← Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Episode 254: How (and why) I worked in fast fashion, part 2
01:37:43
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Welcome to Clothesh, the podcast that thinks the best thing about February. Because it's definitely not the weather is thrifting Valentine's Day decorations because pink and red are the best color combination. I will fight you over that. And for me, Valentine's Day decor is actually a year round way of life. I'm your host, Amanda and this is episode 254 part part 2 in how and why I worked in fast fashion. It's best that you go listen to part one first. That episode starts in Portland, Oregon in 2002 and it covers the early part of my career through my worst job ever at the feminist brand. You'll get to hear about OTS Portland and how I became a buyer for Urban Outfitters and what it was like to work at ModCloth and Nasty Gal. And before we jump back into it today, I just wanted to give one final call to get your postcard of hope from me. There is a link in the show notes where you can provide your email address and your mailing address and I will drop one in the mail for you as I am recording this right now. It is Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States. No, I'm obviously not watching the game because I'm recording a podcast right now. But it is February 8th. I am probably going to take down that signup form by the end of February, so get in there now or forever hold your peace. All right, let's jump back into the story. Part three, even more feminist tease and a lot of dead ends. I. I am a people pleaser. And yes, my seemingly uncontrollable desire to ensure that everyone is happy, satisfied, and content is often damaging to my mental and physical health. It actually took becoming a content creator. Ooh. And dealing with the unhappiness of many strangers around the world to force me to start unpacking that tendency within myself. Let me tell you, people ask me for a lot of things. And I think, like I said, I've always had a really hard time saying no to anyone each time someone reaches out to me from the Slow fashion community to ask me for something. A couple years ago, someone reached out to me and said they were trying to use Instagram less often. Could I start uploading all my posts and captions into a Google folder for them to access so they could stay off Instagram. And would you believe it or not, I did that for them for like a month until I realized that this, this was going too far in isolation. It's really only like a five to ten minute project. Well, sometimes. But the problem is that so many people reach out to ask me to do things for them every week that it becomes really hard to stay on top of it all. And that's, that's where being a people pleaser can become really self destructive. But, you know, don't see it at first. So, you know, in a given week, people will reach out to me to ask help with school projects and to interview me for their school newspaper and get advice about how to change careers, which, spoiler, I don't really have advice. Like, I've learned. I don't know if I've learned much. I've just experienced it all the really hard way. But, you know, people wanting help with their businesses or me to boost their posts on Instagram or any number of things, a lot of people want to just get together and pick my brain. And you know, because I am such a people pleaser and because I do think of myself as sort of like a servant of this community, not a leader, but a person who is there to help and support everyone, I never could say no. And what I found is that I was slowly sort of, I don't know, breaking myself apart. I would say, like, okay, well, I can do this other thing for someone if I just like, don't eat dinner tonight, or I can do this other thing for these people if I don't take a day off this week or I give up this other thing. I don't do anything fun. I don't, you know, play video games or read a book or spend time with my husband. And what really happened is that eventually I found myself just feeling really exhausted and burned out and kind of resentful of something that I couldn't really put my finger on. Like, I couldn't name it, but I knew it was related to Clotheshorse. And really what I realized is I was resentful towards myself for never saying no. So I'm not still cured as a people pleaser. It physically pains me every time I say no. But strangely, of many great things that have come out of Clotheshorse is it forced me to start advocating for myself and start gradually. It's a work in progress, dismantling all that people pleasing behavior. I'm really bad at saying no, but I'm getting a lot better at it. And I am so grateful for all of you who, you know, respect when I say no and know that it's not because I want to say no, but sometimes I just have to anyway. That's now. But for most of my career and most of my life, people Pleasing behavior all the time. And I can look back now and see that this need to make everything okay for everyone started when I was a child. My home life was so chaotic. Adults were a source of unpredictable rage and punishment. And I figured out pretty fast that it was my job to anticipate anger before it happened and do everything I could to prevent it. And should I fail in this mission, it. It was also my responsibility to absorb the rage and its consequences. Hopefully learning to do better in the future. And really this kind of behavior is learned in situations with uneven power dynamics. Parent child is the first experience we have in power dynamics. If you have a bad parent, you feel like property and you feel powerless in every way. You make no decision of your own except for when you decide to do your best to survive by taking on the responsibilities of the people pleaser. And my home life made me feel sick. It was a stomachache and a headache that was always there. I never knew what each day would bring. Would I be hit, stand in a corner for hours on end, Maybe just screamed at for a while about what a bad kid I was. Maybe I would just get to watch my brother be punished instead. There were so many times where there would be hours of like just punishment, spanking, screaming, hair pulling, being pushed around. That would culminate in my mom telling my brother and I to pack all of our stuff because we had to go find somewhere else to live. Like this happened several times a year and it would inevitably. And with my grandma showing up to talk quietly to my brother and I about trying to be better so that this wouldn't happen again, I mean it was just over and over again. I look back now and if it were me, now who I am, I would have been like, oh, you want us to move out? Don't threaten me with a good time. But back then it was just like this again. How did it get this far? It's definitely my fault that it got this far. And so I tiptoed around the house, I did extra chores. I tried my hardest to be the perfect daughter and student and household help. And if I did my best, in theory, no one would be punished. No one would scream that day. Of course, the odds were stacked against me. My birth was an accident. My existence a source of constant frustration for my mother. And to make matters worse, I had the audacity to be diagnosed with cancer and then ruin my parents marriage by being sick. And I would be making that up to my mom for decades until I decided to go. No contact with her in 2019 just, you know what? In the last episode, I talked about this prevailing message in fashion, that is, you are lucky to be there. And this to me was nothing new because I felt like every day of my life leading up to when I worked in fashion, that I was just lucky that anyone would let me be anywhere. I mean, this is what it is to grow up in an abusive home and, and take on a lot of that people pleasing behavior. People pleasing work, I might even call it, is that you're constantly feeling like you have to earn the privilege of being anywhere, anytime. And yes, growing up that way, learning these people pleasing behaviors, feeling constantly like you're so lucky that anyone will let you be anywhere, anytime. It primes you for a lot of toxic situations. It makes you the model employee because you will never advocate for yourself, you will never say no to extra work, and you will never ask for more in relationships. It sets you up to date. People who exploit that insecurity, that inability to say no to mold you into what they want you to be, often harming you in the process. And so I'll tell you, if you're listening to this right now and you're like, so much of this sounds so familiar to me. I have lived this. I am living this. Please, please let this be your sign to get some therapy to talk to someone about this. If you don't have resources for that, which is very normal, especially here in the United States, to not be able to afford that kind of find some books, talk to some friends, start dismantling this, because people will always take more from you than you can give until you tell them that they can't anymore. And that when I say people, that can be relationships, that can be jobs, that can be being a content creator and never saying no because you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, it all adds up. And it chips away at who you are and your sense of well being, your health and, you know, we only get to live one time and it's okay to say no to people sometimes. People pleasing is an easy habit to repeat over and over again. As an adult in my 20s, I had two relationships that mimicked that endless anxiety of childhood of never knowing what you were walking into when you came home. I never felt calm, content, or even loved, just kind of nervous. And this was like something that