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Rachel Faller is one of the co-founders of tonlé, a zero-waste clothing company that believes in promoting equal value across the supply chain. Like coffee, most of the clothing we wear goes through hundreds of hands and relies on a system of manufacture and exchange that is a relic of colonialism.
In this episode, Rachel explains some of the parallels between how coffee is bought and sold and how clothes are made. We talk about who gains and who loses in a world that relies on fast fashion: the production of cheap clothing with quick turnaround times for garment factories.
Former guests have talked about the idea of risk in a global supply stream. When an item has to go through so many hands to get from Point A to Point B, how can risk be shared responsibly? Oftentimes, it’s not. In coffee, a lot of the risk lands on farmers, whose profits fluctuate based on what roasters are willing to pay, even though roasters have a vested interest in keeping the coffee industry going. In fast fashion, the risk shifts to factory workers, who deal with designers who might cancel orders if they’re not doing well in stores, or fluctuate their requests. Those factors mean anticipating labor needs can be tricky.
I know it might seem strange to talk fashion on a coffee and food podcast, but the parallels between the two industries show how systems meant to benefit those in power aren’t accidents. The same systems show up over and over across industries where there are huge profits to be made at the expense of others’ labor. Here’s Rachel.
Ashley: To kick things off: Could you introduce yourself?
Rachel: Sure. My name is Rachel Faller and I'm one of the co-creators of tonlé.
Ashley: How did tonlé begin? What's the story of tonlé?
Rachel: In 2008, I had the opportunity to go to Cambodia on a Fulbright fellowship and learn about traditional textiles from craftspeople who were working there, primarily through fair trade organizations using fair trade as in capital “F” and “T,” and also “fair trade” in quotes. [At the time], fair trade was really starting to become more of a thing in fashion.
I had just started to learn about fair trade and I was interested in how it could be a solution to some of fashion's problems. Having graduated from a textile program, I knew that there were a lot of problems in the fashion industry, but I didn't really know—I wasn't really seeing any solutions at that time. And so I wanted to go and learn from makers directly about what was working for them and what wasn't working for them in this movement and in their businesses, and learn about the traditional crafts that they were making.
I got to do this year of research and really hands-on experience working and learning from craftspeople, which was really incredible. I was extremely privileged to be able to do that and to have that opportunity. But what I kind of saw is—at the same time that I moved to Cambodia in 2008, the Recession happened, and that really dramatically impacted the sales of a lot of these makers.
There was also at that time—2008 and the Recession really led to the rise of fast fashion. Companies started to realize that they could sell more and more products at cheaper prices, so it really accelerated the pace of fast fashion.
Cambodia is also a country where a lot of fast fashion is produced, so I saw how that was affecting people firsthand. The price for fairly made textiles was essentially going down while the production of fast fashion was ramping up.
I saw both extremes in Cambodia, where you saw the impact of these huge fast fashion companies through their manufacturers in Cambodia on the environment, as well as on the workers and also how some of these groups that were striving to be fair trade and to produce things in a better way were also struggling because the market for fair trade was kind of considered luxury. They were also struggling at the same time.
On a very personal note, I was also having a hard time finding clothes that I really wanted to wear and felt comfortable wearing after seeing all of this. Even within the small markets in Cambodia, there were a lot of products that were handmade and very beautiful, but not really clothes that you could wear on a daily basis.
Then you also had these massive markets for castoffs from the larger garment factories—a lot of things that had failed quality control or were overstocked. That was flooding the markets. On a personal note, I was like, “I don't feel good wearing most of the clothes that are available out there for me.”
Ashley: How did these observations—what you were seeing in the fashion industry—translate to starting a clothing company?
Rachel: There were a group of people through one of the nonprofits that I was partnering with who said, “Hey, we want to start this business. But we don't really know how to—can you help us?”
So we kind of did an exchange of knowledge and that led organically to starting the first iteration of the business. And eventually it became clear—my goal was to basically help this group of women start this business and then my goal was always to leave and let them take over the business and let it keep going from there.
