Episode 33 Sophie Slater - Birdsong -Building a Human scale fashion brand
In this episode I’m in conversation with Sophie Slater founder of ethical fashion brand BirdSong.
In my opinion Sophie is building one of the most important fashion companies on the planet today. Birdsong is a total re-imagination of why a fashion brand exists and how it operates. She’s been working on this mission for several years since graduating from social change learning program Year Here. It's a super tough challenge, because to build a business that actually looks after the people in the supply chain, that designs the business model around them and that seeks to cause minimum impacts to the natural world is really hard and not normal practice by the way. Because most fashion products we consume today support a system that creates misery for many in the supply chain and accelerate the extraction of natural resources and the destruction and pollution of critical ecosystems. You know, so we look cool. Birdsong challenges this model and system on every front. We riff on the challenges of building a social enterprise in a category where investors demand scale and fast returns, where destruction and misery is hidden behind the shiny cheap items we crave. We talk about the learnings from building something for a world and system that doesn't yet exist, yet you know intuitively is emerging fast and wanting to happen. Sophie is an extraordinary human, activist, co-designer and social entrepreneur with a deep drive for fairness when it comes to gender and the most vulnerable in our society.
If you like what Birdsong are doing, please support them through their products and/or their Patreon - details below. These lockdown times are even tougher for small social businesses, let's make sure businesses like Birdsong become the new normal. We are what we wear.
We recorded this episode as the UK was preparing for the pandemic lockdown on 20th March, so we were both a little anxious as things were super uncertain and changing fast!
Enjoy