I was just used to. I would, I wouldn't say that I was comfortable, but I really do believe that for a long time I just thought that this is what it was like for everyone, everywhere, at any moment that they were all feeling nervous all the time. That everybody was experiencing these like, fucked up power dynamics. I was always afraid of something, even if I couldn't always name what it was. And I will say one day I realized that in fact, no, not everyone in the world was feeling this way all the time. Because actually it was a bad thing and it was not an okay thing and it wasn't even a normal thing. And that I needed to do the work to never end up in that kind of situation again. And fortunately, I haven't been in a romantic relationship like that in a long time time. But where did I get to experience those fucked up power dynamics over and over again? At work? Not. Not every job. Like I said in the previous episode, ModCloth was delightful. But other places, the fear was constant. An executive at Urban Outfitters, the same one who was going around yelling at all of us to take a discount and if we weren't on the phone, we were going to lose our job. I talked about that in the last episod episode. He threw a rolling rack full of hangers and scarves at me in a meeting while I was literally presenting the next season Spy. It scratched up my face and it created a new outcome to worry about at every future job. Generally, I wasn't fearing having objects thrown at me. I just feared losing my job or being humiliated. Both were always possibilities. And without a job, I would. Well, I don't know what I would do, but the repercussions would affect my entire family. And humiliation. I mean, who actually doesn't mind that? That's terrible too. I will say that guy. The guy who threw the rolling rack full of hangers and scarves at me. The guy who went around screaming at everyone while we were calling to ask for discounts. He actually went on to drive J. Crew to the brink of bankruptcy until he was pushed out. And the last I'd heard, he was living in South America because literally, like, no one likes him. So maybe a happy ending. Not really. He's probably got so much money, he's probably living the dream anyway. That's how it goes, right? But in the offices of many of my employers, that culture of fear impacted and everyone. It ratcheted up an already toxic culture, forcing people to betray their peers regularly. And this is something that I have observed time and time again, where I would see people, in quotes, throwing one another under the bus. God, that is a phrase I have heard way too often at way too many of my jobs. All of this throwing of people under buses, all the Time. That kind of behavior of sort of like selling out your peers, of, I don't know, saying whatever you need to say to stay out of trouble. That kind of behavior stems from people being afraid. When I see people acting that way, when any mention of throwing anyone under any sort of public transportation comes up in conversation, I know that means that is a shitty place to work. And the leadership there runs the company with fear, you know? At the feminist brand, my people pleasing and anxiety levels were off the charts. The migraines and stomach problems never stopped. I was exhausted, but I could not sleep. I had eczema all over my hands and arms. My doctor was gently suggesting in every appointment that I consider looking for another job. How could I explain to her that no one would want me because I was lucky that anyone would hire me because that's how I felt, which in retrospect is ridiculous, but that's how these kinds of work environments just chip away at your sense of self and at the feminist brand, man, I can look back in hindsight and be like, wow, I like made their business blow up in every good way. Like made made them a lot of money, you know, and none of that would have happened without me. Yet at the time, I just felt like a piece of shit every day. The CEO was unpredictable and punishing. I felt like a 10 year old trying to make my mother happy, or at least less angry every single day that I was in that office. But this time, instead of protecting my brother by pleasing my mother, I was protecting my team by bending over backwards in any way for any request that came my way from the CEO. It was my job to take care of everyone. And in this situation, rather than my grandmother showing up to quietly talk me into being a good kid, whatever the fuck that means, I was having that monologue with myself every day. Like, how? How can I be better tomorrow so no one has a terrible day? I worked for that company from 2016 to 2018 and already really shitty, scary time. But also, like, the way people organized and shared information and raised awareness was changing in a really good way. Rather than merely using social media to share pics of vacations and really aesthetically pleasing avocado toast, more and more of us were actually finding education and community on platforms like Instagram. And it meant that conversations were growing about topics that had once been limited to much smaller groups. And one thing that people were discussing more and more was who made our clothes and how the workers were treated. Yes, Rana Plaza had collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers, mostly women, but few people outside of the fashion industry or the activists working to change it, very few people outside of that knew about it. And social media made it easier to share information like that, to reach more people and to get them involved. And because the feminist brand's customer base was very plugged into human rights, and because fashion is a feminist issue, our customer service person was starting to receive emails asking about who was making the clothing we sold and what were the working conditions in our factories. Now, these emails were forwarded to me because I was the director of merchandising, meaning like I was in charge of all things product related for the company, basically the head of buying. And I'm going to tell you, this was stressing me out. I nervously asked my boss, the CEO, what I should tell people because I didn't know much. Our T shirts were printed across town, but the blanks came from a wholesaler and who knows where they were made. Our clothing, like our suits and button ups, they were made through a vendor who worked with a lot of fast fashion brands. And all of that stuff came from China. But I was never in touch with the factories. There were at least two to three layers of people and businesses separating me from the end actual manufacturing of the clothing. And the CEO was like, well, just figure out something good to tell people. Her overall stance was that the customers asking these questions were just being annoying, but ignoring them could turn into a PR issue. And I'm going to tell you, my name is Amanda Lee McCarty and I I am a scaredy cat. I literally cannot think of one moment in my life when I wasn't drowning in anxiety. I would not characterize myself as a brave person. I'm definitely getting there. I do things that scare me every day, like write and record episodes like this. But it's a process. And a few weeks ago, when an Instagram user rightfully called me out in part two of the social media version of this series for not talking about garment workers enough, I was reminded of what a cowardly, dumb baby I have been for most of my adult life. And yeah, I laid in bed that night feeling like a really bad person. But also the reality is that I didn't really start thinking about what might really be happening behind the curtain in the fashion industry until right around 2016. And furthermore, for all of the things I have told you about my life in this series and other episodes of this podcast over the years, there are hundreds of things that happened in my personal life that kept me so busy, so worried and so exhausted that I really just did not have the time or mental energy to even think too deeply about the greater impact of my job. I know I am not alone in feeling that way, and I'm not trying to make excuses, but that's the reality of it all. I just. I didn't have time to think about it, you know? And now I'm here to tell you that garment workers were just not something we discussed in any of the buying departments in my career. And I have talked to friends of mine, former coworkers, et cetera, who went to fashion school, and they have confirmed with me that they don't talk about it there either. So it wasn't like I missed something really important by going to school for painting instead of fashion. None of us. None of us really knew very much about what was going on. And that, yeah, that's really fucking sad. And I guess the fact that I wasn't thinking about it, that often means that I'm a person who was so focused on my own survival that I couldn't think about the big picture. And that's obviously bad, too. Of course I want to be better than that. But that's the thing about being a people pleaser. You're often focused on pleasing the wrong people, the worst people. There were some things that I knew, like I remembered that Kathie Lee Gifford had a clothing line with Walmart in the 90s. And at some point an investigation revealed that underage and underpaid workers in Honduras and New York City were making those clothes. Nike had been busted numerous times for using child labor and exploiting workers all around the world. I actually had a coworker in the aughts who was a former Nike employee, and she had traveled to Asia to see some of the factories where Nike was manufacturing in the late 90s. And she literally said to me, I remember this so clearly. Decades later, she said, amanda, those kids want jobs. They like