A lot of what we cover here at The Interline is focused on optimising the creation of the best possible new products. Sometimes that’s an end in and of itself, but for a growing number of brands that are purposefully stepping to the side of the established fashion system, those products are the vehicle that carries a much bigger message.
This is definitely the case for Neem London, a climate-conscious menswear brand whose Founder, Nick Reed, is both committed to extolling the benefits of the slow fashion model, and pragmatic about the realities of changing the way people shop, supporting domestic production, and switching to 3D-led, demand-driven production.
For Nick, his team, and their upstream partners, a compelling product is the thing that gets consumers through the doors, and the impact reduction will always be built on top of it.
I sat down with Nick just after returning from a lot of events myself, so the tension between making great fashion and making a difference to what’s become a damaging, depletive cycle, was top of mind for me – and I enjoyed having the chance to quiz someone who’s working at it day-to-day.
The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Okay, Nick Reed of Neem London, welcome to The Interline Podcast. Start us off: tell us a little bit about yourself, a bit about your journey in fashion, and a bit about what your day-to-day looks like.
Yes, super-thrilled to be here with you. Thanks for having me. So my background is that I started a brand called Neem London four years ago. We’ve scaled to… we’ll do about £400,000 with a good headwind in November, December of this year. Prior to that, I was buying and brand director at Moss Bros, and I served as acting Managing Director at a small brand called Gandy’s for a while.
And then I was buying and brand director for Charles Tyrwhitt, which is a large, £450 million men’s international fashion retailer today. I joined them when they were smaller, turning over about £5 million. I was there for 16 years and grew along with them.
I was responsible, at all three larger businesses – Charles Tyrwhitt, Moss, and Gandy’s – for sourcing, development, and design of products. I was often on a plane, going everywhere from Peru to Bangladesh to Vietnam to Italy to Romania – and it was at that point during the journey that I felt that the industry needed a different approach, especially in menswear which is where my expertise lay.
I think we’re going to spend a bit of time today talking about what that different approach is, how it manifests itself in the way that you work, and, most pertinently for our audience, that the direction you’re aiming for can offer some learnings to the wider industry, and can offer some guidance, I think, in terms of how you approach things. So let’s start off by talking about Neem with a definition of what constitutes slow fashion, and what that term means to you.
There’s the obvious diametric contrast with fast fashion. But I think in practical terms slow fashion is also different to what we think of as the average state of the industry. Because fashion in general feels like it’s rushing to scale a really precarious business model, and the challenges there are bigger than a narrow lens on the ‘worst offenders’ in fast fashion capture.
Good question. So to me, slow fashion really came from slow food. That slow food movement, that started probably 15, 20 years ago, has grown to where full traceability back to farm is paramount. So in terms of slow fashion, you need to know your supply chain and know the methods, right down to the farmer, and how that farmer is operating the land in order to cultivate the crop. And then you follow the journey thereafter, from spinner to weaver to maker and then to warehouse and shop. You’re tracking all of that.
So full traceability, firstly. Secondly, measurement of the supply chain in some way – so understanding impact, both in terms of carbon emissions, water usage, or, at a farming level, biodiversity improvements.
And then finally it’s about creating products that are less transitional. Trying to create products that can be worn for nine months of the year. Which, as we scale, is becoming more of a challenge, but it’s about products that are as good as a layer in winter as they are as a single layer in summer, and trying not to push seasonality as much. But if you are pushing seasonality, you’re pushing it in a way that is relevant to the season, of course, but also in a way that a product that can be worn for a longer period of the year and ideally can be re-marketed.
So we’re talking about a slowing down of the system through understanding the supply chain and a slowing down of the seasons in order to not force unnecessary consumption.
Which makes sense. And it’s that kind of like the proactive part of it that I think is the doubly interesting one: where it’s not just taking the established model and kind of passively having it run slower, but instead proactively influencing the way people consume through planning and assortments. And doing the same thing through putting together transitional, modular styles… things that are designed to step outside the traditional cycle as well. So the ambition is to slow the system down from the outside as well as the inside.
