Can fashion help to
make the world a better place? UK-based brand Mayamiko certainly thinks so.
The company founded in 2015 by Paola Masperi does everything in its power
to make clothes in an ethical and environmentally-friendly manner. Always
produced in limited quantities, Mayamiko’s clothes are made from organic
cotton and traditional printed fabrics handpicked from a local market in
Malawi that’s just a stone’s throw away from the company’s solar-powered
workshop, where the vast majority of workers are women. They receive a fair
living wage, a nutritious meal every day and a pension scheme.
Looking to generate zero waste, Mayamiko makes sure all fabric scraps
are turned into something useful: those that are not used to make clothing
become scrunchies, jewelry or sanitary pads distributed to women and girls
in need. To reduce the environmental impact caused by shipping orders all
over the world, all of Mayamiko’s packaging is made from recyclable materials
and a tree is planted with every new purchase thanks to a partnership with
nonprofit organization One Tree Planted.
Speaking of partnerships, Mayamiko frequently joins forces with other
brands and organizations to expand its offering of sustainable, ethical
fashion. Silk handbags from Sri Lanka’s Booteek, a project supporting women
artisans who are mothers to disabled children, are available on Mayamiko’s
website, for example. The brand also teams up with Fiore all’Occhiello, an upcycling cooperative in Milan providing stable
employment for disenfranchised communities, refugees and asylum seekers.
FashionUnited spoke with Masperi over the phone to learn more about
Mayamiko’s business model and how it already puts into practice what other
fashion brands are pledging to accomplish in a decade or more.
I’ve worked in different African countries on projects
using technology to improve education, between 2004-2008. Many of those
projects were related to women’s empowerment. Several studies
show that, by empowering women, the positive effect spreads across the
entire family and the community. When women earn more money and have more
choices, their money is very likely to be invested into their children’s
education.
Based on that and the relationships I’ve formed with various
organizations in Africa, I started thinking: ‘how can I do something that
empowers women in a way that works for them and includes them in the
decision-making process?’ I started talking to various women leaders and
sewing was one of the skills that kept coming up. Fashion is a great
unifying power, everyone wants to wear lovely clothes and look good. That
seemed to be a really strong interest for women and it also allowed
them to work in a more independent way. If they wanted to be full-time
workers, they could, but if they wanted to be more flexible or work
from home, that would be possible as well.
The first few years were about building capabilities: training
them and making sure we got to the right level of technical expertise, with
the ability to create products that would be suitable for exports as well. That took quite some time. Then, we spent
a couple of years manufacturing clothes for other labels until the desire
to retain more of the value and have more creative control around what we
were making led us to create our own brand.
This isn’t meant to be criticism of brands, but many were just starting
to play around with the idea of producing more ethically and sustainably,
and they were looking for partners to do that, but they didn’t necessarily
understand all the constraints they’d operate within. Many brands didn’t
understand that, when you import textiles, there’s a bigger environmental
impact, you increase your carbon footprint. There’s also a social impact
because you’re potentially taking work away from the local community by using fabrics from abroad. Anyway, there were a lot of complexities which I think were too
much for certain brands to grasp. Sustainability was quite a new concept
ten years ago.
For some brands, we sourced locally, for others we collaborated with
local artisans to do tie-dye and dip dye, some others imported their own
textiles of choice. It was a bit of a mix. Honestly, it was quite hard for
us to make all these compromises. It was a lot of trial and error and
figuring out what worked for each brand.
I think the experience of working for other labels showed us the
educational gap that needs to be filled in the industry. The idea to start
our own brand came from the realization that we understand these
constraints better and therefore we can navigate them better.
We’ve wanted to work with organic cotton and sustainable fabrics from
the very beginning, but that was and continues to be a challenge. Very
little is produced in Malawi and there is no certified organic cotton. So,
if you want the product to have the certification, you have to import the
fabric. We’re still trying to find a balance so, at the moment, we source local fabrics but we also found a really good
partner in Uganda, which is relatively close to Malawi, to provide us with
organic rain-fed cotton.
Developing the aesthetics of the brand was also a challenge. How can we
be true to the origins of these textiles, tell their stories and have that
process of co-creation with the local artisans, but at the same time create
something with global appeal? The solution was to create very simple
evergreen silhouettes that appeal to a broad audience and also have
longevity. Our brand is not led by trends. We let the textiles tell more of
the story.
It starts from the conception at the design phase. We always ask
ourselves how we can create patterns in a way that is smart and
utilizes every piece of fabric. A lot of effort goes into placing patterns
in the most efficient way possible, which is quite difficult… Print
alignment is very challenging.
However, zero waste is more of an ambition, designing for zero waste is impossible. We try, but there is
always a bit left. So then we asked ourselves: how can we use these scraps
in a way that’s useful? That’s when we came up with a range of products,
from scrunchies to earrings, to creatively use every scrap.