having jobs. They were so excited to see us there. What? I mean, I suppose if a child has to choose between starving and working in a Nike factory, that child will choose the Nike factory. But what the fuck? That particular co worker was actually super Christian and had kids of her own and still somehow felt it was okay for children half a world away to be working in a Factory. By the 2000s, most companies were adding clauses to their vendor agreements forbidding child labor, but no one was actually checking. And the thing is, no one really knew what was going on in those factories that were 10,000 miles away. One thing I learned pretty early on in my career that surprised me was that very few brands actually own their factories. And that remains true even now. They work through agents who work with factories, and then production might be subcontracted out multiple times along the way. Very few brands actually know even the factory that is making stuff for them, much less who is making it or what their working conditions are like. And after Rana Plaza collapsed in the aftermath, labels for all of these big brands were found buried in the rubble. And many of these brands, well, all of them I'm sure, were like, we had no idea that our stuff was being made there. And I believe that because it was a subcontract of a subcontract of a subcontract. Like no one knows really who is making their stuff. In fact, what made American Apparel very unique in the 2000s was not that the company's product was manufactured in the U.S. because even today, clothes are made in downtown LA and other parts of the U.S. what made it unique was that the company was vertical, meaning it owned the factory. And even more importantly, the factory was on site. So there was. So there was complete transparency into manufacturing, at least for those within the company. And that meant that buyers and designers and production staff could literally, in theory at least, walk into the factory and talk face to face with the people cutting and sewing the garments. I cannot overstate how unusual that is. And every job I have had, when we placed our orders, which are called purchase orders, POS for short, we usually weren't even writing those orders to a specific factory, rather some sort of intermediary. The factory might be two to three layers away from me. And this is just about how every consumer product category works. Let's say I was writing a PO for a dress back when I worked at Nasty Gal. That dress might be from a brand. You know, back then we carried a lot of the revolve brands. You could really insert just about any other non slow fashion brand name here. It would all be the same. So I would issue that order, that PO to the brand, and then the brand would place their own order with their factory or their overseas agent. And that agent or factory would most likely contract that work out to another facility. And that could go on multiple times no matter what. I would have no idea where that dress was actually being made or by whom. Let's say it was a Nasty Gal brand dress. Like it was going to have that label inside it. In that case, if it was made in la, which some of our stuff was, I would probably issue the PO to a business that either doled this Work out to other factories or doled it out to garment workers who were sewing at home. That happened a lot. It's called piecework. And now, thanks to some great legislation in California, that's actually illegal. But back then it was 100% happening. And what how that worked is that the garment worker who elected to sew these things at home would be paid by the piece rather than by the hour. And it is an incredibly unfair situation that often leads to workers making less than minimum wage. Anyway, that's what would happen if it was going to be made in la, if it was an overseas order that that PO was written to the agent who then contracted it out to a factory. And who knows what would happen from there. This is how the money trickles out and down from the brand, down, down, down, with each person taking a cut on the way down, leaving very little for the people at the bottom. And those are the people who are sewing the clothes, making the fabric, making the trims, cutting, packing, inspecting all of the things that make our clothing. And I'm talking about clothing specifically here because this podcast is called clotheshorse. But this once again is the same for any kind of consumer product. In the 2000 and tens, one of my employers actually invested money in developing a vendor compliance department that would include factory inspections. They did a test run of inspections on vendors that had the highest likelihood of abusive, dangerous working conditions. And they found that yes, those vendors were bad. One of them had made hundreds of thousands of bedazzled mesh slippers and cotton Mary jeans and slip on sneakers that we had sold through the aughts. They phased that vendor out, replacing them with other manufacturers. I have no idea if they continue to do these inspections or weeding out other factories, because honestly, that was just not something they discussed with the buying team. And I only knew about this because we had to make this huge pivot in terms of sourcing in general buying design. We were not involved with anything remotely related to actual manufacturing at ModCloth. My boss went to China to visit some factories that were making the Modcloth in house brand clothing. And when she returned, she told me that one of the factory owners had seemed kind of like shady, saying weird stuff about how they made the factory a lot safer and cleaner just because she was visiting. The whole scene had given her a really weird feeling. So she made the decision that she would stop working with them. And that was great. Of course, all brands should do things like that. But our Modcloth in house brand was only a small percentage of what we bought and sold. Every Day. Like, what about everyone and everything else? Modcloth and Nasty Gal both bought a lot of fast fashion clothing that was made in la, which implied better working conditions. How many times over the past almost six years of making clothes horse has someone showed up in the comments to be like, well, everything would be better if we just made things here in the US And I'm like, oh, are you, you poor dear thing? You're just so wrong. Because one, it turns out terrible people live everywhere, and two, exploitation. It knows no borders, okay? And the working conditions in LA are not better. They might be better now thanks to legislation, but back then, certainly not. And through the bathroom window at ModCloth, I could see women in the building across the street sewing all day without air conditioning. I asked a friend who worked in production at another brand if garment workers in LA had good working conditions. Because once again, I too had bought the hype that if it was being made in the US it must be better. Oh, man. I'm gonna just tell you right now, beyond even the, like, ethical aspect of it. I mean, I want to remind you that Fashion Nova made a lot of clothing in LA for a long time until they got caught engaging in just, like, egregious wage theft and worker exploitation. But I, as a buyer at Modcloth and at Nasty Gal, bought some incredibly low quality Made in LA product. In fact, I would just say that that product was often even lower quality because to even get close to paying a minimum wage in the United States and keep cost slow, it meant that we had to really, really compromise the quality of the fabric, the trims, everything else. In fact, making fast fashion in the us which I'm sure is still happening, it's kind of the worst fast fashion of all from a quality perspective. But anyway, I asked my friend who was working in production another brand. I was like, how is. How is it? Like, I know the quality isn't good because of all the pricing issues, but, like, what about the working conditions? And she said, I don't know. They don't let us see the factory floor. I've never been to any of these factories, even though they're across town. And with the pricing we demand from them, it's hard to imagine that anyone is being paid well. So I knew little bits and pieces here. But by the time I set out to figure out who was making the feminist brand's clothes, I realized I just didn't know what to believe. It always felt like the actual production of clothing was a secret from everyone, even those of us who were responsible for Managing it all. And sure, I could trust my employers to care about garment workers, but with the way I'd seen retail and corporate employees being treated over the years, why would I trust them? I reached out to the vendor who was making most of our clothes to see if they were doing factory inspections or had any certifications, proof of working conditions, et cetera. And she said, we have satisfied Nordstrom's code of conduct for manufacturing, so we are fine. No child labor or anything. And she reassured me that Nordstrom's code was the gold standard and that we didn't have to worry. She sent me a copy of it, and, well, on the surface, it seemed fine until you realized that it was really just basically getting vendors to say, sure, we don't use child labor or forced labor and our factories are safe. They could say that, but there wasn't any actual documentation required. In the event of another Rana Plaza disaster, Nordstrom could just push the blame onto the vendor for lying. And it's interesting, as I was reading this vendor agreement, because in my time at the feminist brand, which was always very understaffed, another job I had taken on was that I wrote a lot of contracts, like, for partnerships and vendors and all kinds of things, which I