Pioneering the Zero Waste Fashion Revolution: In conversation with Danielle Elsener, Founder of Decode
Photo by Emma Devereaux
Photo by Emma Devereaux
Danielle Elsener has dedicated her life's work to proving Zero Waste is a valid and robust design model.
This approach has caught the eye of many industry leaders, from Virgil Abloh to Jony Ives. Her Zero Waste design system received the Evian Activate Movement Grant and iDesign Covid Grant as well as accolades in global publications ranging from Wallpaper Mag, Dezeen, Hypebeast to Oregon Business Mag.
Danielle and I met up virtually recently to discuss her work and learnings. It’s a pleasure to share the conversation because in a decade she has developed an ecosystem of ways to fix one of the fashion industry’s biggest problem, Waste:
the Zero Waste Pattern making system
Design collaborations
Education
Web3 activations
GW: Danielle I am going to quote your feature from Wallpaper, published in 2020 when you received your grant from Virgil Abloh and Evian. It summarises your vision, mission and the opportunities within Zero Waste design.
Giving the power of information to creative individuals is potentially astounding. What starts as a seemingly simple tool turns into a vehicle for change, creating a tidal wave of new thinkers and innovators with sustainability built into their core ethos. Apathy is the biggest threat to the planet, but this is an easy and effective solution as it offers motivation and a clear direction for those who want to make change and act on it.
This really resonates with me because Decode is a tool for action and you have created this constellation within your platform between your manufacturing system, shop, collaborations and trainings. What has been the most rewarding experience for you so far? That might be hard to summarize, if one comes to mind that really jumps to you.
DE: Yes, absolutely! It's so hard to pinpoint one moment, near impossible, but I will say that it's been almost a year and a half now, even though this has been like the craziest learning curve, it has been probably the most rewarding experience and to see how much I have learnt from it.
The amount of people who have been able to come in and see what we're doing in action, where we are making locally, sustainable Zero Waste garments and being able to see the process and see the people actually selling them makes a huge difference. It is one of the reasons why I have ended up developing this whole world around the Decode ecosystem.
My background is in corporate design, and the world of education and I got tired of people telling me that Zero Waste design doesn't work and that it is not feasible at scale. Those frustrations are what led me to leaving that behind and starting everything we are doing now. So having this physical space is kind of a manifestation of ‘it does work’, and ‘here it is’. That has to be the most rewarding thing for me right now.
GW: When you are pioneering something, you have to do some hand holding. It take can take time for people to really adopt and buy into it because, even if there isn't a financial exchange. This is so new. People are not understanding how it would actually work so that makes total sense.
DE: Yes definitely, I fell in love with Zero Waste design back in 2012. When I was doing my BA in London and over the last 10-12 years that I've been doing this, you can see a change. Back then no one had any interest whatsoever.
There were a lot of jobs I had where I would bring the idea of a Zero Waste garments to them, and they were like, ‘What do we do with it? We do not think our customers will understand’. Over the years, I've noticed a shift and even things like, winning the Evian award that brought a huge spotlight to what I am doing within the world of Zero Waste. Some of the people who didn't care 10 years ago have come out of the woodwork and are like ‘Oh, you're still doing that’. It takes a long time for people to come around to a new idea, but it's worth it.
GW: I'm not sure the exact timeline but let's say when you started the big tipping point for your business sounds like it was a year and a half ago, when you opened the factory in Brooklyn. Can you also talk to us about the challenges that you have experienced. How has Decode evolved? And what are the lessons learnt in the last year and a half?
DE: After I finished my master's, and for a year I was doing consulting work, where I was working with corporations to try to understand how they could put on ‘quote’ Zero Waste to five products. That was kind of something that ended up pushing me towards the manufacturing.
Because a lot of this struggle ends up coming from being told repeatedly that it's just not possible. I would say getting over that hump of showing people that it is possible, and I have facts and figure, I can tell you exactly how much money you're saving, and how much fabric you are saving.
I would say on the more direct learnings, I got used to working for myself in this kind of bubble and now we have eight staff on our team and running a staff of eight people is pretty mind blowing when you are not used to doing that. In the last year, I have had to learn how to become a manager and understand how to work out problems. When we chose to open the space, we decided to do it a bit differently. We had tried hiring someone who had a ton of experience in production. She had 20 years of experience, and she was very quick and efficient. When it came time for me to ask her to change how she did something to accommodate for Zero Waste pattern design, she just looked at me like I was crazy.
