"Fashion is a System": Vanessa Barboni Hallik on Co-Creating Another Tomorrow
Conscious Career Chats Series
Vanessa Barboni Hallik is the founder and CEO of the B Corp Certified sustainable design company Another Tomorrow, which she founded in 2018 while on a sabbatical from her former career in emerging markets finance.
On a mission to create a "truly sustainable and compassionate company", Another Tomorrow is focused on creating ethical responsibly made clothing and imagining a new future for fashion. The company delivers technology-enabed transparency through a fully digitized product eco-system delivering technology-enabled transparency and has implemented authenticated recommerce.
Vanessa is also an active speaker, an investor in early-stage companies set to catalyze or enable systemic change, and serves on the Board of the Accountability Counsel and on the Advisory Board for Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
How did you get your first job in fashion?
As a founder who transitioned from another industry, I created my first job in fashion as CEO. However, what made that job real was the support of an incredible group of people who rallied around the mission of Another Tomorrow and me to make this possible.
I knew a total of one person in fashion when this journey started and I am deeply grateful for every single person who took the time to listen to me as an outsider, shared their insights and opened up their networks with such generosity and love.
Why did you create Another Tomorrow?
I was on a sabbatical from my career in finance, intending to make a shift into sustainable investing from emerging markets and in the process I fell completely down the rabbit hole of how incredibly impactful this industry is. I was floored by both the magnitude and the complexity of the impact and how little leadership I saw from brands.
And so I founded Another Tomorrow with the mission of both modeling a new future for fashion and giving our community an opportunity to co-create another tomorrow in supporting how we produce.
Ensuring responsible sourcing & manufacturing is one of the biggest challenges sustainable fashion founders face. How does Another Tomorrow approach sustainable and ethical sourcing?
One of the very first things we did as a company was establish a rigorous matrix for decision-making across environmental, human and animal welfare that was science based, and in the case of animal welfare in particular, also deeply personal. This has served us very well and ensured that we have scaled the business with integrity.
Doing this from a blank slate allowed us to build many of our supply chains literally from the farm up taking “farm to table” to “farm to closet,” which is so critical as the impact begins at the raw material origin
What was the process like with integrating resale into your fashion brand?
Resale was integral to our brand from the outset as we fundamentally believe that we must treat clothing as an asset again. We built our own in-house program leveraging the digital IDs that you can find on every care-content label to authenticate and activate the product for resale. This technology architecture made the process fairly straightforward for us and a beautifully simple process for the customer.
If someone is looking for a job at a sustainable brand, what is your advice for how they should prepare? Are there certain qualifications or degrees that they should develop? What skills are most important?
I think it’s very important to understand that fashion is a system. One often thinks solely about sourcing and supply chain, which is of course relevant, however addressing how the whole system works is critical. Therefore I suggest first taking a holistic point of view to really understand the most material opportunities and challenges that can move the industry forward. There are some great reports by the major consulting firms actually.
However, within that, every single role in fashion has a role to play in sustainability and therefore I recommend educating yourself most deeply on the issues that pertain to that role, which could mean a specific degree, but there is also an incredible amount of information now available in the public domain.
When hiring for positions at Another Tomorrow, what do you look for in a candidate?
In addition to excellence, I seek a deep sense of care, curiosity and candor.
Do you have any advice for effective networking to get a job in sustainable fashion?
Lean into your curiosity. Read/watch the work of those you admire deeply and reach out to them after you have done the work and politely ask for 20 minutes of their time. Do this on repeat and never take it personally if you don’t immediately get a response. Keep following up as people are busy and often overwhelmed by email, but more often than not want to be generous with their time.
If you could give your younger self or those who aspire to found their own sustainable fashion business, what would it be?
I talk to a lot of founders — those who have succeeded and those who have failed. Make sure you want to go the distance, and if you do, go ALL IN. Also, read Seth Godin’s The Dip.
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