But there was a bit of a conundrum with the market in Cambodia where there was this market for higher-end products to sell to tourists and expats, but the problem with the market in Cambodia is that a lot of the products that were sold locally to the people in Cambodia were also being made under unfair conditions.
In the tailoring workshops, there's an exploitive culture where within Cambodia, families sort of work together and maybe the head tailor gets paid, but everybody else gets free room and board—they might not actually get paid or they send money home. That's kind of the system: It's family tailoring workshops that rely on unfair pay structures.
So it was a bit of an organic process and a lot of evolution in conversation with the team that we developed, and the needs of people changed as we grew as well. So there were a lot of ups and downs, but essentially I ended up staying in Cambodia for seven years working directly with makers to grow this business.
We started out working on a per-piece model with people working from home. And then we moved to having a production facility where people work in the facility and get paid. Then we moved to a salary model, then we moved to a combined model where people are paid a per-piece rate, plus a base salary. So they can earn more depending on their output, but within a set number of hours so there's no overtime hours and stuff that you see in the factories.
Ashley: Since this is a podcast that talks to coffee folks, it might be helpful to explain how tonlé is structured or operates differently from the traditional fashion business model, if there is one?
Rachel: So there have been a lot of changes, a lot of evolution, but we’re constantly in conversation and in consultation with our team in Cambodia, and really centering them as the decision-makers in terms of what we're doing with the business and what they want and what's best for them.
So it’s very different than a traditional fashion brand. The way that works is the designer says, or a brand says, “Hey, what do we want to produce? What's going to be good for the market? Let's go out and find a facility to produce that.” It’s usually multiple facilities around the world. You end up with these long and convoluted supply chains where the product and the customer is prioritized rather than the people who make the products being the center.
The way that we've developed our business has been much more with the makers at the center and always asking you the question, “What is good for the makers?” We ask, “How do we develop products that are first and foremost good for the people who make them, and then secondarily are going to be sellable and good for our customers as well?” It's kind of backwards in the traditional fashion sense, but that's what we do.
Ashley: I think that's amazing how you laid everything out. I think initially someone might listen to this episode and think, “What does a clothing company have to do with coffee?” But you hit on so many themes that come up in coffee, and we're going to talk about a lot more of them as we go on through this conversation.
I want to lay some foundation just for folks who maybe don't know a lot about what the fashion industry looks like or what fast fashion is. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that moment in 2008 when fast fashion became more of a thing, and what that actually means and what that looks like from a supply chain standpoint.
Rachel: Yes, yes. So this is really important because I think a lot of people don't understand what fast fashion is. It's a very specific term that's become very broadly used.
Traditionally in the fashion industry—so pre-2008 and pre-fast fashion—you would have a pretty long lead time before a product got to market. So designers would take about somewhere between three to six months to develop their collections and produce really high-quality samples and do all the fit testing, fabric testing …everything that goes into making a really beautiful prototype.
Then they would present those prototypes to buyers, like department stores and boutiques and so forth. Those buyers would then place orders based on the prototypes. Then the designers could go to the factories or their suppliers and say, “Hey, we have an order from a buyer for this many products.”
Then the factory would have three to six months to produce that order based on an actual production order from a buyer that was going to buy that item, based on a prototype that's really well-made and really well designed. Then the factory would produce it and then it would get sent directly to the stores. Then the stores would have probably another three to six months to sell it.
That whole process is somewhere between 12 and 18 months. So a year to a year and a half, that was how the fashion industry used to work. That's why you have runway [shows] that happened six months in advance.
Ashley: That explains seasonal displays, like, “This is this season’s styles,” or whatever that looks like.
Rachel: That has been denigrated, but it's actually [a] really important [system] to produce in a more ethical and sustainable manner. I know that sounds really backwards, but let me explain to contrast the situation that we're in now.
So fast fashion is where these businesses can be vertically integrated. They can actually take product from design to market in less than a month. The way that they do that is they essentially don't make prototypes. They don't make samples, they don't develop their products in any way.
They're just sending some kind of sketch directly to the factory and they say, “Okay, produce 10,000.” And then the factory sends back the 10,000 that have not been sampled, that have not been tested, that have not been prototyped.
