Sustainable Sale?
I have just activated Sustainable January SALE. One of the things we think are important at Heijne is that we are sustainable. No overproduction we say. We produce on demand, custom made. That means that we don´t have stock.
We release new products or capsule collection, every now and then, when it suits us and our customers. Not regularly every season like most brands or every month like fast fashion brands. So we don´t need to make place in the store for new collections either.
These are the 2 reasons why we actually don´t need to have a big SALE in the end of the season.
So the question is: Why do we have a SALE ?
That´s what I like to explain.
When I say we don´t have a stock, I mean that we don´t have any ready made garments in stock. What we do have is a fabric stock. Our atelier in Lithuania holds the stock. We make sure we only have small badges of fabric and certainly not hold loads of unnecessarily quantity. Every time a garments is produced the fabric stock shrinks. For some fabrics we refill the fabric stock every now and then, but other fabrics are limited editions. When these fabric rolls are finished, we won´t order the fabric again.
What´s the difference?
The difference between other brands and Heijne, is that most brands use all fabric and decide which and how many garments they will produce, before they even know what the customer wants. Often fashion brands make different garments in the same fabrics. For example a trouser, and a skirt and blazer are made from the same wool fabric. But what if customers prefer the trousers? And they don´t like the blazer so much? Then you end up with a lack of trousers and way too many blazers.That is a waste of resources and definitely unsustainable in my opinion.
This will never happens too us. Because you decide where we use the fabrics for. Not our company. If you want trousers, we will make trousers of the fabric. And if the blazers are not selling well, we still won´t have a stock with blazers no one wants. See my point?
Our sale only exists out of a very limited amount of samples for customers to try out i the store. Not over produced garments , which we want to get rid of.
They only down side is that our samples are produced in standard sizes (we have to compare with something when we do a fitting) and are often limited in size choices. That means that unfortunately we are not able to offer all women our sale items. Sorry for this inconvenience!
To conclude I would say YES , it is possible to have SALE and be sustainable at the same time. We call it our Sustainable SALE
