Oliver Timsit who started his fashion career in private label, wholesale manufacturing and working business-to-business now wants to build the go-to ethical but accessible denim brand, Oliver Logan.
Timsit who had already worked in the apparel industry for over a decade, helping manufacture denim for brands like Ed Hardy, Z Brand, Mango, and later Artisan De Luxe, knew what it took to make denim at scale.
Yet, there was one thing still bothering him — why was no one making sustainable denim at more affordable price points. When he surveyed the market, he saw that most sustainable options were often 3 to 5 times more expensive than mainstream brands. He wanted to change that.
“I saw several options that were around $300. But that’s not realistic for everyone — including me. So how is it that there’s not a comparable product made sustainably using some of the best fabrics. How is there not a jean that isn’t a hundred bucks? I knew how much it costs because I’ve been doing this for 15 years. And that is possible to make!”
That was the beginnings of Oliver Logan. While there are certainly cheaper options today that claim to use sustainable materials, the brand sits somewhere in the middle. It focuses on using recycled cotton (and now organic cotton too), reducing the water consumption in manufacturing, and working with partners that run their factories on renewable energy, among other environmental and social initiatives. And the jeans cost between $85 to $125.
Timsit says that choosing more sustainable fabrics and suppliers is easier today than when he started working in apparel. Gone are the days of having to convince suppliers. “It’s in your face now. Everyone gets it that we have to move in that direction. And the price difference in materials is becoming more and more minimal.”
So where the real difference still exists is on the cost of workmanship, he explains: “It does become more expensive because part of our sustainability initiatives are making sure that we are working with factories that are paying those fair wages, respecting labor laws and in fact, going beyond them. All of those things do increase your cost on the factory side because the factory is a machine, if you think of it. It’s an efficiency-based model and these things are arguably less efficient, right? So that’s where I think you see increased costs.”
“But for us, as a sourcing company, that’s our strength and that’s how, where we know how to leverage those relationships to make sure that our cost is still sustainable for everybody,” he adds.
While Timsit had a lot of experience in manufacturing and building supply chains, he was less experienced in building a brand — and he admits he’s learned it the “hard and expensive way,” he jokes. But, they’ve learned who their customer is now: a millennial, he says, looking for value and product. “They’re looking for longevity, durability, and a well-priced option.”
Oliver Logan has focused on direct-to-consumer, a real deviation from Timsit’s previous jobs and his private label business. With that has come higher marketing costs, he says — a learning curve to see what customers are interested in, the content they want to consume, and the budgets to make it all happen. The company is now exceeding $20 million in sales annually.
Timsit has intentionally not raised money. And while that may have inhibited some of his growth and ability to compete in the competitive apparel landscape, he says its allowed them to grow at a more sustainable rate.
“It’s been built on credit card debt, cashflow, and a little bit of blind optimism. I mean, it’s interesting because so many brands are VC-backed or at least have some investors. And while it allows them to do a lot of great marketing and to be at the forefront in the beginning, it’s a hard model. I mean, you’re on this kind of hamster wheel where you have to perform. And their performance metrics are different than ours, right? We have to perform. But what we do has to be profitable because we have to pay for what we have built. And we have to make sure that we can make a certain investment. And that’s why our growth, while we’ve grown quite a bit, it’s been a much slower process.”
But he’s happy to be doing it this way. He’s keen on being part of the solution and wave of change in fashion. In the beginning, Timsit recalls how his early years in fashion exposed him to the harsh realities of the industry: “I spent a lot of time in factories. That’s where I first saw the amount of waste. You see all the textiles that get thrown on the floor, the fabric that doesn’t get used, that too gets thrown on the floor, and then there’s the water and the sludge. It can be nasty.”
Yet, the tide is shifting as consumers are become more scrutinizing, policy makers are putting in new regs, and in general, awareness is increasing — even amidst the age of Shein.
Thus, Timsit is hopeful that Oliver Logan’s middle-of-the-road pricing can convince some customers to shop more responsibly.
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