A multitude of drops: 2015

As people become more aware of the negative impacts that the mainstream fast fashion industry has on people, animals and the environment, ethical fashion has become more popular and prominent. With brands such as Reformation, Etiko and People Tree starting up to address some of the issues that fast fashion presents, customers have more options than ever before to express themselves, morals and personal values included.

But what does ethical fashion actually mean?

This is a tricky question as the term ‘ethical’ means different things to different people. Depending on who you are and what you value, ethical could mean sustainably sourced, vegan, fairtrade certified or a plethora of other different interpretations.

Instead of trying to apply a blanket definition to ethical fashion, The Conscious Wardrobe has divided businesses up into those that fit into the following categories.

Vegan: Businesses that produce items without the use of animal products such as leather.

e.g. Della

Fairtrade: Certified businesses that meet standards for international labour such as reasonable work hours, no child labour and a fair living wage as well as who have a social policy in relation to the production of their goods.

e.g. Etiko

Organic: Businesses whose natural fibres have been grown without any pesticides or other toxic materials, preserving the health of humans and the environment.

e.g. Alas the label

Eco Friendly: Businesses who focus on making their production process sustainable in ways such as minimising their use of water or minimising pollution and waste.

e.g. Reformation

Fair Working Conditions: Businesses that ensure that their workers experience reasonable work hours, no child labour and a fair living wage.

e.g. People Tree

Artisan: Businesses whose products have been crafted using artisan skills such as embroidery which preserve ancestral traditions.

e.g. Yevu

Recycled: Businesses that produce items from already existing materials such as fabrics, metals, or fibers.

e.g. Matt and Nat

Vintage/Up-cycled: Businesses that sell second hand or modified items from earlier eras.

e.g. Your local Salvos

Cause supporting: Businesses that donate a portion of their profits to a cause or charity.

e.g. Conscious Step

Dozens of fashion businesses are working towards addressing the issues in the fashion industry in these ways, its just a matter of finding them.

If you'd like to find out more about the ethical fashion movement, follow The Conscious Wardrobe on Instagram or Twitter to get more information and receive updates on our launch.

01:20
0 Comments

5 Fashion brands that combine ethics + aesthetics

Ethical Fashion

22:58
1 Comments

The True Cost

Ethical Fashion

02:31
0 Comments

Performance Nerves

03:09
1 Comments

6 ways you can build a more conscious wardrobe

Ethical Fashion

1. Educate yourself

What is ethical fashion? Why is it important? These are questions you might be asking right now. Over the next few weeks hopefully I’ll answer some of these questions through my blog posts.
In the meantime you can check out the Ethical Fashion Forum to find out a bit more.

2. Shop ethical

In recent times, more and more ethical fashion businesses are starting up, offering ethical alternatives to the clothes that you normally buy. Some of these include Reformation, Etiko and People Tree. In addition to this, Australian website goodonyou.org.au rates common brands on their impacts on the environment, animals and people. Take a look at the ratings before you go shopping to find out which stores to avoid and which are doing a good job. You might be surprised at what you find.

3. Go thrift shopping

If you can't afford to pay for clothes that are more ethically produced, head down to your local salvos or op-shop a little more often to see what you can find. You never know what fantastic items you might be able to pick up for a fraction of the cost. Not only are you being kind to your wallet, but to the environment by recycling and minimising waste.

4. Borrow clothes

Over the course of our lives we’ll be going to hundreds of social events. Weddings, birthday parties, university balls, the list is endless, and if you’re a girl theres a socially constructed taboo that you simply can’t wear the same dress twice. But lets face it, we’re not made of money and its not practical or sustainable to buy a new dress for every event that we go to. Instead, try swapping clothes with your friends, or hiring something from a website like this one: http://somethingborrowed.net.au/melbourne/for-hire/ or even on gumtree. Infinite choices for a fraction of the environmental cost!

5. Invest in timeless pieces

It’s a time old adage, ‘quality over quantity’. Unfortunately somewhere along the way, the fashion industry seems to have forgotten this, churning out new low cost, poor quality pieces every week. Break the cycle by investing your money in good quality pieces that you’ll wear over and over again like a good coat, comfortable boots or versatile black jeans instead of buying dozens of cheap items that will disintegrate or go out of style in a couple of months. You won’t regret it, I promise.

6. Subscribe to The Conscious Wardrobe

The Conscious Wardrobe is a website that I am starting up with two other talented and passionate young women to make ethical fashion more accessible to you. We aim to help you learn more, shop more ethically and give you tips to help you build a more conscious wardrobe so that we all can make the world a better place. Follow us on twitter to find out more: https://twitter.com/ConsciousAus

19:51
0 Comments

Crowd funding

Over the past few years, crowd funding has revolutionised the entrepreneurship scene. By allowing people to raise large amounts of capital from the wider community, websites such as Kickstarter, Pozible and and Indiegogo are making entrepreneurship more accessible to people from all walks of life.

