Founder’s Letter: The Importance of Impact
Andrew Olah speaks with Bank & Vogue’s Steven Bethell
About a month and a half ago, I received an out-of-the-blue call by the owner of a company in Ottawa, Ontario. The gentleman’s name is Steven Bethell and his company is Bank & Vogue.
Steven is a pioneer in the secondhand clothing industry. What he does is both beautiful and commercial. He has a factory in India that sorts, upcycles and repurposes secondhand textiles and apparel. This factory also supports partnerships with brands looking to create “re-made” collections, using old garments and redeploying them — Steven has done projects for Coach and Converse. Bank and Vogue also has 20 stores in Europe selling their own line of selected repurposed clothes.
I had heard of companies taking old garments and making them new again and I had heard of small workshops that did that but this was the first time I’d encountered a company setting a 120-person production facility to do that.
For this month’s Founder’s Letter, I interviewed Steven about his company. I hope you like the podcast and, most of all, I hope that brands interested in recycling call Steven. You can listen to our conversation HERE.
I am obsessed with projects that have mercantile ambitions and, at the same time, have impact.
There are lots of little projects that attempt to re-use something and sell it. But for our industry, we need to have impact — which means numbers. Let’s hear the project and hear its impact.
Consider Ellen Macarthur’s Jean Redesign program, which arrived in 2019 with much optimism. While the intention of the program is worthy, the reality is that over the last five years, 1.5 million jeans have been sold using these principles. Over this same period, a conservative estimate would tally the total number of jeans sold at 20 billion. Put another way, 0.000075% of all jeans sold were made using the Redesign elements. Is that impact?
Another concern to me is pop bottle recycling. There are apparently 500 billion plastic pop bottles made per year or 1 million per minute. A tiny portion of that is recycled.
Yes, of course, it’s better to do something instead of nothing. But from an environmental point of view, doesn’t it make more sense to stop making things that don’t biodegrade? Does recycled polyester biodegrade? What happens to this fiber post consumer?
The answer is to make new fibers, support them and perhaps even legislate them — which we are certain will not happen in the United States in the near future. Maybe it will in the EU.
Let’s think about impact and let’s think big numbers. Let’s think like Steven does and sell and make big numbers and get on the impact track rather than the “small project” missions, noble as they might be.
P.S. The parties and self-congratulations for our 20 years of Kingpins and 10 years in Amsterdam are over. Thank you to Naveena – NDL and Sapphire Finishing Mills for the presents! I was totally caught off guard and will forever remember your thoughtfulness and kindness. I also want to thank Wink, our show producing partners. They, too, blessed me with a present and again I am so grateful. And thank you to photographer Peter Stichter, who was with us at our very first show in Amsterdam and presented Vivian and I each with a bound book of photos from the Amsterdam show over the years.
Kingpins, as I have repeatedly written, was not created as a business. There were no strategy meetings 20 years ago when anyone said “Oh, let’s do a trade show.” It just happened by accident and many people have found enjoyment and usefulness from it. In the end, making something that others like is more than I could ever imagine. Thank you, everyone.
