Profit-Sharing, Education, and Indigenizing Supply Chains: A Blueprint for the Future of Ethical Fashion
With Niha Elety
Interview by Stella Hertantyo
Niha Elety is the founder and CEO of the fashion brand, Tega Collective. Tega Collective is a sustainable fashion enterprise that champions Adivasi communities from India and their textile traditions. With each clothing collection, Tega co-creates with communities by highlighting their traditional colors, patterns, and natural symbols.
I interviewed Niha in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership about:
Why we need to indigenize fashion supply chains,
The biggest barriers when it comes to making sure that fashion is a medium for cultural sustainability,
How to incorporate ethical profit sharing into a sustainable fashion business model,
And mindfully marketing garments in a way that balances the need to sell products and make money, without encouraging overconsumption.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation. Inside our membership, you'll find the full recording with more insights from Niha (and get instant access to other expert Q&A recordings, workshops, and live events).
What led you to the positions you hold today?
A lot of my journey and starting my brand has come from growing up in two different places. For half of my life, I grew up in the United States. At the age of 11, I moved to India and quickly saw how differently sustainability was being practiced in both places.
I'm sure a lot of us have experienced seeing how differently our parents practice sustainability versus what was preached to us about sustainability. So I was curious about sustainability at a young age, but didn’t know what to do with it.
I have a visual arts background and I’ve grown up surrounded by textiles. Living in India, I had so much access to local textiles through weavers, artisans, printers, and tailors. The ecosystem in countries like mine is outward and consumers can interact with it. Whereas, in the US, the only access I had to my clothing was going to a mall and purchasing it. So you're quite disconnected from that process.
I developed a passion for textile ecosystems and began posting about it online while I was in college. I studied biomedical engineering, which is completely unrelated to what I do today. Sometimes you follow a career path to reassure your parents, which is how I settled on engineering.
While studying, I was posting online about concepts that I hadn’t heard spoken about much in the sustainability space. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people realized the gaps in the current sustainability narrative. That’s also when people started opening up their minds to the idea of cultural sustainability.
During the pandemic, I also started my brand Tega Collective. This happened after I was on a panel discussion with a few Adivasi environmentalists. “Adivasi” means “Indigenous”. So Adivasi people are from Indigenous communities and tribes in India.
A lot of their ways of dressing have been appropriated by big brands in the West and by non-tribal communities in India. So a lot of their work is mass-produced on textiles that aren’t created by the tribes themselves. The environmentalists I was speaking to noted this as a big issue for the craft sector in these communities. That’s where I had the idea of starting Tega Collective and now here I’m today.
You studied biomedical engineering. What is your advice for those wanting to pivot into sustainable fashion from a seemingly disconnected industry?
I grew up thinking that if you chose a certain college major, or started in a certain career path, then that’s what you’ll end up doing your whole life. I’ve learned that that’s not true. There are so many multi-hyphenated people and so many people who have pivoted careers.
What worked for me was talking about sustainable fashion online and sharing my ideas, while studying biomedical engineering. I also spoke on different panels and made sure I always had my foot in the door. That’s what got me into the world of sustainable fashion. Since then, I’ve worked with organizations like Remake, Slow Factory, and the United Nations.
There are so many intersections in sustainable fashion. For example, my degree in biomedical engineering has helped me understand materials and biomaterials in fashion well. So my advice for those wanting to pivot is to find the intersection that’s most relevant to your work and lean into it — even if it feels disconnected.
Find the specific sustainable fashion angle that you are passionate about and start talking to and reaching out to the people in that space. The quickest way to learn is by connecting with other people.
What does it mean to indigenize fashion supply chains?
The reason I talk about indigenizing fashion supply chains so much is because the biggest focus of a lot of the sustainable brands we talk about is on finding the most sustainable fiber that they can use to create clothing. For them, that’s the solution and the silver bullet to being a more sustainable brand. But this has led to a lot of greenwashing.
What we fail to understand is that you can’t just take one plant, plant it around the world, and expect it to be the most sustainable fiber. The most sustainable fibers are those native and local to the areas you grow them in. Right now, the way agriculture and a lot of our farming systems are is just large fields of the same crop.
So we're noticing a lot of people going back to more ancient, Indigenous wisdom — whether it's regenerative agriculture, permaculture, or agroforestry.
I was always wondering why we couldn't apply this to the fashion supply chains. Why aren't we focusing on restoring the ecosystems that we live in, but through native fibers that can be used to create clothing? That's something that a lot of tribes have done in the past. That’s why I started emphasizing the need to indigenize supply chains.
How do you ensure that your business model is financially sustainable while ensuring that you can ethically compensate artisan partners?
It’s quite complex, because we have to balance many aspects when it comes to pricing. We have to make sure that the price point is accessible to consumers, that the artisan partners we work with are ethically compensated, and that we’re still making a profit.
Because the rest of the fashion industry operates with artificially cheap and extractive pricing, sustainable brands are at a disadvantage when we try to use true pricing. We aren’t rewarded for it at all. We definitely aren’t rewarded monetarily, even though we’re trying to positively shift fashion’s status quo.
But we always return to our why. For each capsule collection where we collaborate with artisan partners, 7% of our proceeds are funneled back to the communities we work with to remove the traditional hierarchy of power and profit.
This is the model we work with, because we work with communities where the crat belongs to them. Yet, for many years, artisans and garment workers have been the lowest-paid fashion workers — even though they’re the ones with all the skills and knowledge.
That’s why we decided that we want everyone involved in the creation of our garments to have a level of equity in the company. We want everyone to be a stakeholder. This is something that our artisan partners were interested in as well.
So it's a mutually agreed upon percentage that we came up with. This is on top of the wages that the artisans are paid as well.
When it comes to ensuring that our financial model is sustainable and has a margin for growth, a lot of this has come down to making sure that the pricing of our garments is holistic and not nearsighted. For example, you have to think about the future and consider if marketplace commissions and wholesale opportunities are something you’d be interested in in the future and work that into your pricing from the start.
This is the approach we take, but there is still a long way to go. It’s not easy when the system is working against you.
How have you managed the need to “mindfully market” your garments in a way that balances the need to sell your products and make money, without encouraging overconsumption?
Right now, we aren’t running sales unless it’s during the holiday season. This sets a precedent for the kind of price point that we’re trying to set. It spreads the message that the reason garments are priced the way they’re is because we’re compensating artisan partners.
We also don't want to encourage overconsumption. So we make sure to communicate that quite a lot on our social media and website.
I think the key to mindfully marketing sustainable products is to find a healthy balance of product pushing, community engagement, and education. I love to share informative videos and posts about sustainable fashion — and I’ll often link the examples I’m using to various garments we produce. Or perhaps I’m filming a “day in the life of a founder” video while wearing our garments. I’m not directly speaking about the garment, but I’m sharing something valuable.
Building a loyal community goes beyond pushing your product. That has been our approach.
What are the biggest barriers when it comes to making sure that fashion is a medium for cultural sustainability? What does degrowth mean, in practice, for brand owners? What is the line between cultural sustainability and cultural appropriation? How do you first get in contact with the artisan communities you want to work with?
To hear from Niha on these topics and much more, watch the full recording in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership!