020. Tara St. James on How the Offshoring of Production Reshaped the Role of Brands

Episode 20 November 10, 2020 00:39:13
020. Tara St. James on How the Offshoring of Production Reshaped the Role of Brands
Manufactured
020. Tara St. James on How the Offshoring of Production Reshaped the Role of Brands

Nov 10 2020 | 00:39:13

/

Hosted By

Kim van der Weerd

Show Notes

Throughout the making of this podcast, one of the questions we’ve had floating around in our minds was: how did we get here? There are a lot of ways to tackle this question, a lot of different moments across time and space that we could use to start the story.

One of those is the offshoring of manufacturing in the United States and Europe. Sure, there’s the simple narrative we often hear: the cost of labor got too expensive. This, combined with advances in logistics, technology, and certain trade policies, resulted in production being moved abroad and the long, complex supply networks we see today.

But we wanted to talk to someone who worked for a brand and experienced this transition to dig a little deeper. Which parts of the product development and production processes were brands responsible before the offshoring of production versus afterwards? How did this impact skillsets and knowledge of production processes within brands? And how has this shift in knowledge and skillsets affected price negotiations with suppliers?

Tara St. James is the wearer of many hats. She’s a founder at Resource Library - the United States’ first free-standing sustainable textiles library, owner and creative director of Study NY, a sustainable womenswear brand made in NYC, and an adjunct professor at FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the starting point for all of these fabulous projects, and her own sustainability journey, was her first job working for a much more mainstream fashion brand – just as the industry was adjusting to offshore production.

Want to dig deeper?

Learn more about Tara’s made-in-NYC womenswear brand Study New York.

Read this article by Elizabeth Cline, published by the New Fashion Initiative, about ReSource Library - the United States’ first free-standing sustainable textiles library.

 

Photo by Ivan Karpov

Other Episodes

Episode 0

October 28, 2020 00:07:14
Episode Cover

LOOSE THREADS 003

  Question: This week’s main podcast episode is based on an interview with Mr. Lin, a Chinese subcontractor based in Phnom Penh. In the episode,...

Listen

Episode 7

July 14, 2020 01:11:19
Episode Cover

007. Makala Schouls on Sustainable Denim Production & More

In our episode today we have the immense good fortune of chatting to Makala Schouls. Makala is American and trained in textile design and...

Listen

Episode 0

March 02, 2021 00:17:10
Episode Cover

Manufactured x GIZ FABRIC: Bonus – Miran Ali on Creative Ways of Generating Returns on Sustainability Investments

This week we had the chance to chat to Miran Ali, spokesperson for the STAR Network, a network of Asian producer associations in the...

Listen