First and foremost, thanks so much for taking part in my interview series! Tell us a bit more about yourself and your background
My name is Ruth MacGilp, I live and work in beautiful Edinburgh, and I describe myself as an ethical fashion obsessive, because I eat, sleep and breathe everything related to the intersection of fashion and sustainability. As my day job, I'm a freelance copywriter and digital marketer, which combines my love of storytelling with the demand for strategies that work for businesses online, and I tend to work mainly with sustainable brands and indie publications. On the side, I am an ethical fashion blogger and I write and create on various platforms, purely to share my enduring love for second-hand style, shopping local, making clothes last longer, and fighting back against fast fashion. I also volunteer for Fashion Revolution so you can often find me helping out at community events.
What are your thoughts on sustainability and when did you first become aware of it?
Sustainability is a vague term that doesn't really mean anything at all, except the concept of protecting and preserving the environment for future generations. We've collectively put so much weight on this word and in business, we often see it as a destination rather than a journey, a label rather than a philosophy.
I think I was always aware of the need to change the status quo, having grown up in the early 2000's era of hyper-consumption and greed. But it took me a long time to get to the stage of feeling a sense of urgency about shifting the pendulum. For me, sustainability can no longer be an 'add-on', it's too late for that kind of luxury.
What are you specifically interested in?
Fashion is my first love. Fashion is joyful, creative, expressive, beautiful. It tells a story about who we are, how we live. If we think about the art, the collective and the self, rather than the profit-churning industry, I do think we can still hold on to hope. Since day one I've been transfixed by the fashion universe, despite its distance from my own reality, but the more I dug my heels into the industry side, the more cynical I got about the side effects of such excess and the bigger desire I had to be part of the solution rather than the problem.
Have you seen a noticeable difference in the way people approach spending now and which companies they choose to support?
We have a tendency in the sustainability space to live in a little self-affirming bubble, so I struggle to answer these kinds of questions with any sort of integrity. In my world, yes, people are becoming conscious consumers and even climate activists with a huge level of enthusiasm. Sustainable fashion as a whole has gained incredible momentum after many years of being seen as a hippy habit with no business case. But I also know that fast fashion profits are still rising at breakneck speed, and the sustainability movement has yet to reach the mainstream majority. I think this is why we need to put less focus on consumer action and more on business and government. Universal regulation takes the pressure off ordinary people who are simply trying to survive, and puts it on the brands who have been off the hook for too long.
Tell me about a recent challenge you faced while working on a sustainability project. How did you overcome it?
It is the age old battle of profit versus planet. Every fashion brand needs sales but a truly ethical one shies away from promoting overconsumption. The balance is being able to stay afloat in terms of sales without succumbing to fast fashion selling techniques like flash sales, bombarding subscribers with newsletters packed with offers, and constant seasonal product drops. For me, with slow fashion it's all about avoiding this language of urgency and desire and instead creating an authentic story around a product or service. You can encourage people to take their time on a buying decision and really get to know the brand - not only is this more sustainable but fosters greater loyalty too.
What would you say are your industry’s main downfalls and what are the obstacles to improving them?
Fashion cannot be sustainable if it's not size inclusive. Sustainable fashion’s fatal flaw is that its made for people who look like me, and we cannot expect people to engage with sustainable fashion if it refuses to cater to them. We cannot build a better fashion industry if vast swathes of the population aren’t given the tools to participate. Barriers that ethical fashion brands face are often cited as being financial - ie. no budget to make larger patterns with more fabric - but serious investment must be made here, and the benefits will be reaped once a new customer base is reached too. Fast fashion has stepped up it’s game - it’s time for ethical fashion to step up too.
If you were to choose the first and most achievable changes for any small business, what would they be?
Brands need to communicate their ethical values in a really salient way to attract a conscious consumer, just like with any other type of social media marketing - by creating a community. The difference with sustainability is the need for authenticity. Greenwashing is an epidemic, and the answer is total supply chain transparency. A brand cannot call themselves 'sustainable', 'ethical', 'natural' or 'green' without providing indisputable evidence. Consumers deserve to know more than the corporate PR messaging - they need to know who made their clothes, where, with what materials, and under what kind of conditions. The more you can tell your customers, and the more obvious and accessible that information can be, the better.
What kind of impact do you think small & medium businesses can have on the shift to a more sustainable society?
Big brands, particularly in fashion, can never really be sustainable because of their scale. So small businesses are in the perfect position to make a difference. Keep it small, slow and sustainable. Use the power of your local community and focus on people and planet over growth and greed, always.
What do you think is the ‘elephant in the room’ with regards to sustainability in business? What do you think we should be speaking about more?
Fashion has been, and on some level continues to be, one of the slowest industries to 'catch on' to sustainability, years after other sectors such as food, beauty, travel and tech. With climate emergencies being declared all over the world, it has become clear that fashion and textiles have a huge part to play; they have a lot to answer for. The increased awareness of sustainable fashion has been led by decades of work by campaigners, activists, charities, independent designers and conscious consumers and finally brands are taking notice - but the elephant in the room is that sustainability is still seen as a box to tick or a cherry on top of an existing business model. What's really needed is a total system overhaul, a paradigm shift away from business as usual. It's a really inconvenient truth.
What are your predictions for consumer behaviour in 2020? Which trends are you expecting to emerge or continue to grow?
2020 is all about alternative business models. Rental, swapping, DIY, sharing and circular economy. I'm really excited to see the growth of these areas and hopefully the shrinkage of the traditional take-make-buy-dispose system.
Ruth MacGilp
Freelance Digital Marketer | Ethical Fashion Writer
Instagram: @ruthmacgilpblog
Twitter: @ruthmacgilpblog