California Apparel News

Executives from activewear brands Quiksilver, Volcom, Hurley and Nike recently held informal talks on gathering their collective clout to conserve the dwindling supply of organic cotton, said Erik Joule, Quiksilver’s senior vice president of merchandising and design. The surf and athletic apparel makers also talked about other ways to make their companies more eco-friendly. If the notion of business rivals collaborating on back-office operations sounds unusual, Joule would agree. In fact, he used a new word to describe the effort: “coop-ition.” The mix of the words of cooperation and competition may point to new ways of doing business, according to Joule.

Joule was one of a panel of six apparel executives on Sept. 27 at ecological homewares and remodeling store LivinGreen in Culver City, Calif. The panel spoke frankly about the challenges facing the new business of organic fashion. More than 100 people gathered at the event, organized by the Los Angeles–based Sustainable Business Council. Despite organic becoming a movement championed by Al Gore and magazines such as Vanity Fair, there are still many challenges to making it a mainstream business marked by integrity, according to the panel, which featured Joule; Barbara Kramer, co-founder of the Designers and Agents trade show; Howard Brown, co-founder of clothing line Stewart + Brown; Deborah Lindquist and Linda Loudermilk, both designers and chiefs of their self-named companies; and Violeta Villacorta, a senior designer for Patagonia.

The first hurdle for eco-business may have been overcome when the fashion community began taking the movement seriously, Brown said. “There was a stigma attached to organic design,” he said. “When we told people that we had an organic line, they would say there’s this mountain store down the street that sells Patagonia and Birkenstock. We don’t want any of that here. Now it’s like, ’We need an organic T-shirt line.’”

Now more companies are clamoring to debut organic clothing lines. Unfortunately, the supply of organic fabrics is limited. Only 2 percent of the world’s cotton supply is organic, according to data culled by market-research company The NPD Group. Another question that remains unanswered is whether or not enough retailers will support the industry. Brown said that the question might remain unanswered for a while. He reported that retailers complained that there were not enough organic clothing brands to sell. Kramer added that in the past year, she has noticed many more companies submitting organic clothing lines to exhibit at Designers and Agents. Despite the groundswell of attention lavished on environmental causes in the past year, Loudermilk said that spreading the word remains one of the main challenges for this nascent apparel category. “We need creativity in our marketing,” she said. “We don’t have people taking the risk, creating new fashion ideas and marketing.” —Andrew Asch