I realized very early on that doing things the standard way was not going to work.
We ended up hiring five sewers that are pretty much right out of college or graduated during COVID and hadn't been able to get much industry experience. So very quickly, I became a not only a production server myself, but a trainer for production.
Even though that's not my background at all, that became one of the most challenging things. Just having to understand how to process something on a production line and understand how the steps all interact with each other and making things more efficient time-wise in addition to fabric wise. Outside of that some of the biggest learnings are just understanding how to work within the fashion industry system.
Photo by Emma Devereaux
It was kind of a harsh awakening, as soon as I changed my role from designer, which I still am, I became the owner of a manufacturing facility and people start to treat you different. All of a sudden everyone's nickel and diming you and expecting insanely ridiculous timelines.
There is an example of someone I was working with where I was going to be a subcontractor. We do some white label manufacturing for small brands on the side. We were talking about costs and bills; you know when they would pay for the product that they wanted, and they have insane terms of net 90 days. I would have to do a four-month project, not get any money up front and then get paid maybe 90 days after it's done.
As a small business owner who doesn't have like, you know, quadrillions of dollars to my name, how am I supposed to do that? The terms were so inflexible, and I just was thinking that if I am objectively, a white woman owning a factory in New York in America, what are they doing to factories that are overseas that can't advocate for themselves?
I chose not to work on those certain projects because I didn't like that kind of back and forth. I didn't like that kind of antiquated way of working. But for people who can’t choose who they work with and have to work for no money and have to go out of their way to just to break their backs trying to bend over backwards for you to get your jacket done, it's just insane to me.
A lot of those things about relationships and understanding your role within the fashion system and choosing to be part of it and choosing not to be part of it, that is one of the biggest learning curves currently.
GW: I really appreciate you being so forthcoming on this because we have these great ideas and ideals and, in your case, you had a system which is like an engineering system that people can apply.
You had these challenges with culture that had nothing to do necessarily with what you expected. So, other areas that you hadn't foreseen are then sort of super powering that ‘gung ho’ side of you that is like we need action, we need change’. And that's forcing you to maintain that integrity and think ‘actually that spirit and mindset I need to apply in this other area’.
I think this is important because there is a ripple effect to this kind of toxic culture. And when you look at the Rana Plaza disaster, and how shortchanged the suppliers were, it was abusive of the factories to force people to stay in the building, but it was also a direct result of brands putting pressure on suppliers.
There is a butterfly effect to the ways that the fashion system just squeezes people, whether it's designers that get squeezed when they need to ship to a retailer and don’t get paid. It's an ecosystem that really needs to change.
Zero Waste is not just zero waste in terms of the garment. It is Zero Waste in terms of not wasting human potential.
DE: I will say that one of the funniest things when people ask about the manufacturing business, one of my favorite things that I can say is we know the Zero Waste part works, the rest of the system kind of doesn't work right now.
GW: My next question is about all of your collaborations. Decode is always about collaborating with brands and projects. You're at the forefront of this new breed of hybrid communities, decentralization, open-source models and obviously, a lot of that is about sharing best practices and models. You mentioned that vision even in your Wallpaper piece from 2020. You've really identified a gap and need for design education. So you have been taking action to democratize access to training. Could you tell us more about the course that just went live that you launched the ZWDC course in zero waste design?
Photo by Decode
DE: Yes, so I co-founded the Zero Waste Design Collective back in 2020. There is a need we identified where if someone wants to learn about Zero Waste design, there's not one place you can go to learn about it.
There are four co-founders, all of whom are Zero Waste designers who came together, as a melding of minds initially. You must start from zero, so to speak, there are a few books out there. There are a few internet resources, but even today, there is still not one spot where you could go to learn about the history; the different types of patterns, and how to do it.
The four of us, it's myself, Holly McQuillan, who wrote the book on modern Zero Waste design called Zero Waste Fashion Design. Cassandra Belanger who is from Glasgow, Mylene L’Orguilloux. We all spent the last three years working towards this e-learning platform, where we would make education available to everyone. We are still figuring out how that works long term because right now we have our intro course, which is applying the Zero Waste design and how to do it yourself, not just copy someone else’s pattern. We want to make this on an even larger scale.
As I mentioned earlier, how do we get this into universities where students can learn this at a foundational stage in their design journeys? How do we make a course specific for industry where companies can start taking this and sharing it with their designers and their pattern makers? And how do we also do this for the world of home sewers where individuals are taking action and making a huge change?
