How Can Slow Fashion Brands Balance Affordability and Responsible Production?

By Stella Hertantyo

Part of advocating for a more sustainable and just fashion industry is reimagining the business of fashion and supporting businesses that are actively putting this into practice.

But one of the most common critiques of slow fashion brands is that they aren’t affordable. Fast fashion has conditioned us to believe that we deserve ultra-cheap clothing — and that everything else, in comparison, is expensive.

So slow fashion business owners often walk a fine line between sustainable sourcing, ensuring fair and ethical wages for the people in their supply chain, and trying to remain affordable for customers, while also prioritizing their financial sustainability as business owners. (It's a tough task!)

How can slow fashion brand owners price their garments fairly — for their customers, the people within their supply chain, and themselves?

This is a question with answers that are not only relevant for brand owners but for citizen-consumers too. Becoming aware of pricing considerations helps us to value our clothing more and question whether the true value of that garment — and the people and natural ecosystems that were involved in creating it — are reflected in how much it costs.

What Pricing Considerations Are Consumers Unaware Of?

The fashion industry is opaque and masks exploitation, which obscures the true cost of our clothing. Except for a few slow fashion brands, pricing transparency is almost unheard of.

To understand the pricing of garments, it’s useful to understand the cost breakdown of an average t-shirt.

“Usually, the price a brand pays to the factory is 25% of the retail price. If you are buying a t-shirt for $20, you can assume that $5 was paid for that shirt. From that $5, between 5–12% is reserved for labor costs. That means that roughly 25–60 cents from your $20 shirt will go to factory workers,” explained Anne Bienias, Living Wage Coordinator at the Clean Clothes Campaign, on an episode of the Conscious Style Podcast.

Aside from the cost of labor, many other factors make up a garment, such as materials, transportation, marketing, and packaging. Sustainable fashion focuses on durable products and longer lead times with factories, which allows more consistent payment of wages and a humane pace of production.

Considerations that can push up costs compared to fast fashion include responsible material sourcing, living wages, small batch production, working with artisans, and producing durable clothing. This applies to slow fashion designers that work with “waste” too.

“Both the labor costs and the materials are important because a conscious fashion designer must charge for the time and skill to disassemble and upcycle a garment, make a durable garment, and think about solutions for textile waste. These designers will typically pay a premium price to ensure the labels, tags, and other non-garment materials are also intentionally made. All of these factors, coupled with the fact many sustainable designers and upcyclers are a one-person team is reflected in the price,” says Mahdiyyah Muhammad, founder of the eponymous upcycled fashion brand, MAHDIYYAH.

The one-person or smaller team that runs slow fashion businesses also means that often the same person is responsible for many other business operations, such as community engagement, marketing, admin, market research, customer relations, and finance management.

Slow Fashion Brands Also Need To Make a Profit

Talking about profits may feel uncomfortable when we simultaneously critique fast fashion for its profit-maximizing ways. But the truth is, if we want slow fashion brands to continue to challenge fashion’s status quo, they need to be financially sustainable.

Of course, there are limits to this. Profits should never be made at the expense of other people or natural ecosystems.

“Slow fashion brands and makers notoriously do not pay themselves adequately. Pricing your creations is one of the most difficult tasks as a creator, and there are a lot of temptations and influences that result in pricing one’s items too low,” says Dani Des Roches, founder of slow fashion brand Picnicwear, who had to unlearn that including profit in her business was somehow “shameful” or “greedy”.

Des Roches adds, “Many makers and designers I speak to feel that they should price their goods low in the beginning, and raise them once there is the demand. This is a misguided approach and will not only hurt yourself, but hurt your fellow small business colleagues. Sales will be slow in the beginning, and it will take a while to foster the customer base, but undercutting yourself and others is not the way to approach it.”

Undercharging is still a false representation of the true cost of a garment. While it may feel like a way to win over customers in the short term, it’s not a long-term strategy for rethinking fashion.

How To Create a Pricing Plan That Balances Affordability and Fair Pricing

We need slow fashion business models to become the new normal. This requires creating a pricing system that balances social and environmental sustainability, as well as financial sustainability. Des Roches shares her tips:

Materials and design. If your material costs are high and your design requires hours of work, your creations will need to be priced accordingly. If you can land on a material that can be consistently and ethically sourced for a manageable price — for example, you know your thrift store sells sweatshirts for $6 — and you know your design takes on average an hour to create, you're off to a great start.
Consider your offering. A "Good, Better, Best" pricing structure — which is a tiered way of looking at your product offering — is a helpful framework to consider. The top of the pyramid may be eclectic, over-the-top pieces, but having a stable base of more versatile items, at a more accessible price point, can help introduce more (and potential repeat) customers to your brand.
Keep ROI (“return on investment”) in mind. For example, when working for hours on an Instagram Reel, question whether there will be a return on that investment — the investment being your valuable time. Will that Reel result in sales? It’s hard to answer that question, but a lot of small business owners burn themselves out on social media by thinking that it’s the only way to market their business and initiate sales.

Pricing processes will look different for each business, depending on several different factors. But when considering the above, in addition to the non-negotiables of paying fair wages and minimizing your environmental impact, it simplifies the process.

How To Get Consumers To Better Understand Pricing

Part of the process of fair pricing is normalizing pricing transparency so that customers know exactly what they are paying for and the pricing of slow fashion garments becomes more widely understood.

There are various ways to start normalizing pricing transparency. For example, some brands share the exact cost breakdowns of garments on their website.

Muhammad often shares the number of hours it took her to create a garment on her website. “Transparency in what it takes to make a garment is one of the best ways to combat the ‘sticker shock’ people experience when paying for slow fashion. Most people have no idea the work it takes a person to make a garment from scratch,” she says.

Muhammad adds, “Sharing insights such as the time it took to design the garment, a quick list of the steps it took, or even behind-the-scenes footage can sometimes connect that bridge of understanding. Vulnerability can sometimes be a tall ask for artists and makers, but it could also be the missing link.”

Des Roches uses her online platforms to cultivate a sense of transparency. “Social media has made transparency quite a bit easier for folks, because you can show the behind-the-scenes process. It doesn't help that we all speed those videos up making everything look wildly efficient and speedy, but it's a start for folks to see that robots are not making their clothes,” says Des Roches.

She concludes, “I will say, it's exhausting work and it’s a shame that the responsibility is on the small businesses to educate consumers on the true costs of making clothing. The fast fashion world has worked hard at making that labor invisible such that consumers don’t question how garments are made, so demystifying the process is a huge weight for small businesses to carry.”

While brand owners do have control over how much they share and their pricing, it’s also up to each one of us to unlearn what fast fashion has taught us to expect when it comes to pricing.

We need to question the exploitative pricing structures that we have become accustomed to in the fast fashion world and become curious about what it would mean to build a fashion industry where cost and compensation are a true reflection of the value of a garment.