Exactly right. We’re creating more transitional garments that can be worn all year. And if you are going to create a product that is highly seasonal, like a heavy winter coat or a very lightweight linen, buying that product in a volume that buys to sell out. Keeping the stock lean and using systems such as pre-order to meet anticipated demand, which then doesn’t force unnecessary consumption through deep discounting and panicked buying.
I think that leads us to the question of how that model impacts planning, sourcing, and production. When you think about the typical fashion model, so much of what happens upstream is built on the idea that the only way this all works is to just keep scaling upwards. To keep doing things faster. To keep building more volume, more variety, and making big long-term commitments to massive orders. How have you approached finding partners in materials and manufacturing, especially ones closer to home, who are open to looking at things differently and stepping aside from that cycle?
I was lucky in that, having worked in men’s fashion for 20-odd years, I had some history and contacts that allowed me to go straight to speaking to people that I thought cared about a new system.
Predominantly we operate out of Italy for spinning, weaving and making. And then we also make a little bit in Portugal, a little bit in Romania. And then we farm quite a lot of cotton in Turkey, then we recycle quite a lot of our cotton in Spain.
In terms of finding makers and producers, there were three approaches we used. One was that they had to care about the model. And that was just a matter of talking to them about what we were trying to do ,with measuring the carbon impact of the product, working with recycled fibres or regenerative farm fibres, and so on. That, of course, rules out a lot of people… but it rules in some.
Secondly, we work with makers that are predominantly or fully operating on renewable energy. That rules out, again, a load.
And then, thirdly, they needed to be prepared to support us, really. And what I mean by ‘support’ is that they can offer you credit. As a small business, with a vision to slow down the system, you need to be buying a small and controlled quantity of product that you are not then panic-selling through discounting, because you’ve got to pay the supplier back within a very short timeframe.
Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult for UK manufacturers to support businesses this way, because there just isn’t the infrastructure. Whereas in Italy the quantities that we’re placing meant that they were able to support us.
We’ve always paid, we always do pay, but if we have to pay a significant amount of cash upfront it then forces us into shorting the margin and driving silly discounts.
So it’s effectively like a series of filters that gets you to the stage where you can identify the partners, automatically, that are ready for this kind of journey and who are able to adjust their own predictions and business models around it.
That’s right. So if you’re starting from zero, you have to work with people that understand how difficult starting from zero is, and they have to be prepared to stand by you. They need to believe in the overall concept. They need to believe in the team that we’ve built. They need to believe in the brand that we’re building.
This isn’t a get rich quick scheme. This is a ten-year plan to steal and grow market share in a way that is more responsible and more considered, and that offers a new system.
That’s a great way of putting it. One of the pillars you talked about in slow fashion, was the kind of farm forward traceability, so what’s your perspective on regulations? Because I think the rollout of digital product passports (DPPs) definitely has brands asking themselves a lot of questions about upstream disclosure, which seems on the surface like a positive outcome.
But I think the answer to a lot of those questions, when people ask them, is that they don’t have the information to disclose in the first place, because they simply do not have that level of traceability. It’s not architected into the way that they work. It’s not architected into their supply chain. Do you think legislation is actually providing a meaningful framework and a decent set of incentives for that to change? Or is it more of a moving target that’s more useful in spirit than in letter?
I have very mixed views on legislation. I think, as a small to medium sized business owner, I’m against legislation actually. I think legislation introduces bureaucracy and unnecessary management ,and therefore you’re not focusing on what is actually required. And that is an understanding of your supply chain, right back to the farm – a critical analysis of your supply chain in a way that is collaborative and improving. It’s a search towards products that are cleaner and circular.
That’s where the effort needs to be, rather than on form-filling and pushing problems down your supply chain. So legislation, in small and medium sized businesses, I think, creates bureaucracy that the business does not need.