Crowdfunding encourages people to get more involved in start ups and helps new businesses get off the ground. It allows many more ideas to get funded and the wider public to become investors in ideas and projects that they care about and are interested in. For this reason, entrepreneurs are able to see what the perceived value of their product is before going to production. Will people buy this? Is it worth pursuing? Is there even a demand for it? All these questions are answered before any large amounts of money are invested into the start up. This gives the entrepreneurs a better idea of whether they’re heading in the right direction, or if they’ll need to pivot and try a new approach.

However, while crowdfunding has many positive effects associated with it, there are several negatives that are often overlooked. Firstly, crowdfunding means that a lot of the seed capital used to start up an enterprise comes from the public, not through individual investors. While this does mean that most of the power remains with the entrepreneurs, it can mean that by not receiving as much pointed feedback from potential investors, their business models aren’t as well thought through.

In addition to this, many crowd funders promise ‘rewards’ to their investors, whether it be an advanced sample of their new product or a personalised thank you from the company. Once their project is funded, there is a lot of pressure put on the entrepreneurs to execute their vision quickly, while maintaining a high standard, and distribute it to their investors. Many crowd funded products were delivered later than the promised date to their investors such as the ‘Pebble watch’ and ‘Galileo’, which cast a negative image on these enterprises.

However, this is just a snapshot of the pros and cons associated with crowdfunding. For this reason, it’s important to weigh up these points and to carefully consider your options before taking to the internet to fund your next enterprise.

05:08
0 Comments

Women in entrepreneurship

entrepreneurship

15:53
0 Comments

The Cricket Cooler

entrepreneurship

03:56
0 Comments

Flicks and Feasts - Weekly Reflection #3

03:55
0 Comments

Classic Literature and Transmedia

Each of us has a story to tell.

As you scroll through my blog, you could easily head over to my Facebook profile or twitter and find more content, more photos and information about me. Each part on its own doesn’t amount to much, but put them all together and you get a more complete image of me and my story.

This idea of telling a single story across multiple platforms is called transmedia and the average person of today shares their story with the world through this method all the time. From movie stars and singers to youtubers and bloggers, many of us are no longer confined to one medium to tell our story but use many.

Traditional storytelling has often been restricted to one medium. Even when we’re creating movie adaptations of popular literature such as Harry Potter, this isn’t using multiple media to tell the one story, just telling the same story in a different way.

If the world has changed the way we communicate our lives, how come the way we tell stories hasn’t also changed?

While its true that we haven’t witnessed a storytelling revolution, the way we tell stories is changing - slowly.

Over the past few years via social media, innovative story tellers have been adapting classic literature for a new age.

The pioneer of this movement and the most successful of these adaptations to date has been Hank Green and Bernie Su’s series ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’, a modern retelling of the classic Austen novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

The story takes place largely in vlog format on youtube as Lizzie tells the audience about her life. These videos are complemented by blog posts, tweets, Q & A videos and videos by other characters in the series, the culmination of which results in a 3D character and story that is so convincing and immersive, you might even think it was real.

Since the success of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, several more adaptations have arisen, from Shakespeare’s plays to Frankenstein, more and more are jumping on board this new method of story telling.

Here are some of my favourites:

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’)

Nothing Much To Do (Adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’)

Emma Approved ( Adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’)

What do you think? Is transmedia the story telling method of the future?

02:33
0 Comments

The $5 Challenge - failure

entrepreneurship

So last post I left you after we decided that we needed to move in a different direction for the $5 challenge. To refresh your memory of what happened you can take a look here.

For our next move we decided to look at event planning. Events are great. They’re not too difficult to organise, are lots of fun and bring in a reasonable amount of money in a short amount of time. The only downside is that you only find out if your idea is successful after you’ve invested your time and money and the event is about to take place.

The first event that we tried to organise was a movie night on campus. We’d hire out the campus centre cinema, provide snacks and charge a small fee on the door.

Simple right?

Well in reality it turned out to be much more difficult.

We sorted out the movie, bought our food, set up and patiently waited for our guests to arrive.

Except - no one showed.

So instead of it being a huge night like we planned, it ended up being more like this:

Considerably confused we asked some of the people we invited why they didn’t come, and we got some valuable feedback regarding how we promoted our event. For example, we should have been more personal in our approach and more descriptive about the cause we were supporting.

The movie night wasn’t the only event we tried to do, we also planned to have a dance party. We would run it similar to how MDS runs their parties and as these parties at Monash usually attract a regular crowd of around 40 people, it appeared to be a viable option. I used my connections with MDS and they agreed to provide us with teachers, equipment, advertising space and support on the night. Everything was going to work our perfectly!

So why didn’t it happen?

Because one very key detail did not fall into place. That is, we weren’t able to secure a venue. And so inadvertently that plan was also a failure.

We had several other ideas in addition to these, but none of them worked out. So when we finally completed the challenge at the end of 4 weeks, we had only made a profit of $47.