am not a lawyer, but I would get these templates and then, like, you know, do a ton of research to figure out how to. How to write them properly and legally. And sometimes I'm like, man, I should have gone to law school. When I think about how many contracts I wrote at that time and have since. I've actually written contracts at so many other jobs since then. But working on those contracts and learning about how to write agreements that protected people via plausible deniability, that made it really easy to see. To see through the Nordstrom code of conduct, their vendor agreement, to see that it was written to be like, okay, well, we'll take your word for it. But just so you know, if you get caught, you're going to take on all the liability, right? So if there are lawsuits or anything, it's the vendor taking it on, not Nordstrom. And so it's just really sort of like, I don't know, a smokescreen for it all. And wasn't really intended to, like, protect people. I mean, I'm sure someone thought that when they were working on it for sure, but it was really just intended to protect Nordstrom, not workers anywhere. Not even Nordstrom workers, really. So anyway, I read that. I'm like, okay, I don't know here. So next I reached out to the T shirt Wholesaler to ask about where the blanks we were using were being made. I mean, we're talking thousands and thousands of feminist T shirts printed on these blanks. Like, surely we could get some good information there. So I called the wholesaler and the woman I talked to said, well, some of them are from Honduras and some are from downtown la, and we do a little bit in Bangladesh and Vietnam too. And I was like, okay, that doesn't really help me. Were there any factory inspections? Do you have any certifications? And she was like, we don't use child labor before shooing me off the phone. And okay, well, that's not much of an answer either. And I'm sitting there in full on 24. 7 people pleaser anxiety mode, thinking, what am I going to tell my boss about this? Because, yes, she has been also sort of like closing her eyes to all of this for years too, running this brand. But she surely wants me to come up with a good answer to give customers that will make them happy, but also be based in reality. I'm expecting when I sit down to talk to her about this that she's gonna yell at me or humiliate me, make me feel like a fucking idiot. But actually, she was surprisingly chill about it. Like, she kind of already knew. And she told me that I should just put together a response that mentioned that our vendors had been audited by bigger companies with more resources and that they didn't use child labor, and that I should really lean into the fact that our teas were made in town. They were really just printed in town. But okay, I didn't push her on that because I was scared. I didn't, like, once again, I didn't want to get humiliated. I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want to become her next target for bullying, and I just wanted to make it through another day at work. But it was just another thing that ate away at me alongside, you know, not having health insurance and watching other people get humiliated regularly and tiptoeing around the CEO's moods and sitting in meetings and hearing the most fucked up shit being said by people who were supposedly feminists. And yet it all added up to me, right? If this company didn't care about us, the people they saw every day in the office and stores, they certainly didn't care about the faceless people half a world away that made the stuff we were selling. A few years later, I would finally have the time and space to work, really dig in to who really made our clothes, because you gotta dig for that information. I would learn about the exploitation and the abuse, the unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, the casual cruelty of it all. But I still had to face one more fast fashion job before I got there. Let's 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. Designer and fashion professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills of making, mending and altering their own 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 a set of basic block patterns that capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block or sloper patterns as a foundation for 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. Ruby also provides professional design and pattern 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 clotheshors 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 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 Republica Unicornia Yarns Handmade yarn and notions for the color obsessed Made with love and some swearing in 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. cute little ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl and home items in a wide range styles and price points. If it's ethical and legal, we try to find a home for it. Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram at cutelittleruin. Deco Denim is a startup based out of San Francisco and it sells clothing and accessories that 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? Was this garment made ethically? Is this fabric made of plastic? Can this garment be upcycled and if not, can it be recycled? 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. Part 4 At one point, Dustin and I fantasized about moving to Pahrump, Nevada. I finally left the Feminist company in early summer of 2018, and it's funny how that sentence makes it sound like it was this really easy break. But it was not. After months and months and months of holding it all inside, the dam of emotions broke loose. One morning while Dustin was driving me to work, we were sitting in our very cute cherry red 1980s Volvo wagon parked just outside the Feminist brand's office when I just started sobbing. I can't do this anymore. It makes me wish I was dead. I dream about being dead so I don't have to work here anymore. I remember Dustin being surprised, but maybe he was just shocked that this was happening at 8.50am I will say that there's no way anyone who had spent any time with me in the last year couldn't tell that someone something was off about me. But also, for most of the time I had been working at the Feminist brand, Dustin and I had been kind of living sort of like opposite life schedules because I worked all day at the Feminist brand and he worked at night doing live sound at shows. And so most nights I didn't actually see Dustin. The only time I would see him was when he drove me to work in the morning. And I wasn't gonna squander that little bit of time that we had together by telling him how horrible work was. And so I was just keeping it to myself. But what was also happening is that the anxiety, the misery of it all, the fact that I felt like I had to keep this a secret from everyone, meant that I had just completely isolated myself from all of my friends. And all I really did was work. And I never wanted to talk about it with anyone. Yet I still think most people could probably tell that something was a little weird about me when I met with my boss, the CEO, to tell her that I wanted to come up with a plan together to transition me out of the business. Of course, I presented this so diplomatically, so easygoingly, because I am a people pleaser and I do not want to get yelled at. She just smirked and she said, oh, good, because I wanted to fire you anyway. That's cool. Thanks. All right. You would think that things would have gotten less stressful when I gave my notice, but it didn't, Partially because I spent months trying to fix a disastrous fundraiser product campaign based on Melania Trump's I really don't care, do you? Jacket. And I don't want to reiterate it all here. You'll have to listen to the installment of the I'm with the Brand series about cause marketing to hear the full story of that fundraiser. But also, things were difficult because my replacement was, strangely enough, coming from Victoria's Secret, and she didn't know anything about spreadsheets or E commerce or kind of anything. She also wanted to style everything with a wedge, which was just not the brand. I spent months trying to get her up to speed while also setting my team up to be okay without me. And I felt like I was betraying them by leaving because I knew I was not leaving them in a good place. You know, who would be there to protect them from the CEO's wrath? Because I knew it was not going to be my replacement. And at the same time, I felt giddy about the prospect of never again having to sit at that shitty plywood table that gave me splinters that I had to share with my team as a desk. I was so stoked to never have to sit there again. And so I threw a retirement party to celebrate my departure, complete with snacks and artisanal jello shots and punch and kiddie pools. It was really just such a great day. But the Fear was there. After all, the only fashion jobs in Portland were with Nike and Adidas, and I knew I didn't want to do either of those. But I also had learned from my experiences after Nasty Gal went bankrupt and before I started working at the feminist brand that no one outside of fashion would hire me. And so I was just like, stuck. So stuck in this career that I wasn't even sure that I wanted anymore, even though I was really good at it. I did meet with a Nike recruiter, but I felt the mood sour instantly when I asked, is it a good work culture for women and non binary people? I already knew the answer anyway, but she got off the phone with me pretty fast and I never heard from her again. I decided I was finally going to work for myself. And I started working with small businesses around town, using what I had learned in my career in fast