In a larger business, let’s say £250 million plus, I think legislation is helpful because it forces systematic change. But that systematic change has to be considered in a way that does drive consumption in a cleaner and more ethical direction.
And the danger is that when bureaucrats are one or two steps removed from actually creating a product that sells, and also it sells in a way that is cleaner, more responsible, more ethical… because they’re two steps away, they’re not able to actually influence the manufacturers or the retailers correctly because they’re just not close enough to it.
So in summary, I feel that retailers have to do what they believe is right. And there should be enough of us who believe in fairer working practices, paying a living wage, working with farmers to create cleaner products, or crops that improve soil fertility and health and biodiversity, and working with makers that are using renewable energy.
All of that is then contributing to the creation of products that people want to buy and feel proud of wearing. As a buyer, stroke designer, stroke director of the business, I feel strongly that the product has to be of high design and high durability. Our job is to create products that are cleaner and circular, and that the consumers want to buy. Legislation is potentially employing people in areas that aren’t focused on the actual product ,or the supply chain, but on bureaucracy and management of paperwork, which I’m not sure are in my view, the right places to be focusing.
When you think about products that are cleaner, you have to think about what that actually means to the end buyer. A lot of your products are labeled with impact reduction figures in what I’d describe as a kind of relatable, tangible form: you look at a style and you’ll see the volume of carbon emissions from driving saved, for example, as an indicator. These feel like ways of translating some abstract-feeling concepts into something more tangible: touch points that people are familiar with in their day-to-day life.
What methodology do you use to calculate that? And do you think consumers at large, within Neem’s own demographic, but maybe beyond as well, are going to value that sort of through line from their fashion buying choices to other areas of their lives where they’re making behavioural changes?
There’s two questions there.
Firstly, we work with a company called GreenStory, an Indian tech business who employ textile scientists. We study the supply chain with them and then they analyse the impact using various methods, including Higg [now known as Worldly – Editor], but also others.
They then estimate, through pulling out energy certificates, tracking the supply chain back to source, and then comparing that to average or mean data so they can pull out what the differences are. And then we look to improve those metrics yearly, through moving makers to renewable power, better fibres, and better processes.
In terms of consumer impact, there’s a percentage of our customer base that is net zero focused and is motivated by that. That’s often because of what they do on a nine-to-five basis. They might have worked for BP. They might work for Octopus [the UK’s most prominent ‘green energy’ supplier – Editor.] They might have previously worked in cement-led architecture and now try to work in low-waste architecture. They might be landscape architects working outside a lot, and seeing climate change first-hand. They might be farmers. For customers already engaged in net zero, seeing a brand such as ours, offering a net zero product, gets them interested.
But ultimately the design has to drive sales. My sense of this is pretty simple: product leads and then impact drives repeat purchase. So the fact that we carbon-offset our scope three emissions by investing in climate mitigation schemes, and then also we take the product back at end of life, gets consumers more engaged and more likely to repeat-purchase. But in order for us to steal market share from other, more polluting, businesses, our product has to competitively stand up in both in terms of design and cost.
I think that’s a pretty consistent message coming out here – that the product is the vehicle for change, and that people have to believe in the vehicle and they have to want it.
That’s exactly right. There are some customers of ours that really care about net zero, and there are others that don’t really care and they just like the product.
We’re heavily targeting a Generation X audience. Before I launched the brand, I did a lot of research, and looked at studies into where there was an interest in climate mitigation, and Gen X actually beat Gen Z or millennials. Because those two demographics, while they’re interested in climate action, when it actually comes to consumer spending they’re still building up their wardrobes.
So, other than resale or second-hand, younger people just want to look good for the festival, or the date, or the prom, and they’re more likely to sacrifice the values they have. Whereas Gen X, because they’ve already built up a wardrobe, they’re buying less but buying better-quality, and they want to buy something that really does have a meaning.
Well, as somebody who is, depending on the definition, an older millennial or a younger Gen X, I feel that tension.
