The Ledger
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Radboy: Fashion industry is overwhelmingly white and uses tokenism conditionally
“You're dealing with an all-white industry. Right? And who know it. And you symbolize something specific that's useful up until a point, you know.”
Radboy: Corporate inclusion initiatives maintain existing ownership structures without sharing power
“And when you really look at the term inclusion, it means that ownership doesn't change. Now you're just being allowed here.”
Radboy: Vogue and Style.com act as historical gatekeepers of fashion
“You have to understand that when people, you know, you have these institutions like Vogue and Style.com, and they're like the Library of Congress of fashion. So they, their, your entry means that you happened. So when they refuse to even record that you had a …”
Telfar generated over $1M converting fashion show marketing into revenue
“Like, at some point, we were bringing in over a million dollars just from doing shows, so what you would consider marketing is actually, it wasn't an expense, it was Our income.”
Radboy: Most fashion brand collaborations are superficial PR stunts with small fees
“Well, think, you know, these things are usually for show. They're for press. It's just, you want a press release saying that happened, and then you get a little check for your design fee.”
Fashion overproduction and unoptimized supply chains drive up retail apparel prices
“Overproducing by design, right? Two collections, like, you know, 400 items every six months. Absolutely wasteful. And you end up, when you have to make like that, that's why you are selling a pair of jeans for a thousand dollars, is because you didn't figure o…”
Radboy: Creative workers must build community to alter exploitative environments
“You can't be in a position where you're binding with Your success or your survival to your exploitation. And that's the position that we're put in, in the creative industries in general. Like, we need the platform, we need the budget, we need the distribution.…”
Telfar secured an order to manufacture 20,000 employee uniforms for White Castle
“So with White Castle, we had the opportunity to make unisex clothes for a 20,000 unit order.”
White Castle renewed Telfar uniform orders every six months
“So we became a supplier to White Castle, and they're renewing them every, you know, six months, and like, that Became a revenue stream, not just a kind of press release.”
Telfar based signature bag price on DJ earnings, making it initially unprofitable
“That, that was a big part of it, is that Telfar wanted to base the price on how much you would make in a night DJ. And that absolutely didn't square up with how much it cost to make the bag. Like, at all. But it's like the price of the bag was part of the conc…”
Telfar decided in early 2019 to fully exit wholesale by 2020
“But we made the decision January, 2019, that by January, 2020, we would be completely out, which was a very difficult thing to do.”
Telfar's first pandemic-era bag drop in March 2020 sold out in seconds
“It was the end of March where finally China opened up. We got a shipment of bags. We post a bag drop in the middle of this crazy pandemic... And they sold out in seconds.”
Telfar had never sold over two dozen units before its shopping bag
“And then we had produced the Telfar bag, the shopping bag, and we put the entire production in the store. So it's like hundreds and hundreds of this bag, you know, for a brand that had never sold more than Maybe a dozen, a couple dozen of anything.”
Telfar was generating only a few thousand dollars monthly through early 2019
“We're still only making like a few thousand dollars a month. Right. Through 2018 and into 2019.”
By early 2019, Telfar's wholesale accounts were doubling every season
“And at that time, you know, our wholesale accounts were doubling every season.”
Telfar only collaborates for manufacturing capabilities, not financial checks
“The whole reason why we collaborate changed because of our material position. Like, we're not looking for that check, actually. We're looking to develop a product that somebody is better at making, or that would take us two years to do.”