With all of that in mind, we just launched our first e-learning course. It's called Shifting mindsets: From conventional to Zero Waste Design. It perfectly encapsulates what the course is about.
I am excited because there have been so many times where myself or our co-founders have been asked for workshops where they want us to fly to places and for a couple of days, and there's just so much traveling around the world to give these workshops and it doesn't make any sense if we're just saying the same information over and over. Now it's all in one place and we can direct people to one spot so again, not wasting energy or resources in teaching Zero Waste design.
Photo by Emma Devereaux
Photo by Emma Devereaux
GW: Looking into the future of the fashion supply chain and building efficiencies, it's amazing to see the commercial gain that you can benefit from using Zero Waste design. It's shocking how much that hasn't been harnessed by the fashion industry. I was wondering what you think are the barriers to entry. In your experience why do you think Zero Wast design is not picking up as fast as it could?
DE: My honest opinion is that people aren't picking this up as they should because it's hard. It's hard to shift your system of a linear design or manufacturing system, to one where people are designing backwards, and all the pieces of the system have to talk to each other.
I was trying to get samples made at one of the companies I worked for, and I had to go through a chain of 14 people before I could talk to the manager of the person who is sewing the garment; before I could try to explain how to actually physically make it because it was a different construction line. If I had to do that, just for one garment, can you imagine the cascading effect if everyone in the company was designing Zero Waste and designing backwards?
Shifting the model of design and making is one of the biggest barriers to entry. On a precise level, the technology doesn't really exist in a lot of companies to be able to do it. Current nesting and grading software are not able to read Zero Waste patterns.
There is one company I have been working with for three years on creating a Zero Waste garment. Everything is pretty much ready. However, it's halted at the production stage because the software that all their patterns must go through can't read my Zero Waste pattern. We are trying to figure out a workaround where we can get a pattern directly cut and sewn without the software. Those little things and the energy, time and money that must get invested into problem solving and just getting something very basic to work; ends up being the biggest blockade.
Outside of that, there aren't enough people trained in Zero Waste design to feasibly make companies run on it. Hopefully that will change in the near future.
Photo by Emma Devereaux
GW: I feel like with enough exposure and success it will change even in terms of working with companies who create these patterns. It might require some time and so my next my question is how would you recommend fixing that block? if you were given three paths to change this, what would be the first thing you would do?
DE: One of the biggest things is the hierarchy in traditional design jobs. If I was a young designer that designed this great Zero Waste pattern and actually got it to a production level, often times when it goes up the ladder of design approval, someone will want to change something based on something rather nebulous.
They just don't like that design line for example. That would completely stop the project. And the Zero Waste wouldn't work anymore. It would be maybe minimal waste. But I think kind of levelling up that hierarchy of decision-making processes is one of the biggest hurdles. So decentralising.
GW: Actually your collaborations with brands leveraging Web3 and blockchain to empower transparency, collective ownership and action, that feeds into decentralising. Could you tell me more about that direction? Do you see the future of fashion being deeply embedded in web3?
DE: It's interesting what's happening in this space right now. I think there are a lot of interesting applications that Web3 has gone towards, and if we harness it the right way, it can completely change the game. I am really excited about the part where we harness it for something positive. I know it can seem like people are making garments in the digital realm, but it's so much more than that.
With the Bryce Swan collaboration, it was really exciting because we were doing a series of artist collaborations where basically artists could use our Zero Waste blanks to tell their story and share the story of the Zero Waste process. At that time, Bryce had just started transitioning to a new role, within the world of Web3 and virtual gear.
One of the things we have been working with at Decode is, working with a couple of Web3 companies previously, where we partially shared this space with a Metafactory.ai, which is a Web3 apparel company.
We decided that in addition to making awesome garments with great graphics, we wanted to use Web3 and blockchain technology to actually tell the story.
So we have a little physical NFC chip in there where if you scan it with your phone, it does take you to a web page that talks about our collaboration and what Zero Waste means. But it also has the first ever Zero Waste certification.
We worked with Foam which is a company nearby, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where they do tamper proof of location services. This chip has the ability to share that the garment was indeed made right here on this day and time and there's no way that that can be tampered with.
There is no greenwashing here, I think that's one of the most exciting things about the collaboration. And it's just the first step, it's like little baby steps to get to a point where people can use a Zero Waste certification and it really means something.