fashion to help them. And pretty fast I was working full time. And in some ways, it felt like I was finally living the life I wanted. I named my hours, I worked on interesting things. I had the time to exercise and see friends and garden and read and, and work on other projects. And for example, I was writing a business plan to open my own store that would carry cute, unique gifts inspired by all the kawaii gift shops in Japan. It was going to be called Dream Day. And so at this point, there were like, a lot of reasons to be excited and optimistic. Like, I actually felt pretty good, but it still felt financially unstable. Dustin had just started to build a career as a UX designer after years of being a professional sound guy and touring musician. And he was in the early stages, which meant he didn't make very much money. And we were dealing with intense medical bills, and my kid would be starting college in a few years. And I felt so scared. Like I was making it work for now. But then, and even now, I still live in constant fear of losing it all. I mean, my entire adult life, I've had recurring nightmares about logging into my bank account and there's $0 in there. And that is because I have literally experienced that firsthand. So the money anxiety, it never goes away once you have it. When Urban Outfitters came knocking with a new rental brand that they were launching, I was intrigued. The idea of working on something that could actually be sustainable was really appealing. And the recruiter told me that they were ready to move fast, which was kind of inconvenient because I was going to Japan in less than a week. With Dustin, it was like part vacation and part research for Dream Day I was leaving Tuesday morning from Portland for this trip. Well, the recruiter asked if I could fly out to Philadelphia Sunday night, interview all day Monday, and then fly home Monday night. I agreed to it. Well, because I felt like partially I did not have a choice in the matter, but also because I was really curious about this job. Like, I just wanted to know and then figure it out and move on or move forward with that. Like, just know right away. The sustainability thing was actually really top of mind for me. After spending months working with some really great sustainable, ethical businesses in Portland, I was. I was actually pretty excited about what they had to say. The trip to Philadelphia was less than 24 hours. I interviewed with at least half a dozen people, and it was okay for the most part. I ate lunch alone in the big urban cafeteria, feeling that loneliness from a decade ago all over again. And that made me feel a little weird. I mean, I guess I would just say, like, overall, like, I couldn't decide how I felt. On one hand, the idea was interesting. They would pay me some decent money. I could send my kid to college. On the other hand, this campus had always made me feel yucky and shitty. You know, five, six interviews in that day. I was kind of like, okay, maybe I am super into this job offer. Until my final interview of the day with the company's chief creative officer. It was so horrible. Her disdain and disgust for me was so apparent that I thought about just walking out and catching the bus to the airport. She couldn't even look directly at me. And her contempt for me for this new rental brand, it was almost physically painful. Like, I could feel my face burning, feeling shame for something I could not name. How could I work in an environment where people felt that kind of behavior was acceptable? I flew home with a churning stomach, and when Dustin asked me about the interview, I could only respond with, I don't know. The next day, as planned, we flew to Tokyo. And that trip started by taking a tiny plane out of Portland to Seattle. It was the kind of plane that doesn't have a jet bridge, so you just kind of walk across the tarmac and then up the stairs to board. And as we reached the top of those stairs, I turned to Dustin and I said, I'm not going to take that job if they offer it to me. I just have a bad feeling. And he responded, good. Don't do it. Who cares? And he was proud of me for making that decision because he knew how deep and intense my financial anxiety always was. I felt like this huge weight had been lifted off of me by just telling him that I wasn't going to take the job. And I kind of moved on with things. But we were in Japan for two weeks and every day I expected to wake up to an email from the Urban recruiter wanting to follow up on the interviews. After all, they had wanted to move fast and I was strangely excited to to say no. But two weeks later, no response. A month later, still nothing. And the money fears were creeping up again for no reason other than like Dylan was going to go to college in a few years. I was scared about how I was going to pay for that. And so I started interviewing for other jobs. All of them kind of boring and very fast fashiony. But I just like could not turn down a conversation with a recruiter. Maybe I just wanted the opportunity to say no to someone since Urban hadn't given me that chance. And then the Urban recruiter called to ask me if I was still interested, but the job would be different a little. Rather than being the head of buying, which is what I'd been interviewing for, I would be the senior buyer. That was a demotion in terms of title. I was trying not to get my ego wrapped up in it. But they were willing to pay me what I had been making as the director of merchandising at the feminist brand. So if I could handle that, if I stuck it out, I could pay for my kids college. We would have decent health insurance, There would be some sense of security. Now I know some of you by now are like, why? Why would Amanda even consider going back to a company that has a track record of being shitty? Why would that even be a possibility? And I have received messages from some of you who were a little confused about why I was worrying so much about sending my kid to college. And I just want to clarify that for all of you right now that I obviously had to pay my own way through school. It was really, really hard. Things were hard all the time. And I just happened to find myself as an adult surrounded by people who came from, you know, more financial stability, more financial privilege than I could even dream of at that point. And so their parents had paid for their education and not only did they get to focus more on school in theory, rather than like cobbling together a bunch of part time jobs to pay their tuition, they also were set up for success financially at a much younger age. So they were able to explore their creativity and their interests and their passions and travel and do things that were a little bit more financially risky because they didn't have the student loan debt hanging over their heads, and they got to buy houses in their 30s, which I still don't own a house, everything just kind of fell into place for them in a much simpler way. And yeah, everybody. Everybody should have that opportunity, regardless of where they come from or who their parents are. But unfortunately, I don't live in a country where that is the case. And so one of the gifts I knew I could give my kid was not having to worry about that. A gift of maybe an easier, better adult life. And so it was really important to me that I could figure out how to pay for Dylan's college and anything else that Dylan needed to just be happy. You know, all. You hear people say this all the time. Like, I wanted to give my kids all the things I never had. That's a very real feeling. And even when it feels impossible to give them those things, which, by the way, those things, that doesn't always mean, like, material possessions, you know, it means love and confidence and just things being less stressful. That's what I wanted for Dylan. And I knew the only way that that was going to happen was if I just kept working. Sometimes you love someone so much that you will put yourself back into bad situations that you knew aren't good for you because you know it will be so good for them. And that's kind of where I was as I was thinking about whether or not I should accept this job that I definitely did not want, that I was incredibly overqualified for. And that would mean moving back to Philadelphia, a place I really did not want to live. I said yes to a job I did not want. And from day one, I knew I had made a mistake. The vibes on that campus were worse than ever. I felt my eating disorder coming back at rapid velocity like. Like 48 hours in, I was back in my cycle of really unhealthy behavior. And the headaches and stomach aches returned and didn't go away. Here I was once again feeling like such an outsider, feeling super lonely. I witnessed egregious and definitely illegal instances of bullying and harassment. People said the most fat, phobic and classist shit, and no one pushed back. There's nothing like seeing billionaire Nepo babies make fun of poor people on slack, let me tell you. Or hearing a stylist say that it's impossible to make anything look cute on a size 10 model. My own boss told me that I would be more successful in my career if I stopped caring about the people who worked for and with me. And I Think if someone had said that to me five, ten years before that, I. I would have felt guilty or ashamed for having empathy for others. Because let's be honest, in companies like this, in an industry like this, empathy is considered a flaw, a weakness. But somehow, hearing this from my boss, hearing that I should care less about the people around me in order to succeed, it made me feel like I had to be louder and more outspoken about how others were being treated. And it meant that I had to show up for others twice as