are more high touch than others and some of them happen more often than others. And some of them maybe you can't do, but you can do others. And these are all valid, right? Right? Protesting, calling and emailing your elective representatives. Getting food, books and healthcare to our communities. Educating others, speaking up, boycotting, donating, running for office, voting, shopping local and small. This is just the beginning of the long list of things that you can and are already doing. As I've been saying a lot this year, I believe in you, I believe in me, and I believe in us. Let's keep doing what we're doing because things will. They will get better. Thanks for listening to another episode of Closed Source. Written, Researched, Edited, Hosted all the things by me Amanda Lee McCarty if you like what you heard, please leave a Rating A Review Subscribe Tell your friends all those things. They're all really powerful for getting more people to hear Clothes Horse if you'd like to support my work financially, there are many ways you can do that. That's all linked in the show notes and in my profile on every social media platform it's there. And also, just wanted to add that I have right here on my desk a box of two bumper stickers that I had made that are based on the fake billboards that I've shared on Instagram in the past.
- [120:22]
Ariel
Those will hopefully go live on the.
- [120:23]
Amanda
Site in the next day or two. I just need to find some time, but I'm excited for you to see them. So go check out the other merch in the clothes horse shop if that's something that appeals to you. One last thing I just want to tell you all is that there will probably not be an episode for about two weeks now. One Episodes this summer have been pretty chaotic and are coming on different days, et cetera. And it's a wide variety of reasons. One is like we've been having some really brutal weather, so we've had power outages and other issues like that, Internet outages, things like that that make it hard for me to make clothes horse. But also there's just a lot of stuff going on for work with me right now and in my personal life and I'm trying to keep a balance the next two weeks. I'm actually going to be doing a ton of research and writing for the next set of episodes, which are pretty, pretty writing intensive. I may get one together for next week, but I wouldn't count on it. And that one's going to be all about our relationship with brands and kind of the illusion of brands and why we need to break up with that idea of like brands as people that we have commitments and loyalty to. Yeah, just a really light topic. So anyway, I might have that for you next week. It might be a couple weeks. Weeks. I'm also in two weeks gonna go to the beach with Dustin for a couple days where I hope I'm gonna read a ton of books and maybe eat some ice cream and I don't know, I kind of want to go on a lazy river. We'll see. There will definitely be miniature golf. So just a couple weeks off and then I'll be back. It's kind of, to be honest, the summer's kind of a slow season for podcasts because one, people are out doing other things other than listening to podcasts. And two, it's a little bit harder to get guests because guess what? People are out doing fun because it's the summer. So this is going to be a little weird this summer. We'll get through it together. We're also coming up on the five year birthday of Clotheshorse in July and I'm trying to think about what, what that means and what we'll do for that, but lots more cool stuff coming. I'm really excited about the things I'm working on. Just know some of them are really labor intensive and take a little bit longer, but will be worth the wait. Okay. Okay, that's all for this week. The last thing we'll just say here is thank you to Mr. Justin Travis White for our music and audio support, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye. SA.