On sustainability

Drishti and Rashmick worked with the Techlab participants in Phase Two – Exploration. This phase lasted four months during which the cohort received support in areas such as sustainability, business model development, multi-platform programming and accessibility.

We run a fashion brand called Lafaani but we’re not from a design background. Before we launched our brand, we had worked in various social impact projects including agriculture, water and sanitation.

The textiles and handicrafts of India was a personal interest which we both pursued in our free time. We launched Lafaani when Covid hit with a small investment, the minimum, more or less, required to launch an independent brand.

What we’ve seen of sustainability in fashion is that people talk a great deal about some fairly token gestures. You see some brands that are very pleased with themselves for upcycling waste while their primary material is made of synthetic fibres. We don’t often hear about whether they’re paying fair wages as part of sustainability, whether they’re providing humane working conditions, or how much they’re producing.

We wanted to look at process, the material and people right from the start, along with educating the customer how to use it better, how to repair it and how to dispose of it better. We also encourage the agency of the artisans we work with. We don’t often tell them how we want them to make our fabric, we’re very happy picking up and integrating what they’ve made into our design language. The embroiderers we work with are our co-creators, they are choosing the designs and colours.

Sustainability doesn’t just cover the environment, it’s societal and cultural. We want to preserve traditional crafts because there’s already a sector dependent on craft knowledge which has been passed down through generations.

What aspects of it did you discuss with the Techlab participants?
We began our conversations for the Techlab by trying to understand the teams as people, their interests, their motivations, what they’d learned in the first phase of Techlab and how their idea had evolved.
We wanted to first understand what they understood of sustainability. We know it’s about climate change and waste and pollution but it can often overlook things like your vendors, your partners, the organisations funding you, accessibility. There’s also the cultural aspect of minority communities and whether the service you provide is available in languages that work for them.
As these were organisations from the socio-cultural sector, these were aspects they were also focused on, though we did consider a bit of resistance from some of the teams when we discussed the idea of business sustainability and how to keep one’s work afloat.
As the participants were already engaged in the communities around them in beneficial ways, we introduced the idea of mapping out their engagement from the point of view of making a pitch, say to a local council.
We talked about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globally recognised format. Creating a visual map of all stakeholders, how they relate to each other and how they link to larger goals like the UN’s SDGs could help to create a stronger business proposal and also create targeted communication for specific audiences.
One of our teams felt they weren’t doing anything sustainable but they had overlooked that their engagement with the community is in itself sustainable. We also suggested adding features to an app which was already using green data centres, and add for example affirmations to incentivise its users, things like telling them how much Co2 they saved by using public transport instead of a car.
For some projects, we considered other ways in which their work could be used, and whether they had conducted focus groups with the users to see how it was being used.
What’s a good starting point to incorporate sustainability into a project?
Our objective overall was to create a thinking around sustainability which is more of a holistic approach so that when you’re taking decisions for any project, it’s there as part of your values. We got the sense that the participants were very open to this.
We felt that creating sustainability goals was a plan for later on and for the moment, they should be acknowledging the sustainability they were already engaged in and making it into a feature for their business proposals.