By: Ilaria Pasquinelli, Twitter: @ilaria78, international marketing consultant for the textile and fashion industry.
With Sao Paulo Fashion Week just closed I am here to write (again) about Brazilian fashion.
This time it is about an interesting project I got to know of personally, Projeto Contem, a private and independent initiative led by the Brazilian Gabriel del Corso.
Projeto Contem is both a brand and a network of entrepreneurs working in textile and fashion as well as in food, beauty, design, arts, music and cinema. But for this article we’ll only look at the fashion side of it, which is what is our main interest. Projeto Contem works with Brazilian companies and motivates them to collaborate and produce more sustainable products, particularly from an environmental point of view. The final aim is to bring products to the market that are entirely made in Brazil, but that meet an international taste.
Their priority market outside Brazil is Britain for which the main reason is the renowned high awareness of British consumers of all things sustainability . In a previous article we analysed the different levels of awareness and interpretation of sustainability that fashion consumers in different EU countries have.
But what about Brazilian consumers?
According to a recent study of Accenture, Brazilian consumers are, it seems, more concerned about companies’ policies and behaviours than the British or the Americans. The reasons are diverse: consumers in Brazil are younger than in old economies, therefore, they may also be more informed thanks to their familiarity with new (digital) media. Also, Brazil has the largest tropical forest and river basin system in the world with a great bio-diversity, and Amazon deforestation problems have been rampant for many years. This has possibly led consumers to be sensitive towards environmental issues, particularly in a moment where the domestic industry is developing so quickly.
As a consequence, Brazilian textile and fashion companies are very concerned about how they produce and what they can possibly do to reduce their impact. The increased commitment of traditional big companies and popular designers – like Osklen – who bring eco fabrics to fashion shows, can only strengthen the belief that the Brazilian industry is certainly making the effort of finding innovative solutions that can be scaled. Maybe more than some industries with more of a pedigree like Italy or Spain.
Of course it is also true that Brazil has still a lot of skeletons in the closet, an example of which would for instance be the largely nontransparent leather industry (see upcoming article).
Projeto Contem is ‘yet another’ innovative project. They have partnered with Eco Simple to create a nice line of fashion accessories. Eco Simple is a company that produces fabrics from leftovers of big textile companies’ as well as from recycled pet bottles (Brazil produces more than 200.000 tons of PET plastic per year). Eco Simple outsources the recycling bit to local cooperatives giving work to a number of disadvantages people. Recycling plastic bottles is also the core business of around 20 companies in the country, one of which is Unnafibras.
Finally, Projeto Contem is also about giving end consumers guidance to consume more responsibly. Soon an online store will be launched selling Projeto Contem own brand as well as other ‘good’ Brazilian brands.