While we weren’t very successful at making profit, our failure provided a valuable learning opportunity. We learned the importance of marketing and of recognising the opportunities that networks present, which we can apply to any future business ventures.

Have you done the $5 Challenge? How did you go? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

05:07
0 Comments

A multitude of drops

04:43
0 Comments

Friends and Fancy Cheeses - Weekly Reflection #2

Reflection

23:36
0 Comments

Australia - the world's leader in mammal extinctions

conservation

Did you know that of every 3 mammal species that goes extinct around the world, 1 of these is Australian?

Since European settlement, 30 species of Australian mammals have faded into extinction. When you include birds, reptiles and amphibians, this number sky rockets to well over 100 species being wiped out.

This is an insane number of species. How is this even possible?

Causing a species to go extinct is actually easier than you might think, and it happens far too often due to our own carelessness. In Australia the main causes include:

Habitat loss - Due to logging and land clearing, a lot of the habitat that these species called home has been lost or repurposed to fit our needs.

Invasive predators - Feral cats and foxes have decimated many populations of smaller species. For example, feral cats kills an estimated 75 million native animals every night across Australia, a loss that many species are unable to recover from.

Other invasive species - these include weeds, feral herbivores and species such as the cane toad which have significantly changed our ecosystem and reduced the amount of available resources for native species.

Fires - Over time due to human interference, there has been a change in fire regimes causing an increase in the severity and extent of wildfires which many species are unable to withstand.

But this is just the beginning of the issue. Not only have we driven many species to extinction, we are still doing it. At present, according to the IUCN, Australia has 96 critically endangered animal species. This means that these species, which include the northern hairy nosed wombat and the orange bellied parrot, are either facing an extremely high risk of extinction, or have numbers which decreased (or will decrease) by 80% within three generations. Some of these species may already be extinct.

But this doesn’t even begin to cover the scale of the problem. The IUCN red list hasn’t been updated for a few years and there are several other Australian species very near extinction that have not yet been recognised as critically endangered. One such species is Victoria’s own faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s Possum. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires destroyed approximately 42% of the possum’s habitat, halving the wild population to only 1500 individuals. This number gets smaller every year due to continued industrial clear felling in their habitat. It is common consensus amongst scientists who study this species that the Leadbeater’s Possum may not survive the next couple of decades if drastic action isn’t taken, but the classification, which hasn’t been updated since 2008, doesn’t reflect this fact and little is being done to protect the species.

Most of Australia’s wildlife is found on no other place on earth. Over 80% of our mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia, and are incredibly important to maintaining our rare and beautiful ecosystems.

It’s up to us to protect these amazing and unique species, and we can’t do it without you.

Visit the Australian Wildlife Conservancy here: http://www.australianwildlife.org/support-awc.aspx to find out more about what you can do to help save some of our amazing Australian wildlife and put a stop to the extinctions.

21:04
0 Comments

Stepping down from Leadership

leadership

Throughout my university studies we are often encouraged to step up into leadership roles and to challenge ourselves, but we often don't consider the transition out of these roles. How do you know when its time to step down and move on?

I think this is a really big challenge that leaders face whenever they are in a leadership position. When a leader fails, they don’t have to make this choice for themselves. Rather they get pushed out or encouraged to leave by the people they’re leading. This is what generally happens in government, when we’re tired of a particular Prime Minister or political party, we vote them out. But what about when a leader is liked by their followers. What then? How do you decide to move on?

A couple of months ago I was struggling with this very question. I had been president of my high school alumni over the past year and while I knew that I had put in a lot of effort into building the organisation, the work no longer interested me. Instead of feeling excited and ready to face new challenges, new problems would leave me feeling stressed and upset, yet people still wanted me to remain in my position. When I mentioned possibly stepping down people were surprised and tried to convince me not to. Was it the best outcome for me or the organisation if I remained in my position of leadership?

This required a lot of self reflection and I had to ask myself some key questions.

- Is my passion shifting?

- Do I have the time?

- Is the work too demanding?

- Would I only be staying out of obligation?

- Is there someone who could do a better job than me?

- What’s best option for the organisation?

Thinking through these questions really helped me come to a decision. I found that amongst my other commitments I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to the organisation, I no longer felt passionate about the work and instead it left me emotionally drained. It's true that I felt an obligation to my team and didn't want to let them down, but I felt that there were other people who could do a better job and that if I remained in my position it would not result in the best outcome for the organisation. For these collective reasons, I decided to step down.

While I felt sad about it at the time, upon reflection it has become clear that this was definitely the right choice both for me and the organisation. A couple of my peers stepped up into leadership roles and are doing a great job and keeping everything running smoothly. Being free from this responsibility left me feeling like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, and has allowed me to pursue other opportunities. Contrary to what some may say, this was not a failure, but a valuable learning experience for me. I hope you can learn something from it too.