Well Made

After 27 years as the iconic mind behind J.Crew creative, Jenna Lyons is a few months into the launch of a brand new startup – Loveseen. Of course, her decades of creative and marketing success are invaluable to her new pursuit, but she admits that she still has a lot she has to learn.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When you order a Take Back bag from For Days, you fill it with old clothes (in any condition, from any brand), ship it back to them, and they give you store credit. But behind that very simple exchange is a complex supply chain that's built on circularity.When founder Kristy Caylor learned that on average, each person in the US sends 70 pounds of fabric to the landfill, it was an epiphany. If you think about how to shrink your annual pile of unwanted clothes, donation, resale, and repair may come to mind. But Kristy was concerned about the items that don't have a place in any of those reuse streams, which is why For Days is focused on basics. There are no greener pastures for your old t-shirts, socks, and underwear — that is until now.For Days launched with an in-house recovery facility where they receive, source, and grade each item they collect from their takeback program. Depending on the condition and fabric of an item, For Days will rejuvenate it for sale on their site, or ship it to downcycling partners. In this episode, Kristy talks about what it really takes to build a circular fashion brand, how to motivate consumer behavior changes, and where brands need to invest to accelerate real industry progress.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

In the summer of 2018, we talked to Hilary Milnes about how retail isn't dead but it's changing, the struggle of shuttering department stores, and innovative ways that online and offline shopping can intersect.Over two years later, it's a case of same same but different. Hilary is still covering retail and fashion, but as the Americas Editor for Vogue Business. And now, one year into the pandemic, these trend trajectories have spiked, forcing brands to accelerate faster than anyone predicted. The customer-facing shifts came quickly — adapting to an online fashion month, pivoting retail strategies, and riding the ephemeral wave of creator-driven trends. But behind the scenes, supply chain shifts are still happening far too slow, leaving frontline fashion workers shortchanged and overworked, even amidst consumer outcries.On this episode, Hilary Milnes has optimistic and pessimistic takes on which of these shifts will stick in a post-pandemic world. She also illuminates new opportunities or smaller fashion brands and the ever-growing, ever-elusive role of the "creator."Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When consumers see a brand that claims to be "sustainable," reporter Alden Wicker encourages them to investigate. Every product's supply chain has different sustainability opportunities, so sustainability strategies will look different for every brand.First, she says brands have to acknowledge that sustainability is not binary. One product can be more sustainable than another, but sustainability is an ongoing journey rather than a final destination. Next, brands need to define their sustainability strategies and what sustainability looks like to them. This requires unraveling the supply chain of each product to see the impact of your materials, manufacturing, and transit.It's a lot to unpack, and Alden is always eager to investigate. In this episode, Alden answers the question, "What do we talk about when we talk about sustainability?" She advocates for a bigger focus on factories, warns against recycling red herrings, and confronts the challenge of assigning value to sustainability.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When you're researching a sustainability topic, it can feel like a Russian nesting doll of rabbit holes — you often end up with more questions than when you started. The good news is, if you find yourself deliberating the gray areas of sustainability, then you're in the right place.Ian Montgomery says that designing for sustainability is all about getting comfortable with tradeoffs. He is the founder and Creative Director of Guacamole Airplane, a design studio focused on sustainable packaging, and one of the first Lumi Experts. If you've explored the Lumi Sustainability Properties, then you're familiar with Ian's work and his knack for finding clarity, and even conviction, in sustainability's gray areas.

The first step to making Cyclon, On's recyclable shoe, was to use a single family of materials — polyamide (made from castor beans!). But that's just one piece of the cradle-to-cradle puzzle.To capture the shoes for recycling, they've developed a subscription model and a dedicated recycling stream. Staying true to the mission, these shoes aren't recycled to turn into other plastic goods down the line — they're recycled into new Cyclon shoes.It's an experiment that co-founder Caspar Coppetti says is aimed at not only revaluing waste in the supply chain, but slowing down our behavior of consumption. In this episode, he goes in the weeds on sourcing, manufacturing, and open source sustainability after talking about the origins of On and their unique philosophy on sponsorship.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

After four years as Slack's Head of Global Design and before taking her new role at Facebook, Kristy Tillman brought her side projects to the forefront.Kristy has a list of impressive side projects in her creative think tank, Tomorrow Looks Bright. It's a place where she does more than invite herself to the table — she creates the table and sits at the head. Kristy's work is always driven by optimism and an urgent need for a more equitable future which doesn't start in a decade, or in a year, but tomorrow.In this episode, Kristy talks about incentivizing diversity, acting on your values early, designing for millions of people at Slack, and before designing for 30 people with her new fellowship, Made in the Future.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Before Rumpl, sleeping-bag-style puffy blankets were predominantly marketed to Alpine athletes. Rumpl didn't invent the category, but founder and CEO, Wylie Robinson is doing everything he can to expand it.Wylie likes to ask people a simple question, "How many blankets do you have at home?" Then he asks, "How many of the brands can you name?" Outside of heritage brands like Pendleton or Woolrich, there is very little brand loyalty in the blanket business. Beyond that, there's little being done to bring performance textiles into the space.On this episode, fresh off of his Shark Tank pitch, Wylie shares what he learned from being on the show, how Rumpl continues to scale and differentiate, and why the pandemic took their branding down a few notches on Maslow's hierarchy.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

By his own account, Boll & Branch founder, Scott Tannen knows that his bedding brand may not be the first that comes to mind when you think of "cool" DTCs. The branding is classic and the style feels universal, but dig into the Boll & Branch supply chain and you'll find that they're totally changing the game for how textiles can (and should) be manufactured.Before he had a logo, or even a brand, Scott had drafted out the unwavering brand principals which deviated far from the norm of the textiles industry. Boll & Branch has adopted and created their own standards that meet or exceed qualifications for ethical labor, sustainable materials, and transparency.As he puts it, "There are so many issues that exist within this manufacturing cycle, and if you don't break it all apart by starting from scratch, you can't fix it." Tune in to hear how Scott and his wife Missy have built a transparent supply chain that they're proud of.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

If you bought a Bellroy wallet when the company launched a decade ago, you're probably still using it. For the past ten years, while they've worked to slim down your every day carry, they've slimmed down their environmental impact behind the scenes.CEO and co-founder Andy Fallshaw has a unique brand of optimism that's a constant ebb and flow between digging into details, and panning out to see the full picture. On this episode, he's settling into the nuance of sustainability, talking through current and future solutions that adapt and evolve. To build for sustainability, you often have to break a few paradigms along the way.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.