They immediately put them in the store and they test those 10,000 items and see how fast they sell. If they sell well, maybe the brand will order more. There's a lot of data analytics and stuff that goes into this. But essentially, as you can imagine, that results in more waste, more overproduction.
We’re getting to this micro-season thing which we have now, where stores are expected to have new products on the shelf every week instead of collections every six months. I'm not saying 2008 started that, but it sort of jump-started it.
This whole thing means that [companies] are shifting the risk onto the factories and onto the suppliers, because in order to get something from design-to-market in a month, when the process used to take 18 months, the factories basically have to pre-order fabric. They have to pay all these upfront costs.
They also have to take on the risk of having—let's say a factory has 1,000 workers. So that capacity is a risk, right? They need to pay their salaries no matter what. And this is true of tonlé as well. The factory needs to pay their solid salaries, no matter what, whereas the brand only pays for the products that they ordered.
If one month they get an order that they need 1,500 people to work on, well, they're going to outsource to a subcontractor. If the next month they get an order for only 500, that's only 500 of their workers they need to make [things]. Then they've got all this spare capacity.
The factories essentially have to take on all that risk of the capacity of the labor. They also have to take on the risk of buying the raw materials upfront, which means that they're going to over-order their raw materials, so that if a brand comes in to place an order and they say, “We want this really fast turnaround time,” they can do that.
Ashley: It seems like there's a lot of problems with that model.
So first and foremost, you used probably my favorite word right now, which is risk—a lot of the risk in fast fashion seems to be distributed to factories. Is that right?
Rachel: Yup. I think really emphasizing that these are formerly colonized countries or continue to be colonized countries. This is 100% a legacy of colonialism. It's not coincidental at all that all of these countries were colonized and now continue to be colonized by this extremely exploitative system where we—primarily in North America and Europe—can outsource the labor. But these companies, which are again, mostly owned by white Europeans and American men, are essentially making huge amounts of profit while not having any of the risks.
Ashley: Exactly. Their profits are not affected at all. They're still making money while transferring the risk of fast fashion to formerly colonized—and truthfully, like you said—[they continue to be] colonized countries.
Rachel: Yes. A lot of that infrastructure was literally set up under colonialism. It's just really mind-blowing. I mean, if you think about India, for example, a lot of the garment industry was built under colonialism and now [companies] are like, “Oh look, we can just kind of continue using this.”
Ashley: Right, right. There's no talk of what reforming an entire system looks like. Especially when it's set up under a system that was meant to exploit people.
But then it seems like there's this secondary issue of sustainability from an environmental standpoint and from a consumerist standpoint, where fast fashion encourages people to buy things and continue to look for new trends and fashion—probably more often than they would normally—to encourage continued spending. And that's where you get the environmental waste as well, like, “We need this product to be produced really quickly. The waste of it is inconsequential at this point.”
Rachel: Yeah. And it's partly inconsequential because the brands and the customers who, again, are in those Global North countries, are never having to see it, right?
I lived in Cambodia for seven years. I literally saw this waste piling up. I mean—yeah, there's so much we can say, but essentially those negative environmental outputs are being shifted onto these countries as well and it’s not only in terms of the literal waste, but the cut waste that we see.
tonlé uses scraps that come from the garment industry. I forgot to mention that earlier, but we actually get this waste literally from these huge companies via their factories, because the factories have all this excess fabric. Some of it is still on the roll, so it's perfectly good, but they just had to order extra because they didn't know the brands were inconsistent with their projections.
That's another part of the risk: that they're having to invest in all these raw materials. Brands will not give them clear orders or productions until the last minute.
Then there's also cut waste. There's things that fail quality control because of course, if workers are trying to produce so fast, their quality is not going to be great. So things are not going to be produced as well. So there's lots of extra waste [that] has increased exponentially.
I would say that the percentage of waste as compared to the products being produced has increased. The number of garments that are being produced has increased. I think, and I'd have to check this statistic, but it's something like since 2010, the number of garments being produced every year has more than doubled.
