Linear Supply Chains - Linear Thinking.
It’s easy to wonder at the moment; where have all the designers gone? Where are the creative thinkers? We seem to have come out of the pandemic having lost some of our creative thinking, our ability to assess problems and find critically creative solutions. I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot recently (see my previous post about Redesigning Design Systems), and its a thought that keeps getting bigger as we look at the political landscapes both here and abroad.
Around the globe we’re seeing decades old infrastructure and support systems being slimmed down under guises such as ‘austerity’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘competition’. Until ultimately they crumble under a weight they can no longer support. At which point it’s all a bit too late and our leaders have to start looking around for a scape goat. If you’re reading this in the UK you’ll have a lot of reference points for that alone! But even if you’re not, I bet you have plenty of examples from leaders of your own country, or even businesses.
You may well be wondering what this all has to do with the production of apparel, but stay with me if you can. Today we have the most globalised supply chain ever; we have raw feedstocks made in India, which is then shipped to Sweden for processing before going to Italy to be spun in to yarns, then it goes to Sri Lanka to be finished before heading off to be knitted / woven, dyed, finished in Taiwan which is then sent to be made into garments in China. The miles clocked up by the garments in your hands before you’ve even worn them is likely to make a wanderlust traveller green with envy.
Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash
And while this all sounds very advanced (because somehow we equate globalisation with advancement) we’re still working within a supply chain structure that is more than 3000 years old. How the global textile industry operates is older than Christianity. And ironically, the women who spun yarns by hand back then earned more and had more status within their communities than they do now. Textiles was the first ever currency and through the development of a metal based currency, it lost its own value and, ultimately, so did the people who make it.
And yet demand for textiles is the highest it has ever been, which is not only a problem for a supply / demand based system, but it is also a huge problem for the amount of waste it creates which is being pushed onto a buckling council system who in turn pass it to waste contractors who will sell what they can to other countries, making double on an item of clothing by taking money from the council to dispose of it while selling it in another country and then washing their hands of it afterwards. It’s all very linear, and unsustainable.
This is where The Good Factory comes in, we’re not about this linear thinking, we assess the benefits and negatives from the feedstock stage through the entire creation of a new product, while reviewing the end of life process, making the whole system circular. But as a supplier we’re unique in this, and we really shouldn't be.
