008. Green Design Link – From Knitwear Producer, to Brand, and Beyond!

If life as a fashion supplier is so hard, why don’t manufacturers just sell directly to end consumers? How can we do artisanal production at scale? And what are the implications for how we approach social compliance? This week, we cover all these topics, and more, in conversation with Ellen Saville and Kelly Phenicie from Green Design Link/the Endery.

Green Design Link supports a community of over 1000 knitters in Peru. Knitters aren’t directly employed by Green Design Link, instead Green Design Link works with a network of small business leaders who directly manage the relationship with knitters. Historically, Green Design Link has been a producer for other brands. However, they recently decided to start their own in-house brand called The Endery.

We chat about why Green Design Link decided to create its own in-house brand. To our surprise, the impetus for this transition was deadstock and pre-consumer waste. We explore the barriers manufacturers face in selling directly to end consumers, and what positioned Green Design Link to make this leap.

Kelly and Ellen share quite a bit of detail about how the relationship between Green Design Link and its knitters is structured, how the risk and reward is distributed, and the kind of relationship they’ve managed to establish.

Inevitably, this takes us into social compliance. We look at the tension between mainstream models for social compliance, and how these do or don’t fit within Green Design Link’s production model. And what the implications are for thinking about how we might integrate artisanal production into more conventional fashion supply chains.

Photo provided by Green Design Link

Want to dig deeper ?

Learn more about Green Design Link and the Endery.

Interested in learning more about zero waste production? Check out this Huffington Post video featuring Tonlé, a pioneer in zero-waste production techniques.

Learn more about why textiles are so difficult to recycle. 

Check out Reverse Resources, a trading platform for pre-consumer waste.

Check out this great investigative piece on social compliance auditing by Maria Hengeveld.

Learn more about the remarkable fall in China's suicide rate (especially among women) as a result of formal employment opportunities, and the accompanying financial independence. 

Photo provided by Green Design Link