Then if you think about waste as a percentage of that, the waste has more than doubled as well because the waste as a percentage is higher.
I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. Our team goes to these warehouses in Phnom Penh where the scraps are collected by these informal recycling streams, they go and they get waste from the garment industry, from these big factories. Factories have to get rid of them sort of on the sly, because the brands don't want their sort of trademarked materials to get out and be made into something else.
But the brands also kind of look the other way because they know that they're not buying the raw materials and they're not investing in those. So they can't really say anything. So our team members go to these warehouses where all this stuff is collected and resold, and then we can pick out what we want, but I see all kinds of things there. I see garments that are half-made. I've seen bales of fabric with brands’ names on them. It's pretty wild. I'll have to show you a video or something.
Ashley: One of the first images that I saw when I went to your website was a picture of stacks and stacks and stacks of garments. I assume that that's what traditional factories would call waste?
Rachel: Yes, exactly.
I want to just really emphasize that there is a tendency to villainize the factories in this situation. Even with this concept, and I know we’re going to talk more about transparency, one of the problems with talking about transparency is it lets the brand say—and I want to credit my friend Kim here, she worked with tonlé in the past and she now has her own podcast called Manufactured, which is really fantastic. She talks a lot about the distribution of risk and reward and why that needs to be re-analyzed.
She and I had a lot of conversations about transparency and how it allows the brands to basically say, “The problem is transparency. The factories are trying to hide things from us,” and this kind of, “OK, we’re going to put the blame on the factory. When in reality, we made the factory take all that risk and we're not paying high enough prices and we're not giving fair projections.”
So the factory is taking on all the risk, meanwhile, we're kind of saying, “Oh, the issue is these bad factory managers are exploiting their workers and throwing away all of this waste.”
I just want to really reemphasize the fact that these brands—it's very convenient for them to be able to make all the profit, but take none of this responsibility when something goes wrong.
Ashley: It's this idea of transparency, but without thinking of the intersection of transparency and power.
Rachel: And accountability, right? It's like transparency, but no accountability when you're really the one that isn't providing the infrastructure and the money to make these changes.
Ashley: It seems totally viable for a lot of these companies to very well do so. Especially these huge fast fashion companies that, as you mentioned, there's no risk to their profits. They're just transferring that risk over to factories.
Rachel: Right. And the way that works essentially is again, brands pay for products that are made. They pay for the final goods, right? Sometimes they don't even pay for them until 60 or 90 days after they've already got those items on their shelves. So if they aren't selling those items for any reason, they can basically find something in their contracts that allows them to get out of paying for those items.
Ashley: That happens in coffee as well. I think that that's why this is such an interesting conversation to have because there's so many parallels in the way that items that come from one place and are consumed in another place are treated because of colonialism. Colonialism is the house that builds all of this.
Rachel: Yeah. I agree. 100%.
Ashley: So let's talk about tonlé and how you’re at least, in a small way, trying to build a more ethical structure. Something that I really appreciate about your website is number one: you don't use the word “disrupt,” which I hate.
But number two, you also admit your own mistakes. And you talk about that. You talk a lot about honesty and how you're not necessarily this big company who's trying to shake things up—I mean, you're trying to shake things up to the extent that you can— but you're saying like, “This is our company and this is what we can do.”
So I was wondering if you can talk about some of the tenets of tonlé that are attempting to at least chisel away at some of these colonial structures.
Rachel: I think, just going back to my experiences—when I first moved to Cambodia, I, and again, this was in conversation with our makers, but mostly my first goal was, “Let's provide jobs for people that are safe and comfortable and different than what's happening in fashion at large.”
There is this culture of aid and white saviorism that is also a continuation of colonialism and this idea that, myself as a white person, not only a white person, but a person from North America who's had access to a good education and a lot of privileges—that I have benefited from this colonialism very directly through the riches of my culture that have been enriched through this extraction and this exploitation.