Those labels, I think rightly, focus on the environmental impact of the product. But as we’ve written about before at The Interline, the human beings in the garment supply chain often get left out of impact quantification and communication strategies. You mentioned before that you spent a lot of time working with mainstream brands, and I know you came away disillusioned – to put it mildly – with how the industry treats its suppliers. What do you think needs to change in order for fashion brands in general to start to better recognise the value and the humanity of the people who work upstream of them.
Now that’s a question! I think in terms of people, a determination to pay living wage, not minimum wage, should be a motivator in larger businesses. Secondly, companies should commit to using technology within the domestic country to reduce fixed costs – something that, unfortunately, might result in employing fewer people because the burden on margin is reduced, and that increases your ability to pay more of a living wage. And outside the UK, it’s a matter of making a commitment to assess and audit your factories using whichever system you feel is right.
Now, in terms of social responsibility, I think a lot of work’s been done in this area in the last twenty years. So, whilst there will still be hiccups, I think whether it’s big events such as Rana Plaza or smaller-scale events such as the practices being uncovered in Leicester, the catalysts have moved the industry a long way when it comes to social working practices.
At an industry level, I think there’s still a greed behind the drive to move from factory to factory, looking for small pennies and margin growth, and behind the focus on the cost rather than the net margin. Companies are too quick to discount, too quick to overbuy, too quick to
to become fat and bloated on the domestic end, rather than control those costs more and then to pay a bit more, and work with suppliers and grow with makers and suppliers.
But generally I think this area has improved in the last fifteen, twenty years or since I’ve been visiting factories around the world.
That’s encouraging to hear. And if we think back to the multi-filter model for selecting partners and suppliers that you talked about earlier, it’s almost inimical to that idea of shifting the sourcing base around to chase the cheapest needle.
I think this is a separate podcast really, but the fashion business is inherently inefficient in terms of communication and management.
There are some businesses that are efficient and therefore they’ve scaled, because they’ve kept the fixed costs low. But generally, it’s quite a bloated industry and quite inefficient in terms of sampling, courier costs, flying stock in, and buying too late and not managing inventory.
I think technology has improved all of those areas I’ve just mentioned That should allow fixed costs to reduce, and therefore, you can invest more in product and then the supply chain. Whereas the last forty years, through the growth of manmade fibres, we’ve seen a focus on trying to push problems down the supply chain. So if my margin is not good enough, well I demand a lower cost or I’m going to move factory. The industry has been pushing too many problems down to manufacturers in Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world, rather than working with them on improving systems together.
Of course, there are some retailers that are shining examples here.
When we come around to doing an efficiency episode, which I think we need to do, we’ll have you back for that! Moving on: you recently kicked off a collection of regenerative knitwear with a fully domestic supply chain, which I feel like has a lot of the little pieces of sustainability and circularity and things we’ve talked about so far in microcosm. Quickly, if you wouldn’t mind, walk us through what you’ve learned from that collection and that process.
So we work with regenerative cotton that we grow in southwest Turkey, traced directly back to farm, and then we work with regeneratively-farmed merino.
Now regenerative is an unclear term, so in my eyes what it means is improvement of soil health, and improving biodiversity above and below ground – and then measuring that soil health and biodiversity. So it’s not necessarily a ban on inputs, but you need to measure if your soil health is improving to therefore grow a healthier plant or animal, that leads to a better product.
We’re now developing a product, which is a British wool from two hundred and sixty sheep in Somerset in the Mendips. These are sheep that have been crossbred over the last six, seven years to create a type of sheep’s wool that is more lustrous and creates a softer yarn… close to merino but not quite the same as Merino. It isn’t itchy. It’s softer. It’s breathable. And again it’s regeneratively farmed. Then we spin that in the UK, and then we make that in the UK.
In terms of what I’ve learned, UK manufacturing is hard. I don’t think this industry is built for it. And I think anyone who feels otherwise is a bit naive. Unfortunately, the infrastructure just isn’t there.
