COSH!
Instead of launching another product that adds competition for circular entrepreneurs already struggling, I want to develop an accessible way to connect consumers and retailers.
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Online platform for sustainable fashion at local retailers
COSH! is the online platform that makes consciously choosing sustainable clothing easy. By selecting and filtering on the platform, consumers can find clothes from local retailers to suit their own style and budget. In this way, COSH! aims to make sustainable shopping accessible to a wide audience and to shift budgets from unethical to ethical employment. The system uses an innovative business model where local merchants become members and their sustainable offerings are vetted and displayed.
With the city's support, COSH! will focus even more on digitalisation. A technological tool is currently being developed to objectively screen clothing according to seven pillars: Ethics, Working Conditions, Ecological Materials, Circularity, Short Chain, Animal Friendly and Transparency. Sustainable fashion retailers and retailers in transition in Antwerp will display the screened brands. This encourages consumers to shop locally, while promoting Antwerp as a sustainable fashion city.
... In 2010, Bruno Pieters asked Niki De Schrijver to help create a new luxury fashion brand that was completely ecological, ethical and transparent.
Niki: "Honest By was the first fashion company to be 100% transparent: factories, materials, suppliers, you name it. It was all open source. Even prices and margins were no secret. In fact, it was the forerunner of Fashion Revolution, which started its transparency campaigns in 2013, following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh."
Honest By was Niki's turning point. Niki: "It made me realise that I had always acted much more fairly, correctly and sustainably than what I saw in other companies," she says. "In Moroccan factories, there is usually a lot of shouting at the workers, as if that is the only way to get them to do something. Not so in the factory where we produced, where the boss also took a very different approach. I myself was always in the midst of the sticklers. I realised that fair intrapreneurship, and later entrepreneurship, was inherent in me.
Then I got involved with sustainability and it hasn't let me go since," she adds. "I think as a designer you have to ask yourself: If this piece ends up on a pile of clothes, can it biodegrade? If the answer is no? Then don't start."