To to Cambodia and then saying, “I'm going to help people,” but not acknowledging that the very poverty that I was seeing was actually caused by my own culture's history of extraction…
Ashley: I see what you’re saying. I think that's hard to reframe sometimes because you're totally right. The way that so many companies in the Global North and in Western countries portray themselves is this very like, “We are saving the world, we're saving these parts of the world that are being affected,” but there has to be a point where we say, “We caused these problems.”
It's something that I'm starting to see people talk about more in Central and South America, where in the United States, where we were refusing refugees, we caused political upheaval and disruption and instability in Central America, flat-out.
I think that that's an important framing to talk about with tonlé because it's not about like, “Oh, we're going to—again, using those buzzwords—we're going to go disrupt the fashion supply industry because these are all the problems.” It's saying we caused these problems. We need to fix it.
Rachel: Yeah. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Fair trade—we could get into it—has a lot of problems. There's a lot of neocolonialism in fair trade.
If we wanted to make trade truly fair, there have to be reparations. I don't want to say one brand can do this on their own, and that's why I don't call our work reparations. But there does need to be systemic reparations before things can get better because, for a country like Cambodia that is so resource-rich, for example, and culturally rich, but there's been so much extraction for so long that it would be really hard for people to start their own, whole new infrastructure of thriving businesses because there has been this long history of extraction.
There has to be a giving back. One thing I've been thinking about a lot are the words “giving back.” I'm like, “Yeah, we do need to give it back. We need to give it all back.”
Ashley: Right, we took it.
Rachel: I think that giving back is often framed in a very white savior way, but if we actually acknowledged that giving back means literally, “No, I took this, I need to give it back,” and really sit with that and really think about what that means and how are all the ways in which we’ve benefited from this long history of extraction.
Again, no one company can solve that, but what we're trying to do—and this is my journey—but going from saying, “Oh, I just, I come to Cambodia, I'm seeing all this sadness and this poverty, and I want to help, and I want to do something about it,” but then having that realization, living there and seeing that ongoing impact of neocolonialism in the garment industry and in the aid industry and saying, “No, I'm actually part of these problems. I'm actually part of why these problems are happening. And if anything, the best I can do is to reduce my harm and try to return and redistribute some of that wealth that's been taken away.”
A big part of that is a fairer distribution. Again, I want to emphasize that not one company can do this by themselves. You have to be in a systemic thought pattern where we have to have collaborators and we work to create better systems at the same time, thinking within our business, how can we have a fair distribution of risk and rewards so that more money can be returned to people who had created that wealth.
Ashley: I think that's a really interesting point, what you said about reducing harm, because I think when you talk about companies that have connections to colonialism, or are the product of colonialism, there's a lot of talk of doing good, but there's not a lot of talk of reducing harm, because that feels bad, because that's a negative.
Rachel: To acknowledge that you created harm.
Ashley: And you need to reduce that harm!
Because it's easy to paint it the other way around. It's easy to say, “Oh, we're doing good work.” It's easy to see upward projections or it's easy to see impact that's benefiting people as good, but it's like—no, you [need] to reduce harm because you fucked it up to start.
I want to talk a little bit about how tonlé at least attempts to reduce harm. One of the things that I was really interested in when I was on your website was how you talk about the supply stream.
Maybe this is a weak visual—sometimes when I'm reading things, I try to visualize them. But when I think about a traditional supply stream, it seems like a linear—it seems like a graph that's going up and it starts with makers at the very bottom and then ends with CEOs or people who own the means of production or own power often ending up with the most resources. It seems like, in some way, you're trying to make that a circle. I was wondering what that looks like.
Rachel: That's what we're trying to go for. I believe that in the business models of the future, we need to be thinking—and the systems of the future beyond just business models, because I think there's also a tendency, I think right now there's an emphasis on businesses are gonna do everything and that's not a good way to think about it.
I think in the business models of the future, first of all, they need to be something that benefits everyone. And we need to be thinking about building our businesses in a way where everybody can thrive and benefit and cooperate to build something that actually does center the benefit of everybody involved. That includes the customers, that includes the owners, that includes the investors, but it also has to include the people who make the products because the people who make your products should be core to your business and [you should be] treating them well and making sure that they're benefiting—that should be your highest priority, because they're making the very thing that you are selling.