The other initiative we came up with was using the fabric to create
reusable sanitary pads for girls. They are not only made of
scraps, the fabric that goes against the skin is made of organic cotton. Not having access to
sanitary products is one of the main reasons why girls don’t go to school
during their periods. There’s still a lot of stigma around it. So, we work with an organization
that delivers educational messages around the topic of menstruation and
women’s health, and we deliver a product that supports their message.
The small pieces of fabric that we can’t do anything with are used for
doormats or mops.
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Our philosophy is one of human connections. We believe that we’re
stronger and better together. We don’t see other brands as competitors but
rather as potential partners. I think it’s just our mindset, but it may
also be a cultural thing. I was born in Italy and I come from a big family.
Conviviality is something that’s in me as a person.
A lot of these partnerships are strategic. For example, we were
wondering how we could reduce our carbon footprint and one option was to
offer customers the opportunity to plant a tree for every time we ship an
order. We’re basically saying: “look, we’re not perfect and we know that.
While we work on getting better, what can we do in the meantime?”. Usually
a partnership is the best way to do that.
The others are more opportunistic. So, for example, I was travelling in
Sri Lanka looking for artisanal products that we could offer to our
audience when I encountered this amazing project with mothers of disabled
children. It’s very different business model from Mayamiko. The mothers go
to town once a week to make the pieces. I felt that this organization, like us,
figured out something that works for the people. So, a partnership was a
natural thing for us. We form these partnerships to offer our customers a
more varied product range and allow them to get in touch with different
realities, crafts and techniques.
You can learn so much from working with other brands and organizations!
Sometimes you’re kind of stuck in your own little world, trying to make your
business work and, suddenly, there’s this world out there full of people
doing amazing things and you can learn from each other.
We have a lovely problem, which is we have more customers than products.
This didn’t happen overnight, it took us three years to build a
following and the reputation that our products are of good quality. It’s
really great for us to see customers that keep coming back. My big dilemma
is how to grow in a way that’s sustainable both economically but also in
terms of my vision. Where do we go from
here? Do we need to partner with bigger factories to produce more so we can
sell more? Is that really what we want?
Maybe we have to think of smarter business models, such as a secondary
market where people can send their used clothes back and get something new
in return. We’re now at a painful point…. We always talk about being more
sustainable, more responsible, more mindful with our consumption patterns,
but the way we measure success is still very old school. For example, if
you’re looking at investors or getting financial help from the bank, some
of these metrics about growth, which are about selling more and more, they
actually don’t fit with the world we want to create.
We’re small and we still make mistakes, but we want to be choosy about
the mistakes we make and the risks we take because we’re dealing with
people’s jobs and their jobs are their lives. We could have had a much
faster growth trajectory but we deliberately choose not to grow too
fast.
We have 15-20 people working for us full-time and 50-100 artisans
collaborating with us occasionally. It depends on the collection we’re
working on and the partners we’re working with.
It’s hard to differentiate yourself these days because all the big brands
are doing some sustainability or ethics initiative. That is really
confusing for consumers. I’m not saying that big brands are greenwashing
but it’s very hard to differentiate between what’s marketing and what’s
real innovation. The fact we’re small allows us to change and innovate
faster.
We’ve created QR codes for our new collection which allow us to link
each individual product to the people who worked on it. People talk about
transparency and connecting with the makers a lot, but many of those
initiatives are very generic. If you scan a QR code, usually you’re taken
to a generic page that tells you a little bit about the product and that’s
it. We thought: “how can we push this envelope a bit further?” If you now
buy a dress from Mayamiko and scan the QR code, we know exactly who made
that dress, so you’re taken to a page that tells you truthfully the real
people that made that specific dress.
If you know exactly who made
a product, you know exactly what went into that product. What materials,
what trims. If you think long-term about smart recycling, that would be
really valuable data. We’re hoping that’s something we can do both for
Mayamiko and potentially offer to other brands in the future.
More broadly, our goal is to improve our positive impact. Can we work
with more women? Can we work with more artisans? Can we bring more
sustainable products to our customers? Can we be more inclusive? Today,
since we only work with organic cotton, it isn’t very flexible, so only
certain shapes work. We want to try and be as inclusive as we can. We’ve
recently removed all zippers from our products, everything is tied so it
can be adjusted to different body shapes. But we’re not doing enough on
that side, we need to do more.
The QR codes were launched three weeks ago, so it’s all very new. But
it’s definitely gotten a lot of interest on social media. We can see in
analytics that people are using the codes and viewing the pages.
In the future we’d like to expand on that and offer customers the
opportunity to talk to the makers, send them a thank you note. We know this is
only the beginning of the journey, but the response has been positive.
Nevertheless, there’s a pragmatic part of me that thinks “even if people
don’t use it, we should do it anyway because it keeps us honest”. This is
something that helps us to make sure we never cut corners. Let’s say we’d
meet again in five years and Mayamiko would have grown 100 times, making millions
of products. If you ask me that same question, “do you know who made your
products?”, and I’m not able to answer it… Then I’ll have failed.
Pictures: Mayamiko Facebook