hard. I knew I wasn't going to fit in here. I mean, one of my direct reports were a Cartier watch to work and my boss couldn't understand why I didn't fly first class every time I traveled. So why not at least know that maybe I wasn't going to fit in, but at least I was being the best person I could be. And that chief creative officer from the horrible interview. I was in so many meetings with her, and she not only refused to acknowledge me, she would stare through me as if I weren't there when I was speaking or presenting. As far as why she hated me so much, I can only assume it was because of how I looked, because it certainly wasn't related to my talent or my experience. And once again, if I had had to deal with her five, 10 years earlier, I would have felt that I was the problem. But suddenly it was dawning on me that I was not in fact, the problem. And that company was super fucking lucky to have someone as smart and talented as me there to make decisions and teach others. Something was breaking through in my brain. It was a little seed sprouting and poking through the earth. And it was telling me that I could and would do better than this, that I didn't belong there because I was too smart and too caring. And that was just fine. And clothing rental, well, it wasn't as sustainable as I had hoped. If you want to know all of the reasons why, you have to listen to the Rental Sewed episode of the podcast. I put it out a few years ago. I'll share it in the show notes. But needless to say, it's just not sustainable or ethical to rent out fast fashion clothes that can't survive being worn over and over again. And of course, there was no discussion of the working conditions in the factory where these clothes were made, much less the impact of propping up a fast fashion system via rental. Which, surprise, surprise, when a fast fashion conglomerate opens a rental brand, it's not sustainable. But also, fast fashion had gotten really fast Being back on that campus after years working for other companies made me see with clarity just how fast and fucked up the industry had become. Everyone was making super cheap clothing super fast. I was so shocked by how little we were paying for everything. How could the company be paying less to make clothing then than it had been 10 years ago? It just made no sense to me. And while we had once planned our buys three to six months in advance, we were encouraged to place orders one month or less before delivery. Everything was shipping via airplane. Entire containers of clothing were being burned. And every friend I had out there from my previous job was saying the same things. Too many new products to design and buy and not enough time and people to do that. Well, it was peak fast fashion. Well, until Shein. Shein wasn't quite what it is yet. It was really fast and cheap though. Like, what I saw very clearly coming back to the place where I had started my career was like, holy shit, everything is so fast, so cheap and such low quality. And then another thing I had been observing passively for close to two decades really came into focus. None of the executives at any of these companies, except once again, ModCloth, actually had any respect for their customers. The executives thought that the customers were stupid, desperate, and just didn't know well enough to have standards. So we could shovel anything their way and they would scoop it up. It didn't have to fit, it didn't have to last long, and most importantly, it didn't have to be something that these executives would ever actually wear themselves. And I saw this early in my career at Urban Outfitters, where nobody in management or above would dare to actually ew wear clothes from Urban Outfitters. They were shimmying around the office in $1,000 Danish sweaters and Celine shoes that cost more than my rent, visibly cringing at the acrylic poly blend sweaters and literal plastic shoes that we were making and selling. I'll tell you, one of the reasons that people came to really trust my judgment at Urban and come and show me products they were working get my buy in on is because I was one of the few people who worked there that actually worked close from there. And so I truly was the customer and could like explain why I would or would not buy something. It made it really easy for me to understand the customer's psychology. At nasty gal, the CEO would wear like $10,000 worth of clothes to the office every day while telling us that the customer would surely love vegan suede if we told her to. She just wanted to take direction from us know she didn't know better. And if we photographed the clothes just right, she would think they were a lot nicer than they really were. The CEO of the feminist brand didn't think the actual product or how it fit mattered. The marketing was the most important thing. If we could have the right marketing and the right hype, we could sell our customers anything. Once again, there was this idea that customers don't actually know anything and they are just waiting for us to tell or trick them into buying something. Anything, it doesn't matter. At the rental brand, my boss would see and touch the lower price point fast fashion. We were renting out to customers and scoff. Ew, cheapo creepo. But then admit that the customers were kind of too stupid to know just how shitty these clothes were. And once again, it was all about the styling. Let's create the illusion that these clothes are nice and the customers will never figure it out. You know that weird stomach ache you get after eating too much candy? I was having that nonstop, just this unpleasant, constant discomfort with no obvious source. And I reached a point where I needed Dustin to drive me to work every day just so he could hold my hand and reassure me until the last moment when I had to get out of the car and scan my key card into the building. I had to keep working at this job so my kid could go to college, so we could afford food and rent. Survival meant doing this for as long as possible, even if everything, the survival of my family meant being okay with how fucked up everything was around me. Well, 2020 rolled around. Have you heard of this year? And on a family vacation to the desert over New Year's, Dustin and I had a serious talk while Dylan was in the shower. I wanted to leave the rental job. I would apply and interview for other jobs, but I really felt that the best way forward was to save as much money as we could over the next year. And then I could leave at the end of the year. We could use that money to move out of the city, maybe to Lancaster county. And then I could figure out what I wanted to do next. We were both actually pretty excited about the future. And yes, we did talk about possibly moving to Pahrump, Nevada, and starting a traveling vintage store. We were just, like, ready to have a new adventure. And then it was March. I don't need to tell you what happened in the world that year, but in case you've forgotten, it was the COVID pandemic. And one day we were told to pack up all of our stuff because the company was going to try to work from home for one day. It would be a test in case the pandemic situation worsened. It was a Thursday. I never worked in that office again. And I'm so glad I took my plants home with me because they wouldn't have made it. But it was such a. A wild week for everyone. You know, that Monday there was a lot of conversation going on about this illness that was going around and making people really, really sick. And it was very scary. And I had to go to New York with the associate buyer for bottoms, and we had to go to vendor appointments. And that whole day we were so freaked out and washing our hands, like, over and over again and just being, like, so anxious, like, on the train home. I was sort of, like, breathing through my scarf because I was afraid. And then the other thing that was supposed to happen that week is I was supposed to actually fly to LA on Thursday for LA market. And on Tuesday, I came into work and I was like, I'm feeling a little nervous about this. To my boss, I was like, this whole, like, coronavirus thing is really picking up momentum, and I'm afraid. And she was like, oh, you're being overdramatic. You're going to LA on Thursday. And then on Wednesday, LA declared a state of emergency. And then finally, my boss let me cancel the trip. It wasn't even going to just be me. I was going to be leading most of the team to la. And I was just really scared of them getting sick, you know, Like, I. I wanted to look out for them. So canceling that trip was great. And then Thursday, it was like, okay, we're just going to go home and try working at home. And like I said, we never went back again. A week later, we were told to cancel everything we had on order, whether it was actively being sewn right then or already at the port here in the United States ready to head for the warehouse. And there was no negotiation on this. We just had to cancel it. So I had to pull my team together via Zoom and divvy up the list of people to reach out to. And basically they would reach out to people first. And things were difficult. Then it would get bubbled up to me, and it was a really miserable time. Vendors and sales reps cried as I spoke with them. They lost their jobs and their businesses. I knew the effects of these cancellations would ripple all the way to the bottom of the supply chain, meaning factory workers would not be paid and might even lose their jobs. It was sickening. It felt so Wrong to me, because this company had the money to pay for these orders, but refused to do so. And when I brought this up with my boss, she was sort of like, you can't let yourself care about these things. And so I would have to go to a meeting