Earth Day reflections, the imperfect pursuit of sustainability, and a PM's framework for obsessing over your wardrobe
(..and sucking a little less every day)
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Becoming a product manager is a double-edged sword. You spend all your time at work applying and perfecting the science of problem solving. Then you take that back home with you, extending it to problems you face in your every day life. On the one hand, you develop the confidence and systematic approach to solve any problem you’re experiencing. On the other hand, you believe you can find a solution to any problem. This is a fallacy, and a humbling one at that.
This post is about my own adventures in trying to product-manage my life.
I spend a lot of time thinking about my consumption habits and how to make lasting changes to them in a way that reduces harm to the Earth and its inhabitants. If you’re someone who thinks about this too, you must be familiar with the enormity of the challenges on this path, how imperfect the journey is and how loaded the term ‘sustainability’ is.
Backstory
I am someone for whom clothes have always been a major channel of self-expression and self-assertion, and a pretty integral part of my identity. Growing up in a developing country, my life and habits shifted from their inherently sustainable roots (a characteristic of communities of color) and proliferated indiscriminately as my financial position and purchasing power grew. Sustainability is not something you’re thinking of when you are a have-not spending half your life playing catch-up with the wealthier haves.
After getting sufficiently westernized in my pursuit of more, and after having poured thousands of $ into making the world’s fast fashion giants richer, I started getting re-introduced to the narrative of mindful consumption. The appeal of less and better started growing in me.
Problem exploration
I wanted my lived experience to reflect thoughtfulness about the resources I take from, use and ultimately release into my environment. More specifically, I wanted to transform the way I shop for and spend money on clothing.
This became my Mission Statement.
This was going to be a tall order, unlearning decades of impulse- and convenience-based decision making. I had no idea about the end destination. For Point A, I had to start with an honest assessment of where I was, my current state. Point B is still very fuzzy. Where does all this lead?
In a typical problem solving process, this is called discovery, and the end-to-end process looks like this:
Framework
After a lot of self education (thank you Internet universe) and introspection, I decided to frame this journey around the values I wanted to adopt to guide my actions.
Why values and not goals?
Goals are very point-in-time. They get outdated as new information emerges. They’re often extremely arbitrary. Goals are not lasting. Goals are unforgiving. I wanted this process to generate a consciousness in me that had just never been there before. For lasting change I needed values that would form the decision making framework and guide me towards my mission.
Values
Reinvent myself by using my values to guide purchase decisions.
It’s ok to still aspire to elevate my style, but I will do it responsibly and choose mindful consumption over drastic action.
Be clear about what I’m willing to give up for the mission.
Reject impulse purchasing. Think long and hard about new purchases and buy only when they’re complementary. Fall in love with my wardrobe.
Reject trends, choose to identify and develop an individual sense of style.
Reject the fast fashion industry. If I can’t trust that a company is treating its labor force well and being a responsible producer, I can not support it.
Embrace my roots as a person of color.
Keep it simple with the good ‘ol mantra: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Measure my purchases. I can only change what I can measure.
Based on these values I developed a set of strategies that now comprise my repeatable playbook for how I make purchase decisions. The difference between values and strategies is that the former stay constant across horizons while the latter may change based on the horizon.
A horizon is a time period, a phase. In the process diagram below, each of the 4 arrows represents a horizon.
Strategies for Experimentation
Build on my wardrobe with the right accessories instead of buying more clothes. Advantages:
They are never washed, so no microplastics in the ocean.
They are long lasting, investment pieces.
Statement bags and shoes can be the focal point of an outfit while having a capsule wardobe of good quality basics.
They multiply the possibilities when mixed-matched with existing clothing.
A good quality shoe or handbag adds sophistication to an outfit in a way that clothes seldom can.
Buy pre-owned, thrift and vintage as much as possible. Advantages:
Actively participate in landfill redirection.
They have a lot of personality, are more unique and are almost always conversation starters. If I care about up-leveling my style game, I can’t disregard these options.