That seems very fundamental to me, but it's so opposite of what the traditional fashion industry looks like insofar as that, in the traditional fashion industry, the people who make products are actually not even included in the businesses.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when a lot of retailers were having shut-downs, they just canceled their orders to their suppliers. In some cases, a lot of those products were already produced or even already shipped. The brands just said, “No, we're not going to pay.”
A lot of people from the outside are like, “How can they do that? How can they not pay their workers who made their products?” And the fundamental problem is that those workers are not even considered an important part of those businesses, which is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.
Ashley: That’s a common theme in a lot of businesses—the idea that the people who make the thing that is valuable are the most disposable. And that's very true in coffee as well, on both ends of the supply stream. I don't think we talk about the producing end as much in terms of disposability, but certainly for baristas, we treat them as disposable.
Rachel: Yeah. [We treat] commodified knowledge or creativity as more valuable than labor, or more valuable than the skills that it takes to create a high-quality product or the skills that it takes to farm a high-quality product.
You see this really in tech—their whole goal is to outsource all of their production of anything physical and to consolidate the knowledge and the creativity as the value. You see that to a certain extent in the fashion industry as well, where brands and patents are more valuable and even technologies are more valuable than the labor that goes into a product.
And not only the labor—I want to emphasize that it takes a lot of skill to make a high-quality product in fashion. There's a reason that robots don't make garments, because they’re hard to make. It's very hard to make a good garment—weaving and dying and all of these things. These things take a lot of skill and we don't value that anymore.
I think a big part of this again goes back to colonialism, because Europe was not resource-rich. So they went to all these other countries to extract the resources and made their value the “supposed knowledge” that they had—through religion and writing and language and history. They quantified that as their value.
I mean, this is a little esoteric, but it's kind of led to this idea that there's this knowledge class of creative people who, even to the point, in the art world, the highest-valued artists don't even make their products and have workers who make their things that get paid far less than they do for coming up with the idea.
Ashley: Something that you said that was really interesting is the need to build businesses that take care of everybody. I think it's really easy for people to almost default on how the system works as an excuse to not pay people.
So I was actually just reading this Facebook chain that a friend of mine who's a chef started, and it was all about how restaurants can't afford to pay chefs or cooks more money. And while that is true—because the restaurant industry is deeply, deeply flawed—I just thought how interesting it was that this person was able to justify the lack of high wages as just a problem that we have to deal with.
Like, “Oh, but I still deserve to have a business. I still deserve to run a restaurant and make money at the exploitation of others.” And I think that that's probably true in a lot of industries, including the fashion industry.
Rachel: Totally. That really resonates with me because I sort of had this realization probably a few years back where I felt some of those things. Where I'm like, “I have to conform to some of these things that I don't like about the industry in order to survive so I can keep paying people…” and so forth.
I can't put my finger on exactly what, but I think what I realized is that for me, I have no interest in running a business that isn't 100% true to my values. I would rather run no business at all, or a smaller business, a smaller version of this business, than to compromise on some of these very important things. If our goal is to create this more fair microsystem within the system, I want to do that 100%, even if that means being—most of the time, it doesn't mean closing down, it just means being much smaller.
I would rather do that 100% on the smallest scale than to grow really big and have to compromise. A lot of that pressure is actually coming from not just sustaining as you are, but there's a pressure to grow. I think usually when you have to grow, that's where these compromises start coming in.
A lot of that pressure does come from investors now. I have seen a lot of so-called sustainable fashion companies, when they raise money, they end up compromising because eventually those investors are going to be like, “Well, now I'm not happy with 20% profit anymore. I want you to make 25% profit. Now I want you to make 30% profit.” So how do you come up with that profit?
Then you end up squeezing things or you have to grow in some unsustainable way. I think the pressure is often not just about making a decent amount of money, but making a lot of money and who gets to consolidate that wealth.
I think for me, I realized I would much rather stay a bit smaller and just be more authentic to what we do than to grow and compromise, because that would be, I don't know, that would just be a fundamentally—I don't want to run a business like that. So why would I do that? I'd rather close.