with my team and, you know, give them a pat on the back for canceling these orders and try to help them work with people who were pushing back. And I hated it so much. I was like, this is the first time in my career where I have felt like I have had to really overtly be an active part of ruining people's lives all in the name of shareholders. And I just couldn't believe that this was happening. And I don't know why I couldn't believe it was happening, because, come on, I had worked for this company as a part time sales associate. I had seen them fire a guy because he let someone use his employee discount on a pair of jeans. And they took that guy to court and sued him for $10,000 and won, ruining his financial life for like a decade, you know, all over a $30 discount on a pair of jeans. I had seen how they would squeeze every last bit of work out of the salaried employees and how they thought we were all criminals and thieves and how little they thought of us. I mean, this was the same company that had, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which was causing epic amounts of uncertainty for everyone everywhere, had said, go back to your desks and call every single vendor and get a 15% discount on what's on order. And it's not even like it's up for negotiation. It's either they give you the discount or the order is canceled. And what that means for all of these vendors, who in most cases, who had probably already paid for the materials, perhaps even the production was already done, is that these people were giving up their economic stability in favor of shareholders of this big conglomerate and the billionaire at the top of it all. This was the company that always bragged about having an extra hundred million dollars in the bank at all times, telling us to just rip any sort of economic stability out from underneath all of these people all around the world. And this was this moment for me where I realized my entire career, my entire adult life basically at this point had been based on these really fucked up power dynamics where my employer always had all the power and not just over me, everybody else who worked alongside me, everybody who worked in every store and every warehouse and everyone overseas who had been making this stuff in their Factories. It was always, always this illusion that we had some freedom, some buy in, in any decisions that ever got made. But the fact of the matter was we had nothing and we were nothing. And we were just, you know, columns in a spreadsheet that could be deleted in an instant. And it was this moment where I realized, I don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. After years of being trapped in this industry and not having anywhere else to go, where I realized I just can't be a part of this anymore. Or at very least I can't be quiet about it. I have to say that this is wrong. And I have to say that we have to figure out another solution. And I have to say it and it a lot. By now you probably know that no matter what I said or what I thought, every brand and retailer around the world canceled all of their orders that March of 2020. And I can't even begin to imagine what the ripple effects were globally. The human impact of it all. To have people, people's money, jobs, livelihoods ripped away from them overnight, we'll never know. Did people lose their homes? Did people go hungry? Did people die? When people talk about fashion being sort of frivolous or not a political thing, I always come back to moments like this where, yeah, it was actually a life and death situation. Yes, fashion is political. All of this stuff is political. Anyway, the other thing I'll just add here is not only did everybody cancel their orders, some, some retailers were pressured into reinstating those orders or at least paying for them. But urban, meaning free people, anthropology, Urban Outfitters, and Nuuly, my employer, they never did. They never responded to any pressure publicly and they never spoke about it again. And I will tell you that that didn't seem to matter to anyone because I still get messages from people all the time telling me how they just can't stop shopping at Free People or Anthropologie because there's nowhere else for them to shop. Nowhere is as cool or great or fits who they are. And, and you know, I give people a lot of grace when it comes to fast fashion because I understand, I understand how hard it can be to avoid. I understand that there are a lot of accessibility issues here. I understand that we're addicted to it, right? When people tell me that they just can't quit anthropology or Free People, that, like, that's the thing, that's what's holding them back from quitting fast fashion is how much they love these brands, it does make me angry because I think, wow, These are companies that, like, really don't care about humans at all, as demonstrated, for example, by what happened in 2020. And these are companies that steal from artists and designers and small brands all the time. And it's well documented. And these are brands that fundamentally do not respect you as a customer. Customer. And yet you all just keep showing up day after day to give them more of your money when you and the rest of the world all deserve so much better. Just two weeks after we'd been sent home to try working at home for a day, and just one week after we had canceled everything on order, I was furloughed. I felt a complex set of emotions. On one hand, we were about to experience a lot of financial trouble. Like, I wouldn't receive my first unemployment benefits for months. It was terrifying. On the other hand, I didn't have to go to this horrible place again, and I didn't have to be complicit in general shittiness anymore. Like, I could live with myself. But also, it was hurtful. I was the first person hired for the buying team, and I had hired and trained everyone else who worked there. I had picked out literally everything that was on the site when it launched, and I was the only person furloughed from the buying team, and I knew that that was not a coincidence. For the next few months, I proceeded to, I don't know, possibly lose my mind a little bit. There were days where I just laid on the couch. There were days that I got up and felt really energized and did a bunch of cooking. There were days that I just played the Sims all day. There were days that Dylan and I just binged watched old episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. Every day I woke up thinking the same thing. This is only temporary. I'm gonna have to go back to that job. And there was weird comfort in that, but also, I don't know, dread, because I would have my. So funny. My team was having these, like, virtual happy hours once a week on Zoom, which I know lots of companies were doing, and I still had to go to them, even though, you know, I wasn't paid by the company then. I was being paid, well, in theory, by my unemployment insurance, which still hadn't rolled in. And I would still have to go to these events with my team online and see from outside, wow, these people are so dysfunctional. There's so much toxic behavior here. How could I ever go back to working with these people every day? And yet, at the same time, I'd have to play this game like Be so positive and great. Like, no, I totally have not been laying in bed all day crying. Everything is great. I'm having the time of my life. Because if I didn't show up and be super duper positive, they were never going to bring me back. Even though I really didn't want to go back. Because here was the thing, the fear was there, right? I had reached that point in my career where there are a lot less jobs at my level. And I knew with what was happening in the world, there were no jobs for me and there wouldn't be for quite some time, if ever. And so should I not be brought back to work, to this job that I didn't like? It was going to be the end of my career and I just couldn't imagine what would ever happen next. So the fear, the fear kept me going to these virtual happy hours and being the ultimate people pleaser all the time so that I could get to go back to this job that had clearly already disposed of me. Well, this went on for a few months and then in the second half of July, I was let go permanently via phone by my boss. It was a very awkward conversation where she thanked me for being so mature and cool about things, even though I was just like, I'm so fucked. That was just really repeating over and over again in my mind, I am so fucked. I am so fucked. They had given me two weeks of severance and my insurance was going to be cut off in like four days or something. It wasn't enough to like even go cram in a bunch of doctor's appointments. And that's really scary when you're in the midst of a global pandemic. So I got let go and a couple days later my phone is blowing up one morning with texts from a bunch of different friends all around the country who had seen the headlines that Urban had declared a surprise and exceptional profit for for that previous quarter. And it was a surprise to everyone. Because how could a company, a retail company, have surprise profits, profits at all, when all the stores were closed, when people were dying and their bodies were going into refrigerated trailers all around the country? How could a company, any company, experience a windfall during that time period? That profit was actually unpaid wages of retail workers, warehouse workers, corporate workers and garment workers around the globe. That profit was money that was stolen from us all in the name of paying shareholders. That profit was derived from the pain and fear of so many people. I was given a specific time to go back to the office to empty out my desk. And there was actually