Since this new virus broke into our lives their sales have risen significantly. For example Black Friday 2020 online shopping surged 22% to record $9 billion 1 . On the other hand, Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com set new records by racking up around $115 billion in sales across their shopping websites during the Singles Day event in November 2020 2 . This important shift in the consumer behaviour is expected to be irreversible.
As a consequence of this change, customers are increasingly demanding more information regarding the product composition and manufacturing process, which results in more pressure for companies to maintain their ecological credentials, work force wellbeing and environmental care policies at a high standard. This puts traceability on demand, not just a fancy marketing statement anymore.
The above situation conforms a scenario where natural fibres, such as wool, can show their renewable and sustainable attributes. Wool grows yearly and naturally. When it comes to animal welfare, in Uruguay sheep live free from stress and following the basic norms published in the animal welfare guide www.wool.com. Being a natural fibre, it does not contribute to micro plastic pollution, plus wool garments are washed less often, dry on the line and have longer life spans. They can also be recycled and turned into other products such as bedding fillings. At the end, wool fibre returns to where it came from, earth, being that wool is biodegradable. In other words, plastics disintegrate and turn into micro plastics. Hence, essentially when eating fish, you are, to some extent, eating micro plastic, whereas as wool biodegrades, it turns into soil where trees and plants can grow. Yet, many environmental rankings rate better oil origin fibres because they are not taking into account the oil extracting stage, neither the disposal nor end-of-life phase.
As a society we started to notice and be astonished by the vast landfills and desperate to find a culprit we set our magnifying glass on the process of the clothes we wear and on putting an end to the single-use plastics we consume. As a consequence we are gradually but consistently slowing our pace since we have seen that fashion’s fast fuel industry has damaged our planet. The only (rather significant) problem regarding this change of behaviour is the overflowing information, greenwashing strategies, biased facts and false information which confuses consumers, misleading them into buying products that aren’t exactly as ecological as what they communicate to be.
1 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/28/black-friday-2020-online-shopping-surges-22percent-to-record-9-billion-adobe-says.html2 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/coronavirus-pandemic-has-pushed-shoppers-to-e-commerce-sites.html
Nevertheless I firmly believe that the same reasons that made consumers pay more attention to the composition of what they buy, are also going to, in due time, flourish into higher consciousness of buying fabrics which have a positive impact on the environment.
We may ask whether this significant change in consumers’ conduct could have taken much longer without the pandemic… We will never know.
Anyway, one thing is certain: the fibre ball is unravelling and no one should underestimate the power of consumers who are looking through a magnifying glass to see what it finally exposes.