Stop buying crap, and companies will stop making crap – Info Web Design

Congratulations! We killed Ivanka Trump’s brand!

On Tuesday, the first daughter announced that she was shuttering her fashion line. In an official statement, she explained that it was because she wanted to focus on her role as an adviser in her father’s administration. But the timing of the announcement was curious: She could have ended her brand the day she took the White House position, but she chose not to.

The business seemed to be floundering: One source found that online sales of Ivanka Trump products sold on Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Zappos fell nearly 55% over the last year.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly caused sales to plummet, but if you refused to purchase an Ivanka Trump product over the last few years, I’m going to suggest that you had something to do with it.

There are many reasons you may have scrolled past those bland Ivanka Trump A-line dresses or bedazzled heels on Amazon or walked past them at Bloomingdales. The brand was the target of a massive boycott, spearheaded by Grab Your Wallet, a movement urging people to protest the Trump family’s ethical violations by refusing to buy from their brands. Reporters investigating the brand’s supply chains found a trail of human-rights violations–from below minimum wage pay to being forced to work 57 hours a week to hit production targets–which may have dissuaded some women from buying the clothes. And then there was the crappy design of the products: Women complained that they were made of low-quality materials and were unflattering on most body types.

It almost doesn’t matter whether you were more offended by her father’s child separation policies or how ugly her cork pumps were. The fact is, our individual purchasing choices do matter: We have the power to kill off brands and force the industry to do better.

But as a fashion reporter, I’m seeing some big consumer-led trends that are sweeping the industry, thanks to our collective decision to affect change. We’re telling brands to stop treating clothes like they are disposable, cut down on pollution, and treat their workers with more dignity–and they’re listening.

We’re killing fast fashion

But fast fashion also trained consumers to think of clothes as disposable. When you can buy an of-the-moment dress for $12.99, it’s very easy to come back in a week to pick up a new one and toss the old one. We now know that this behavior has huge environmental consequences. As the media has widely reported,  Americans have doubled the amount of clothing they toss every year over the last two decades from 7 million to 14 million tons, which is about 80 pounds a person. And donating clothes to charities only creates economic headaches in developing countries, some of which are trying to ban the import of secondhand clothes.

We’re demanding brands treat workers better

It’s not just quality and environmental waste we care about. Many consumers are more concerned than ever about how garment workers around the world are being treated.

Many of us had a big wakeup call in 2013, when a shoddily built clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 garment workers and injuring 2,600 more. (The New York Times found that many of the injured are still suffering five years later, and a number of them have committed suicide.) After all, these low-wage laborers had lost their lives making clothes–for brands like The Children’s Place, Mango, and Primark–that many buyers would casually throw away after a few wears.

In the past, most brands were cagey about sharing details about their supply chain. But things have changed over the last few years, largely because consumers are demanding to know if anybody suffered while making our clothes. Many fashion startups are carefully choosing to manufacture at factories where workers are treated well and are paid a living wage.

But as consumers, our work is far from over. While there is some evidence that the market for ethically conscious products is growing and young people, in particular, are keen to buy from brands that are doing good in the world, the biggest apparel corporations in the world are slow to change their ways, partly because they have so much power in the market and believe their customers will buy anything they put on their shelves.

When we hear stories of widespread abuse at factories thousands of miles away, it’s easy to fall into apathy and believe that there’s not much we can do to change the status quo. But we can allow our horror and outrage to change our behavior, and prompt us to think carefully about where we choose to buy our next pair of jeans or kitten heels. It might not change things immediately, but over time, it’s clear that wallet activism works.

Just ask Ivanka Trump.