Fashion forward brands

Marketing should be as sustainable as products, say clothing company founders.

The founders of sustainable fashion brand Rapanui Clothing have declared war on greenwash.

Brothers Mart and Rob Drake-Knight are campaigning to make marketing as sustainable as the green products it pushes.

“We feel that supply and demand should be allowed to work naturally, but the current trend of green marketing is making it difficult for consumers to work out what is a truly sustainable product and what is greenwash,” Rob Drake-Knight told Businessgreen.com.

The brothers’ solution is to mix user-generated content with honest communication and information design.

“Sustainability can be as much about the marketing method as the product,” added Mart Drake-Knight. “Sustainable marketing is all about… good communication design and innovation. For us this means recognising the shopper’s behavioural habits and innovating new systems that allow people to shop quickly, with a conscience.

“We’ve invested a lot of time in communication design and, put simply, we use eco-labelling to benchmark a products' eco impact – interactive traceability maps are available to go into more detail if needed, with images, video and figures of our entire supply chain for every product from seed to shop.”

If potential customers want to dig deeper into the scientific detail behind the products, Rapanui has built a wiki-style resource, where consumers can ask further questions in open dialogue with the company.

Sales have increased by 1,000 per cent since the tool was launched – admittedly in a growing company only founded in 2008. But the approach has also won the brothers a 2010 Sustainable Business Award.

“We’re saying that fashion brands should start educating themselves, and their consumers, about their supply chains and reduce spin marketing and reconnect the consumer’s awareness of their environmental consequence – ie, their buying action,” says Mart Drake-Knight.