Vintage luxury pieces are a lot higher quality (material+craftsmanship) than their modern-day equivalents. (Many luxury brands had their roots in local family-owned small businesses that hand-crafted luxury goods for the elite. Later, business executives took over these heritage houses and used aggressive marketing tactics to turn them into their contemporary, mass-produced versions.)
Some materials (eg leather, denim, fur, silk) age beautifully and that look can never be replicated by new items.
Discover and support indie labels, boutiques, small businesses operating out of basement studios/ ateliers, minority- and marginalized- owned labels, for example, women owned, trans owned, bipoc (black, indigenous, people of color) owned, etc. Advantage:
Reject the legacy, colonized, commercial fashion industry that runs on sweatshops and factories that pay unfair wages, creates life-threatening work conditions, exploits humans, uses forced labor/ slavery, etc.
Educate yourself, do your own research, don’t believe myths fed by an industry that inherently can’t be trusted.
Hold brands accountable to claims of being ‘sustainable’, ‘vegan’, ‘feminist’, Use their social platforms to ask questions. Be suspicious and unforgiving of those that ignore, flounder or are dishonest.
Make it a habit to read the fabric composition labels on my clothes.
Make it a habit to research what companies reveal about their supply chains on their websites and through industry research like the Fashion Transparency Index.
Embrace my roots as a person of color.
Buy local. Normalize things like clothing swaps, hand-me-downs, sharing and repairing clothes, DIY, upcycling, handwashing in cold water, hang drying, etc.
Use my privilege to buy from indigenous peoples (who exemplify sustainable farming and animal husbandry practices) so my money goes straight to them, not to colonizing companies. Rethink gifting by supporting such producers for my gifting needs.
These strategies also led me to some initial metrics to understand whether I am making good choices. According to my value #9, I can only change what I measure.
Metrics
My intermediate outcome here is to maximize the number of good choices I make. A ‘good choice’ is one that adheres to one or more of the strategies above (which in turn draw from the values). So the metrics I picked are:
Value and % of dollars spent on ‘good choices’
Number and % of items that fulfill one or more of the ‘good choice’ criteria
I also introduced sub-categories that logically group together my ‘good choice’ strategies so I could slice and dice the data multiple ways.
As an example, this is my data for 2020:
Notes on the data:
- Cost column is in USD
- Data includes spending on gifting. Does not include retail spending outside of clothing and accessories. (e.g. spending on Amazon for groceries and home supplies, gadgets etc. I never shop for clothing on Amazon, but if I did I’d add it here). I do track makeup/skincare/vanity spending separately but didn’t include it here.
So in 2020, I spent 66.13% of my total wardrobe expenditure on good choices. 59.57% of all items I bought fulfill my ‘good choices’ criteria. I am not going to break the data down further or present it over multiple years. That’s a great exercise, but I want to keep the focus very much on the process, rather than this dataset.
As you may be thinking by now, my process has some limitations
Limitations
Categorization is tricky and in reality, ‘good choices’ is a spectrum. For example >90% of my ‘Conventional new’ purchases are luxury handbags or shoes which, arguably, per strategy #1, could be categorized as good choices. But in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I didn’t want to categorize them as so. Many of the items brought from indie, minority-owned small businesses are relatively good choices (from a labor and production practices standpoint) but if they’re made from dirty fabrics like polyester, rayon, nylon, etc. they’re far behind a linen or other biodegradable item from a fast fashion brand. I don’t break my data down by material, because >80% of contemporary clothing seems to made with fabric blends. You can optimize for 1-2 categories but beyond that it starts getting quite impractical.
My process currently incentivizes diversification of my overall consumption, not net reduction. Like I mentioned, this is an explorative and experimentative phase, where I am still analyzing the multi-year viability of the different strategies. As my last full year of data shows, I am moderately performant against the strategy but strictly adherent to the spirit behind ‘good choices’.
Concluding thoughts
This is the start of a conversation about some really hard challenges facing the fashion industry and us, the consumers of it. There’s a lot of learning to be gleaned, innovation to be seen and transparency to be had, and all these things take time and commitment. If you find my framework valuable in your own pursuits of mindful consumption, drop me a comment below and I’d love to share the template or brainstorm solutions.