#folkdays

You come from a development background, how does it inform what you do now with Folkdays?

The whole business idea is very much based on that because I worked for Oxfam for two and a half years, then I went to work for a consultancy that concretes on the public sector. I had a lot of projects with the Ministry of Development in Germany. At the same time I saw, for myself, a very big gap in the sense of when I went shopping everything I liked wasn’t sustainable. And everything that was sustainable, I didn’t like.

So it was a little bit of a combination of my experience working in the aid industry and being fed up with the fact that dependency is reenforced all the time. People in a lot of developing countries make stupid decisions but only based on their knowledge of ‘if we do it like this we are going to get more funding next year’. If you give anybody, here or there, money and say invest it in a way you think is smart and I think the outcome is much better, and development can happen.

I also noticed on a lot of trips I took that there are still a lot of crafts around and high quality materials being produced. The combination of all these made me come up with the idea, then I quit my job.

What’s been the biggest learning curve?

It’s a really hard business model. I, kind of, did know that before but now I feel it every month. My personal biggest learning curve was becoming someone who is a boss herself, and being a good one. I am not sure if I have managed to be a good one but I’m on my way to getting there. That was personally challenging because I thought once I am a boss I’d do it well but then I realised I have to do this or that better.

Above image shows the Savor collection by Folkdays photographed by Patrick Desbrosses. 

For you what makes a good boss?

I think a good boss is somebody who puts total trust in the people that work for him or her, and also [someone] who bring the best out of their employees. Who give them self confidence and fun in their work —that creates the best results.

What are some of the things you focus on when you decide you want to stock a piece?

For one, quality is always super important, then the material itself —the raw material. I always try to plan my trips around material; when I want to source great wool I go to Bolivia and Peru, when I want to source silk I go to Cambodia and Laos. It has a lot also to do with who well you click with the people.

What are your thoughts on the current state of fashion?

I just watched part of this short film and someone in [it] said something like: Why fast fashion is so hard to get rid of is because we love reinventing ourselves all the time. It really fits well with our way of living and we try to do it via social media, but we can also do it with fashion. We can buy something new everyday or every single week.

Of course I find the fast fashion industry very difficult because they produce a lot of waste [and] in most cases they can’t really control the working standards their producers work under. From an environmental and social point of view, it is craziness. I think the sales in the garment industry went up 10 times over the last couple of years, there is this explosion of consumption. At the same time, I see a lot of alternative approaches never really make it to be scaleable. I don’t know we are still small, but I do think it is a scalable model and I think people who are against fast fashion, have to come up with way of producing cool designs in a good quality and not make it too expensive. There is still a big lack.

It’s great obviously to want to create something that good for the environment and people, who aren’t necessarily the consumer, but the reality is you need to talk about the consumer and the fact they don’t want to spend a lot of money. Not a lot of people can actually afford it.

There is the question of money, of course. A lot of people come here and they tell us you are selling your stuff too cheaply. We only do B2C; we don’t sell to other businesses cause that would reduce our margins too much. Because we do B2C we can give people prices that are not crazy.

What advice would you give to people who wanted to be more conscious in their consumption?

I think it is a good idea to ask yourself if you are actually happy, because the happier you are the less you consume automatically. I think it is important, not to be too judge-y on yourself, like ‘oh now I feel super shitty because I went to Primark and bought some stuff.