We have talked a lot about how do you get people to care about a certification, whether it's like doing it grassroots or if it's like going after legislation type things where people want to get it because it's mandated. There is a lot more work we're going to be doing in that space around certifications and tamper proof protocols.
GW: I love that aspect of the Web3 ecosystem and its capabilities. It's really fascinating how you can record something. There is a real emotional value to that, even in terms of heritage and that piece becoming vintage.
In terms of artisanship, just to perhaps talk about something that people might see as a contrast to Web3… I am referring to the rise of the artisan and people quitting their jobs to become like bakers or potters. Do you see Zero Waste design and Decode as a system as part of a new wave of artisanship as well?
DE: Yes, for sure! I love physically making things, I love Zero Waste patterns. That is why I do all of this. I can just make Zero Waste patterns at the end of the day, and make awesome garments. But I do want to also democratize that process and offer things like home sewing patterns.
I have a free scrubs pattern that's available on my website back from 2020 which you can still download. Giving people the ability to even experiment in their own lives with sewing. So many people took up sewing during COVID, as well as knitting and crocheting. I think that we are a part of it and it's just figuring out where that lands in their future because it's a cool movement on a personal note.
I just moved to two acres of land to the house my grandpa built back in the 50s on Long Island. My dream is to be able to grow enough cotton and indigo to make the most insane Zero Waste t-shirt, that was grown and sewn right in my backyard. So that's my little artisan moment.
GW: Absolutely amazing. And that piece, because of its natural properties will age also in such a beautiful way. What about your upcoming collaboration with DEGEN on a home sewer-based pattern?
DE: Yes, so for the last year or two I have been pretty much in the world of fashion basics just with what we have been doing here. I really wanted to do something fun and kind of escapist and like kind of a wild pattern. I had met DEGEN just a couple years ago during COVID and had a call. Then recently we explored the idea of doing collaboration.
DEGEN is in the world of home knitwear, and I can be in the world of home sewing. We decided to make a collab where she did a jumper top and I did a pair of pants that kind of overlap. We are actually going to do a photoshoot of the final pieces next week here, which is really exciting. Then we are going to make the patterns available for everyone in the coming months. It is going to be something fun and kind of different and cool and quirky. I'm excited!
GW: I love their website and the way it's designed. I wanted to know also like on a human level, the experience you have created. It’s always fascinating to see when you're unlocking something for someone and helping with a transformation. What do you witness when you see that kind of transformation when you're either training or collaborating with people? What is a common transformation you see them experience when they use the Zero Waste based system?
Photo by Emma Devereaux
DE: My absolute favourite thing is seeing the light bulb moment, when it just suddenly makes sense to someone; like, like ‘I can do this’. I think it's a moment because a lot of people who are just getting into the world of zero waste are not quite confident with doing it, like they think they're going to do something wrong or mess it up. But the moment that they go from asking you how to do it to them just taking it and running with it is so cool.
Everyone that has taken workshops or that I have worked with has different backgrounds. The way that they interpret Zero Waste into their lens, even through different mediums, is cool. It's just my favourite thing seeing people empowered to go take it on as their own and use it in their own style, where everything doesn't have to be like pink and blue.
GW: You are in a kind of micro factory in a large city which I think is such a great model and certainly New York is great, with the garment industry that already exists there. Not every city is like that. But I really do believe in this as part of this ‘future factory’ and sustainable fashion future. It's not that new if you think about centuries ago, there used to be a lot of workshop places and manufacturing within cities. I would love to know a bit about your vision of the future.
DE: There is so much that excites me about the future. I think that over the last couple of years, we've seen a huge change in how people are accepting the world that they live in and understanding that they have a lot more power than they think they do to change things.
Even from small decisions to ‘I don't like that brand messaging’, ‘I'm not going to buy from them anymore’, ‘I don't want a $5 shirt that I'm going to throw away in a year’. Changing those kinds of shopping patterns. But also people being more invested in repairing what they have and keeping things. Because for the last couple of decades, everything's been about more and faster and louder, but I think there's a shift towards becoming more human again.
I am just excited that people are taking better care of themselves overall. And even in this age, where you know, I'm talking about Web3 and future focused initiatives, I still at the end of the day just really love selling and coming back to that kind of base skill that I can use to make something close to someone's body. I don't know if the dichotomy of those two things is interesting, and I'm just excited to see how that continues to shift.
GW: Yeah, Web3 is seen as an ecosystem of technologies. But it’s the mindset and the principles that matter. It's been really great chatting with you. Thank you.
Photo by Emma Devereaux