Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aaron Jacobson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Aaron thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
The biggest challenge to profitability for independent designers is fast fashion. The ubiquity of ultra-cheap clothing and aggressive sales online reinforces an expectation among consumers that clothing has no inherent value. When we buy fast fashion for pennies we’re actually co-signing a much darker reality; that garment workers themselves- who grow fiber crops, mill yarns, dye fabric, cut and sew clothing, and pack your orders- have no value. Millions of workers throughout the global textile supply chain earn sub-poverty wages in dangerous sweatshops, paying for our “deals” with their health and dignity. Meanwhile, when independent brands, like Faan, factor fair wages into our pricing, some customers think we’re being greedy. Without more education and awareness around this global crisis, balancing customer expectations with the real costs of ethical, worker-centered manufacturing will continue to undercut our profitability.
Aaron, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
The global fast fashion industry is fundamentally destructive and unsustainable, responsible for more global pollution than every industry besides oil. I left my work as an architect and launched Faan to demonstrate a more ethical model predicated on the values of circularity: make things locally, make them naturally, make them last, and make them for everyone.
We apply these values directly through our two core collections. Our Organic Collection responds to a set of troubling realities: 60% of our clothing globally is made from polyester, which sheds microplastics and toxifies our soil and waterways. Meanwhile, conventional cotton is one of the most water and pesticide intensive crops on the planet. In response, we source only domestically grown organic cotton, which uses 90% less water and zero pesticides. Every shirt in this collection- along with the fabric scraps from production- can be safely composted.
Our Deadstock Collection responds to a second crisis: clothing brands send millions of tons of overproduced fabric to landfills and incinerators every year. So, we work with second-hand vendors in New York and Los Angeles to reclaim these discarded fabrics to produce our Deadstock jackets and pants.
There are too few clothing brands nationally, let alone within our regional Fibershed, engaging holistically with circular production. Faan offers a working model to demonstrate that affordable, zero-waste, regional production is both possible and environmentally imperative.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
I’m trained as an architect and moved to Beijing, then to Shanghai, to work with a design firm. My daily walk to the office took me through the alleys of the garment district where I first started experimenting with fabric for fun. I started sharing sketches before work with a pattern-maker in the district named Fanfan- the namesake of our brand. At first, I drew clothes using architectural conventions, as though they were buildings. Fanfan helped me translate my ridiculous drawings for the sewers who drafted my first samples. We worked this way for nearly two years; reviewing sketches on my way to work or fitting samples on my way home, and selling one-off pieces to architect friends. It wasn’t until I got back to the US with suitcases full of clothing samples that I considered leaving architecture in earnest. Obviously, leaving a stable career I had invested a decade of my life to felt extremely risky and foolish to me. I took some pieces to New York to get feedback from retail buyers. I think I expected to have my heart broken so that I could return to architecture without reservations. Instead, one buyer bought the collection outright. Suddenly, I was in business and had to figure out how to produce my first order.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Working directly with garment workers in China, I’d seen glimpses of poor working conditions in the larger factories responsible for churning out fast fashion. Manufacturing in the US was my founding principle as a company and, in my mind, the only way to ensure transparency and ethical standards for workers throughout the production process. I met with factories around the country but my goal was to manufacture in Cleveland, where my own great-grandfather once worked as a pattern grader. Cleveland had been the country’s second largest garment manufacturing center in the US through the early twentieth century, before taking advantage of underpaid workers overseas became the industry standard. I lucked into meeting a small local factory getting started at the same time as Faan. I’ve learned what I know about “small batch” manufacturing from them and they’ve produced every Faan garment for nearly a decade, a short drive from our studio. Building personal relationships with the people who produce our clothes has been absolutely invaluable to our growth.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.faanware.com
- Instagram: @faanware