In July this year the press got their hands on a story which would make any normal person gasp, that the iconic British Burberry ‘burns nearly £30 million worth of clothes and cosmetics every year, to avoid them being sold at a discount and potentially damaging their brand image’.
It is a shocking figure, but I totally get it. It is a serious problem that I too am faced with. My company is tiny compared to a brand like Burberry and our waste will be a fraction of theirs but we waste too.
You will be disgusted to learn that a few weeks ago, I drove my car over approximately 1,000 pairs of perfect spectacle frames. I drove over them five times just to be sure we had damaged them enough so that we could dispose of them in the dustbin and not fear that some opportunist would fish them out and sell them on eBay at a huge discount. Five times felt like a suitable amount of times to adequately destroy them and deem them unfit for anything other than landfill where they will sit for next 200 years, not disintegrating. I feel sick writing this. It is madness.
Can you imagine how that feels? To destroy something that took so long to create. The hours spent designing them, navigating colour options, tweaking prototypes to make them perfect. These were frames I was proud to have my name on, excited to see launch and just 12 to 24 months later, they are viewed as ‘old styles’, discarded beneath the relentless demand for new. And now no one wants them.
The only option for the leftover stock was to dispose of them. But I have to ensure they do not end up in the hands of the ‘wrong’ people, and by that I mean opportunists looking to offload designer goods for discount prices in discount retail environments, hence devaluing my brand’s image. I have to protect my brand and my customers at all costs, and I do. But the ultimate cost is to the planet.
Ethics and fashion have not always gone hand in hand, and it is only in recent years that the realities of the industry have been brought to light. One of which is waste, and the sheer enormity of it. The false premise of ‘need’ is what the fashion industry is built on, and of course the eyewear industry is no different. Every season we get asked ‘what’s new?’ but does anyone ever ask what the cost of all that ‘new’ is? New colours, new styles, new point of sale, new packaging every six months. It simply makes everything else old, and who wants old when you can have new?
It is important to remember that the feature is not exclusive to Burberry and nor to us – it affects every eyewear brand, fashion brand, cosmetic brand, or in simple terms, almost every manufacturer on the planet. We all have to burn, melt, bury and destroy product. We do it to defend our precious brands, to maintain our identity, to protect our intellectual property, and guard against counterfeiting.
Just to be clear, this waste makes me sick and I long for a resolution to it. Over the years we have tried every option from donating off-shore, recycling, upcycling, but none of it really exists in the same volume as the waste that is made.
People will quickly assume that our production management is off-kilter and that we just make too much product, but it is important to understand we are also at the mercy of the factories and their production minimums on styles and the materials we use. If, for example, the industry demands a minimum of 10 new styles in five colours every six months, and the good factories have minimum orders of 100 per colour, that’s 5,000 frames produced.
We have six months to sell them before more new things come out and these flop down the rankings into the world of ‘not new anymore’ and then ‘old’. Essentially, we and many companies like us are buying way more than we need. The factory is then making more than we need and we know we are making waste already, but the insatiable demand for new puts us in a difficult position, and I am on a mission to find another way.
It is not just the unsold frames that are wasted, when you are producing a luxury product. Of course people expect perfection, and so they should, but we recently had to reject an entire production run for a very small colour run in the plastic. It was in an existing colourway, so the defect would have been obvious to our customers. There was nothing else wrong with these frames other than this consistent ‘imperfection’ – so off to the dustbin they went. Shocking. We are a very small company in the scheme of things, so I dread to think what the volume of waste is within the big brands.
How many no-longer-new frames are headed for the bin?
We live in such a throwaway culture. We are asked for new designs before our existing ones have even had time to really stretch their legs. I constantly feel pressured to launch new designs unnecessarily and perhaps if we could slow down, launch new products every 12 to 24 months instead of every six months that in itself would reduce the waste as we would have more time to sell the products we have on the shelf rather than cutting their lives short to make way for unneeded new deigns. But would the industry allow it? Would that work?
I run a company whose heart is intrinsically in plastic – and with waste plastic being one of the biggest problems on the planet right now, I cannot help but think about my and the eyewear industry’s contribution to that. Millions of plastic sunglasses and spectacles are thrown away every year by manufacturers and brands. While I cannot change my core material, I can certainly make less of it, use less of it, throw away less of it, thus contributing to less factory emissions, but I also need to maintain my presence within the industry and the demands of my customers.
Charity or recycling of course seem like the most obvious answer to all of this and trust me when I say both avenues have been investigated thoroughly. On many occasions, the charities just don’t want them, or want only a select few styles. In other cases, corruption coupled with the financial opportunity of thousands of pairs of top-tier quality spectacles is sadly too much for some people. The risk of devaluing the brand outweighs the prospect of donating the products, and since we all rely on our retail customers, for them to find a crooked website selling our products for unrealistic prices would be unacceptable.
There have been suggestions of making art or upcycling the products, but realistically the volume of the product outweighs the demand for this and often the cost of recycling, or upcycling is more than the cost value of the frame. Also, quality recycled materials are few and far between, and the same goes for eco-friendly acetates. I am aware that this may come across as a bag of excuses, but it is the truth and the realities I am faced with, while the whole time more and more product is being manufactured.
This article has been triggered by the Burberry story and the screams of despair in the comments section from readers, and quite right, ‘what a waste’ it is, but what are our options?
Oliver Goldsmith is about longevity. The products I produce are not intended to be a throw-away commodity. So how can we be more responsible? How can I prevent the undeserved fate of these ‘old’ frames?
For me, the obvious answer is to simply produce less, but the attitude of consumers and retailers needs to change too. We need to slow down, give our product longer to integrate with the market and try to live in a less throwaway culture. There will always be ‘new’, but do we need new quite so often? Slow down the speed of everything and the waste will be reduced.
Eyewear designer Xavier Derome agreed. ‘It’s totally true. I have thousands of frames that will probably be trashed some day. Add to this waste all the frames that have a small fault. All the hours or labour and the quantities of materials used to produce these ‘lost items’ – it makes me realise how vain humanity can be,’ he said.
I want to be more responsible, and I believe most independent brands do too, but how do we do this while maintaining our place within the market? Maybe our contribution will make a difference, maybe it will not. Will the industry change? Who knows – but I am on a quest to find the answer and I hope other brands will respect my honesty and help contribute to a mini revolution.