Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lacie Thorne. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lacie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Phigitals founder Lacie Thorne witnessed the oversupply of the fast-fashion industry firsthand when she was the first person hired for the Jennifer Lopez brand for Kohl’s Corporate, the largest celebrity licensing partnership in history with an exclusive contract for all 1,100+ Kohl’s doors and projected sales of $3.5 billion. In her role as launch designer, she traveled to Jennifer’s home to meet with her and her team, discuss brand direction, and then execute the established vision with multiple overseas vendors in Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She repeated this professional experience by launching celebrity clothing brands for Nicki Minaj and Adam Levine under the leadership of Tommy Hilfiger.
Once she was in the overseas manufacturing facilities, however, she became aware of the scale at which the global apparel industry operates, accounting for up to 10% of global carbon emissions annually, more than international flights and shipping combined. While many consumers believe donating their used clothing is a solution to their consumption patterns, the oversupply of fast fashion clothing items so far outpaces demand that only 15% of donations are recirculated domestically, with 85% being sent off shore to places like Ghana and Chile.
Lacie was inspired by her experiences and research to apply to the MBA program at Yale University’s School of Management with a focus on Sustainability, with a thesis on reinventing the concept of secondhand goods in the consumer’s mind. Ultimately, the fashion industry’s incentive model is broken: brands only get paid once, even though the clothing asset may trade hands multiple times via third party platforms like Poshmark, Ebay, the RealReal, StockX and others. Because brands aren’t incorporated into the profit loop on these platforms, they are incentivized to create low quality- high turnover fast fashion items to keep customers returning to the traditional retail transaction point, because that is where they receive their profit.
Phigitals disintermediates planned obsolescence in the consumer goods industry: when brands are monetarily incentivized to create products that last beyond the first generation lifecycle, a ripple effect of modified consumer behavior is created to extract value from the existing supply chain, thereby reducing overall carbon emissions produced by new product manufacturing.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?
After Parsons School of Design, Lacie fell into a niche of celebrity clothing design, but quickly became aware of the environmental impact of the global apparel industry. It was her responsibility to push the “go” button to begin the operational procedure that would manufacture upwards of 60,000 units of a particular garment. These styles utilized raw resources like cotton, underwent multiple chemical procedures to achieve the necessary aesthetic impacting environmental supplies like water and air quality, required global shipping and transportation resources- for what?
Celebrity fast fashion clothing was being sold for a low price with low margins. It was designed and intended to be low quality to ensure the consumer would purchase again. In other words, after all of the resources utilized to conceptualize, create, and globally ship the garment, it was designed to be worn a few times and thrown away. Lacie began to feel she was more part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Shortly after the launch of her 3rd celebrity clothing brand, Lacie had the opportunity to move to Hong Kong and pivot her career from fashion design to fashion communications. She worked as an art director for luxury brands throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and realized luxury apparel retained a profit margin that accommodates for better quality – it is designed to last. But who can afford an entire wardrobe of luxury goods?
She began working with Hong Kong NGO Redress, an organization with a mission to prevent and transform textile waste to catalyze a circular economy and reduce fashion’s water, chemical and carbon footprints. She developed a thesis that if brands could extract value from fashion’s secondhand supply chain, they could reduce global carbon emissions. In 2020, Lacie took a cryptocurrency trading course online during the pandemic and began learning about blockchain utility, applied to Yale SOM, and developed the conceptual framework for Phigitals.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Lacie’s deep industry knowledge from 15 years working in the international fashion industry led her to triangulate concepts between manufacturing, consumption, and the utility gained from web3 initiatives.
Phigitals [Physical + Digital] is a a web3 enabled B2B Saas solution for sustainable fashion resale, allowing e-commerce retail platforms to recapture margin in the circular economy, boosting profits while reducing their carbon footprint by up to 86% per transaction. The company tethers individual fashion items to NFTs on the blockchain to provide royalty commissions on resale transactions, incentivizing brands and consumers into higher quality circular fashion initiatives.
By tethering blockchain-based NFTs to cryptographically secure data tags on goods, Phigital incentivizes brands and resellers for the secondhand consumer goods market by providing 5 benefits:
- smart-contract enabled trail commissions through the ownership lineage to the brand
- storytelling data memories increase value & add provenance to garments
- consumer intelligence from user generated memories creates better product market fit
- easy, one-click list to sell streamlines the resale process
- supply chain audit assurance for scope 1 & 2 manufacturing emmissions
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Despite Lacie’s training in fashion, and the multitude of experiences that came with her career in the fashion industry, at a certain point it became impossible to ignore the growing data associated with the environmental impact of the career path she had known so well.
The fashion industry is a megalith spanning continents, multiple facets of global supply chain, and numerous consumer outlets. Its manufacturing ranges from undocumented sweatshops in Bangladesh to automated factories in Beijing and America, producing many categories of consumer goods: jewelry, apparel, handbags, footwear, swimsuits and more. Analyzing the metrics of such a diverse source of data can be challenging, but we can focus on what we do know:
1. Nearly three-fifths of all clothing ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced
2. In the USA, 10.5 million tons of clothing is sent to landfill every year
3. Global clothing production increased 60% from 2000 to 2019
These facts are sobering in the face of global climate change, and while consumers reportedly claim they want responsibly sourced fashion, data indicates little is being done to disintermediate the consumption trajectory of fast fashion.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.laciethorne.com
- Instagram: @laciethorne
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laciethorne/