Ashley: Right, and I think that's okay. That's something that I think when people talk about owning businesses, that's failure, but it's not.
I actually had somebody on my show maybe two years ago (David Hu), he ran a coffee shop in New Jersey, and it ran for a couple of years and then he shut down and we talked about that. We talked about what success was and what failure was. And he was like, “No, I succeeded. I ran the coffee shop I wanted to run. I paid baristas well. They knew their schedules ahead of time. I didn't devalue their work. I closed because I ran out of money, but I didn’t fail.”
I think this is really a framework because on the converse, what you were talking about—and especially because you're in San Francisco, you're in the epicenter of VC funding and venture capital is coming in and demanding, “Okay, we've made 20% returns this year. I want 25% this year. I want 30% this year.” It's embedded in our system that we are expected to grow constantly.
Rachel: Just on that: With the “impact” or “do good” space, I think there's also this added pressure to grow your impact.
I've talked to a lot of investors and we've actually raised some money, but luckily we've been able to raise it in a way that's very values-aligned—that could be another conversation. There's a lot of people, investors, who are trying to get into the impact space now and be like, “Oh, well now we're an impact investor, but we want you to make the same amount of profit. And also we want you to impact the lives of a million people.”
I've actually been passed up for funding versus other businesses that I knew they were deciding to make those compromises where it's like, “Oh, I want to be able to employ 1,000 people, but their lives are only going to be marginally better, they're going to get 10% more wages instead of having a very radically different business model.”
So compromising supposedly for incremental quote unquote “impact” versus radically reforming the system—because I think if you want to radically reform the system and really challenge those norms, you can't take traditional investment capital. It's just fundamentally not aligned, in my opinion. But people think they need money and they want to grow. So they decide to make those compromises. But I don't know.
Ashley: It’s tricky and it's weird because a lot of it involves almost deprogramming your brain a little bit. And I can see where say, “Oh, we hired 1,000 people” feels really good, but like you mentioned, if the impact is really minimal, would that impact be better served by fundamentally changing the lives of a few people in a really radical way as opposed to being able to put in your pitch deck, “Look at all the people we've helped.”
That's what that feels like. It feels like I'm going to put a pitch deck together and put these numbers together.
Rachel: And it's kind of disingenuous because it's like, people can already get jobs in Cambodia for 10% more money. Just because you went and created all these jobs, I don't know. It's just weird. It's like, “Oh, you're responsible for employing these people, but it's kind of taking away their agency.”
But I think the impact of tonlé, one thing I realized is that for me, I really want to create a business model that challenges the norms. I don't want to just be like, “Oh, look, I employ these people. Great. I'm good.” I want to create a model that people can look to and that can really challenge those norms and say, “Look, it's possible to do this and that we can really rethink and question these structures.” And like you say, do things that businesses don't do, like being open and transparent about our mistakes, being honest about the challenges and the compromises that we do have to make sometimes, and why we made those choices.
Businesses typically don't do that, right? And I'm not saying, “Oh, look, we're so good, blah, blah, blah …” But our customers are coming to us and saying, “This is so refreshing, and I wish more people did this.” And for me, that's worth it. That we can set a standard, that there is this different way of doing things.
No, it's not going to be perfect. We are living in a terrible system and we're all participating in different ways, but it's about choosing how you participate and then being transparent about how you've chosen to participate. I would rather know I'm participating in all these terrible things. I would rather pick the least bad one and then just be like, look, this is the choice I had to make. And here's why, you know what I mean?
Ashley: I see what you're saying. That's something I’ve thought about too, is that it can be really easy to see a problem like exploitation and colonialism and how the supply stream works and think this is too overwhelming. There's too much, but it is OK to choose a part that you can tackle.
I want to talk a little bit about one of the things that I think is really interesting that tonlé does—thinking about that circular supply stream is that customers are very much involved in that process. Something that I think is really compelling about the way that your business works is that the final point of sale—the customer now has the thing that they have bought and it is done, and that's the end of it—is not the end for tonlé.
