The official start of the Eileen Fisher Social Innovator Award recipients’ design project at Eileen Fisher happened this January. Through August, Teslin Doud, Carmen Gama and Lucy Jones will be working collaboratively in the company to create an innovative and scalable solution for damaged Green Eileen garments. The trio started the project gathering its thoughts and brainstorming with people both in and out of the company. Now, the three are doing research and getting to work with the damaged garments.
What is one key thing you learned this month, and how does it relate to sustainability and social innovation?
Carmen Gama: “I’ve learned that it’s important to try to extend a garment’s life until it fails to serve its initial purpose of being. By doing so, we give the garment more value and teach customers that what is considered “damaged” (small & medium holes, stains, worn out etc.) still has the potential of extending its life by being repaired before it is transformed into a new product or worse, becoming landfill waste. Once the garment is beyond repair,we can ask ourselves, ‘what is its next life?’ Is it to tear it apart and turn it into a whole new garment? New textiles? Or simply material for other industries? Our answer is to change the damaged garments into a beautiful new product, all the while learning ways we can be designing for take-back in the future.”
Lucy Jones: “From this point forward. we are so lucky that we are able to operate out of the Makerspace in Irvington, which is a space dedicated to organizing “Chop” and fostering creative collaborations such as ‘rug-making’ classes and relationships with the local community. One of the obstacles we are faced with is that no one damage is the same. We will therefore recommend a ’menu of processes‘ according to the severity of the damage. We are currently assessing how to make the techniques as cost and time efficient as possible with limited labor involved in order to keep the price low and hopefully introduce a different demographic to Eileen Fisher. We would like to encourage people to bring back clothes to Eileen Fisher, but also to be proud of wearing clothes that do have holes, or are slightly faded. Changing the consumer mindset through example really is the key to a more mindful consumer society. Our next steps involve plenty of collaborative opportunities and we’re looking forward to putting our system in place.”
Teslin Doud: “We have shifted gears from observing to creating as we experiment with solutions for all of the tens of thousands of damaged Green Eileen garments. In school, we got to dream as big as possible and materialize our most complicated concepts without having to worry about cost, production, or even next steps. Joining the industry and working world, reality has set in; we’ve started to see the ripple effect of our decisions and the necessity for collaboration throughout the entire company. As we begin to ideate, we find our minds running in circles, constantly overwhelmed by dreams of idealistic futures of zero waste to landfills, scalable solutions and elevated craft. Now, we are trying to let ourselves play before pulling out our lens of reality. Experimentation and mistakes can lead to incredible innovation, but accepting limitations is what will lead us to a viable solution.”