very little there because on our last day before the world shut down, I actually had had this like, inexplicable feeling that I was never coming back. As a loss prevention officer watched me pack up my pens and folders and papers. I looked around at all of the empty desks, just dead plants everywhere, random items of clothing tossed on a big table, the smell of dust. I was sad because it felt like a rejection, like when the person you've been wanting to break up with breaks up with you first. I felt angry for being let go with two weeks of severance after working for that company for more than 12 years, cumulatively. But I also felt excited because maybe now I could be free. And this is when Clotheshorse began. I was finally free to talk about what I had experienced and I had the time to learn more about the impact of fast fashion. I finally had had space to think about it all and see the big picture. And almost six years later, I'm still doing this work that is Clothes Horse. I have been learning all of this alongside you this whole time. Some days are hard and some days are exciting and rewarding. And some days I get death threats from vegans. And other days one of you reaches out to say that something I said or did made you think differently and change what you are doing. That said, the work of Clotheshorse is primarily unpaid. And yes, that does make me feel like a gigantic loser sometimes. Especially six years into this, seeing other podcasts put out one episode a month and bring in tens of thousands of dollars in Patreon support and ads. Yeah, it makes me jealous. It makes me feel like I'm bad at things. And yes, yes, I cry about this sometimes. I think about quitting all the time, but I just keep coming back to it. And when I think about this work and why it's so important to me, it's because I realize that this whole system exists around us, that depends on us, right? And it's not just fast fashion. It's like this whole fast everything world that doesn't exist without us because we do the work that fuels these companies and then we turn back around and fuel it with our wallets. I think all the time about how this whole system that can't exist without us thinks of all of us as disposable as columns on a spreadsheet. That whether we're the workers or the customers, the system does not respect us. It doesn't want to give us good things, whether we're paying for them or working for them. And And I think about how all of these companies that I worked for fundamentally disrespected their customers and thought they were kind of stupid and would settle for anything, right? That they could give them anything and they would keep showing up to buy it. Just like they thought that all of us who worked there were just lucky to be there and would put up with anything they threw our way. And if we stopped putting up with it, we would be easily replaced by the next person in line. And I think about all that all the time. And that is when I start to feel like this work is important and I can't stop doing it. Because we need everyone to realize that we have the power in this system when we work all together against it. And it's time for everyone to know that this system right now doesn't have our best interests at heart, doesn't care about our interest, best interests. Why are we continuing to participate in it? Right? And so maybe someday this work won't be important anymore because everyone will have figured it out and things will be changing. And when that happens, I won't need to do this work anymore, and maybe I'll start a podcast about music or something. But until then, it feels like important work, even though it is hard work. Okay, well, now, you know, I don't make any money off of clothes, so how do I still exist financially? Well, you know, for the first year, ish. After I was let go, it probably wasn't a full year. I collected unemployment. I interviewed for, like, a gazillion jobs and was rejected by all of them. And I just wasn't sure what I was going to do next. And. And one of my friends, my friend Janelle, who owns a brand called Allroads, reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to do some business consulting with her because she just needed help with inventory planning and marketing strategy and product stuff. And I was like, sure. And so I started working with her, and then she boasted about me in a Facebook group for shopkeepers. And that's how I got my second client, Jenny of Jenny Lemons. And I have been working with both of them since 2021. But, you know, I picked up more and more clients. Things were going pretty well, but I got offered a job in Austin, Texas. And I knew, I don't know, I felt like Dustin wanted to do something different, and Dylan was about to start college, and I wanted to be able to pay that tuition without worrying, so I took the job in Austin. But I kept seeing a few of my clients while I was there because I just didn't know how this was going to work out. Something had fundamentally changed within me since 2020. And what had changed was that I no longer had tolerance for bad behavior from corporations. You know, I wasn't going to let a CEO walk all over me and treat people poorly and exploit people and just. I just couldn't be a part of it, and I wouldn't be a part of it. And so I worked at the job for, I don't know, like, a year and a half. And I can go on for hours about everything that was wrong about it. But I'll just say no one gets to scream at me, okay? No one gets to scream at me and humiliate me, and they also don't get to scream and humiliate anyone on my team. And so I ended up quitting. And I would say that I was lucky. But I also think, you know, my work speaks for itself. And when people heard I was open to taking clients again, my calendar filled up pretty fast. And so for the last two and a half years, I have been working full time for myself, which, I don't know. I get emails from people all the time. Perhaps you who are listening right now are one of them, with people asking me, like, well, sometimes you all ask me, like, will it work if you quit your job and start a podcast? And I'm like, no, I'm sorry, but no, that won't work. But other times you're asking me, like, what's an exit ramp from fashion? And I don't really have any advice for you because for me, it took me a long time to leave, and I think it was just a combination of. Of me having a lot of experience, of me knowing people who knew that I had a lot of experience, and then me being able to do good work for people who recommended me then to other people. And I don't think it could have happened five years previous. It certainly couldn't have happened 10 years before that. And I think what it really was, it was the right time, and me finally having the confidence to recognize that I wasn't lucky to be here. People were lucky to work with me. And that is such a big change for me as a person who felt like I never got to have a say in anything. And now I can fire someone as my client if they yell at me. Imagine that. What a shift in my life. And I'll tell you, it took me a really long time to get here. So, yeah, I'm lucky enough to get to work every day as a consultant with a wide variety of small brands who are trying to do things a better way to prove that a better future is possible. I help them with product planning and financial stuff, data analysis, even marketing. And I take all of the skills that I learned working in fast fashion like strategy and finance, and help them make better decisions. I spend a lot of time doing spreadsheets and teaching strategic methods and playing therapist when things are hard. I actually feel like I'm part of something bigger of building a better future. Nothing is easy. This is challenging work and there's no paid time off or sick days. I keep my hourly rate far below market value so people can afford me, which means I have to work very long hours in order to pay Dylan's tuition and cover my healthcare, et cetera. And yes, I still have nightmares about logging into my checking account and finding $0. Some things never change. And yet I never even consider talking to a recruiter about a corporate job. I just don't want it. And yes, I worry all the time about what will happen next, but this is still a pretty happy ending. Although I actually think that I'm just at the beginning of what happens next and the ending is hopefully really far away. It was a long journey to get here, but I hope I get to keep doing this for a long time. Thanks for being here with me and thank you for listening to another episode of Closed Source Written, Researched, Edited, Hosted all the Things by me Amanda Lee McCarty if you liked what you heard, please leave a Rating A Review Subscribe Tell your friends all of these things that bring more people to close Horse. If you'd like to support my work financially, there are so many ways you can do that. There's Patreon, there's Ko Fi, there's the Apple Premium Subscription. There's the Merch Shop. All of these things you can find in the show notes and in my bio on any social media platform. And of course, thanks as always to my other half, Mr. Dustin Travis White for our music and audio support. And who knows, maybe someday we will move to Pahrump, Nevada. There will not be a new episode next week because it is Valentine's Day weekend and Dustin and I are actually going to a really cool contemporary art museum in Maryland. Remember, one of my goals this year is to see more art irl. And we're also probably gonna do some pretty cool thrifting and maybe eat some hot pots. So in two weeks, I'll be back. And we'll be getting back into the I'm with the Brand series and we're gonna be talking all about the psychology of pricing. All right, talk to you then. Sa.