There's a resale market. You talk about aftercare, how to take care of your items so that they actually last a long time. You also have this acknowledgement that the customer isn't necessarily always right. So I was wondering how you think about your customers—and not to say that you're not grateful for them, or anything like that, but customers are equal to employees. You can't treat customers as more valuable. They're just not.
Rachel: I think that this concept that the customer is always—the way that often manifests in the kind of fair trade fashion world is through also white saviorism.
It’s like, “Oh, buy this handbag and save a woman from sex slavery. Buy this and save poor people in Africa.” That is super disempowering, obviously. But it's this very white savior mentality and this very colonialist way of looking at it. It’s like, “Oh, the fashion industry is bad, but you can buy fair trade and you can save people.” That leads into the founder narrative that we were just talking about of like, “Oh, go to Cambodia and save people through providing these jobs.”
Well, you're not providing jobs. People have a contract to work with you and you've mutually decided to work together to make something and to sell something. I used to, but I've changed this, I don't say I'm providing jobs for people. I employ people. They choose to come work at tonlé, right? They always have the agency to leave as well.
People keep choosing to work at tonlé every day because it's good for them. And it's good for us. It's a mutually beneficial agreement. At the point at which it's no longer good for them, I hope that they find something else that they like better. The same is true with our customers, the way that I see our customers and the way that we've tried to articulate this is that the relationship of a person who buys a product to the person who makes it is a mutually beneficial agreement.
You get a beautiful, handmade product that has a lot of integrity and labor and skill put into it and they get paid fairly for their labor and skill and design. That's a mutually beneficial agreement and it should be seen as such.
So when you're a customer buying from a company that's trying to produce things in a fair way, yes, you're supporting their work, but equally you're getting something out of that.
Ashley: I also appreciate that you talked about the use of language because that's something that I've been trying to think about, even in the job market—the idea of how power works.
“I'm providing a job, I'm giving you a job.” No, no, no, no, no, no. We live in a capitalist system where we have to work. Jobs are there, you can employ people because that's what the relationship is, but to acknowledge that this is the system under which we work versus this paternalistic, “This is the thing I'm giving you,” is really, really interesting. And something I want to explore more of in the coming months.
Just to start to wrap up our conversation, just because we're going a little bit longer than some of the normal episodes that we do, I was wondering if you could talk about what you want people to know about tonlé.
Rachel: Oh, that's a hard one. I would say the most important thing to me about tonlé, or that I want people to really understand, is how different it is that we do our own production.
Our production, our sales, our design, all working in tandem seems very fundamental, but it's very radically different than what's going on in the traditional industry. When we talk about, “Oh, Nike makes this shoe,” or, “H&M makes this T-shirt,” it's not correct.
Nike doesn't make anything. H&M doesn't make anything. They don't own factories. They don't operate manufacturing facilities, they don't grow the cotton. You know? I want to really emphasize that I think the first thing that really needs to happen to change these systems is that I want customers and people who are new to the industry to understand that there is this major disconnect between where value is placed—and it’s not on the production.
And I think we need to recenter the people who are producing our goods, and that includes factory owners. That includes the people who are running production, because they are the experts in making products. Usually when we talk about sustainability, when we talk about brands, if you go to a sustainability conference, you will just see the leaders of all these sustainability departments at brands, but they're not the experts in sustainability. They're not doing the sustainability work. The sustainability work is being done by the factories and the workers, and even the factory owners. They're the experts, yet they're rarely involved in these conversations.
One of the things I'm most proud of with tonlé is that within our business, that's all very integrated and we have people running production who also do production. We have people working on designs who also are involved in the production of the garments. So that is all designed as a system to work that way.
In thinking about language and thinking about how we reframe this—we need to analyze that and analyze how we talk about these brands and the long-term implications of that.
Ashley: Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a really fun conversation and I think it might be easy to be like, “Oh, how does fashion relate to coffee?” But there are so many themes that translate to both industries. And I really thank you for going in depth with me.
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Exploring Coffee Through Fast Fashion with Rachel Faller