I think larger retailers have a responsibility with UK manufacturing to try and support a program over a three, four, five year period of investing in the industry, but for a smaller retailer it’s very difficult to work with UK manufacturers because they’re all operating on wafer-thin margins, aren’t capitalised, and don’t have significant orders that they can be assured of from season to season. That makes them vulnerable, and as a small business it’s difficult to operate that way.
So while we try and do a bit of Made in Britain with socks, and then this knitwear range, it’s tough. We’ve got to create a product that is commercial, at the right price, and it’s got to sell.
The challenge of a lot of this is, for domestic production to make sense, people talk about the necessity of reinvention and a different way of doing things. But it’s hard to reinvent yourself if you don’t have stable foundations, and you don’t have the luxury of time. I can see how that’s a precarious position for domestic manufacturing here in the UK.
It’s just that the infrastructure isn’t here. Having said that, though: the infrastructure is close by. Portugal is invested. Italy is invested. And then parts of Eastern Europe are invested as well as Northern Africa.
So anyone thinking of starting a brand, I would say to be wary of the value of manufacturing in the UK, but to still try and do something domestically – if only because it’s easier to manage and stay in touch and supervise.
But I really think it’s the responsibility of larger retailers to invest in Made in Britain collections, and it has to be over a three or four-year period. There has to be forecasted income and production capacity that the manufacturers can build on. Because the government isn’t going to step in and help.
You’ve now mentioned the magic ‘government’ word, so that means we’re now locked into three episodes: this one, the efficiency one, and then a whole topic on politics.
Yeah.
For now, though, I know you also design with recycling and longevity and disassembly in mind. I’ll ask you for a quick answer, just because this is a big topic that could go on a long time. What does it look like, practically speaking, to bring end-of-life considerations into product creation?
We do two things.
We make sure that all the products that we design, or at least 90 % of the products that we design, can be recycled at end of life. That means testing that product with the recycler we work with to ensure that, after multiple washing and wears, they can actually break that fiber down and recycle it.
Then we take product back at end of life. We have a QR code which has a digital product passport in, which is just fairly basic proprietary technology, but we’re also working with GreenStory to improve it. We take product back, we batch that up, and when we get to 250 kilos we send it Spain and we work with two Spanish partners who recycle or downcycle. We also take back any brand, any condition and offer credit on that to help drive sales into Neem, because we have a simple view that any sale from us is a cleaner sale than it probably would be from the retailer down the road.
We also resell some of that. At the moment that resale is only in our shop, but it’s performing well, and at some point we’ll put it online as well. We even had Harry Styles come in and buy something from the second-hand rail a couple of weeks ago.
The labour costs and the unit costs here, though, you need to be very careful of. Our view on this is we’re driving new purchases through a recruitment scheme which is offering credit. So 95 % of customers who give us old clothing, whether it’s Neem or non-Neem, then go on to buy something from us.
When it comes to recycling and downcycling, you can only operate that if you’re working with volume. We need to get to a quarter of a ton, which we do about three or four times a year, and then we send that back to Spain. And of course sending it back, and then dealing with it, and managing it, and then ensuring that it’s not exported outside the EU does take time, energy and money. So you need to work with volume in order to bring the unit costs down, and also you need to drive new sales which have a healthy margin.
Yes. The two business models can’t be in fundamental tension with one another. As you said, you are, at the end of the day, becoming profitable and targeting new sales from what you’re doing. I think people do often frame some circularity and end of life stuff as a risk to the new-sale business model. But I think yours is a good example of the fact that the two can feed one another.
That’s right. We see the collection of textiles as a recruitment exercise. It triggers purchases, allows deep narrative storytelling, and ensures that we work hard on making sure that the textile we collect is managed in a responsible way. It would be easy for us just to give the quarter of a ton every few months to a charity, that would take it for free, but that may not be able to guarantee that they’re not exporting it outside the EU. But we want to make sure that any textile that we collect is managed within the EU.
Shifting gears slightly: as a tech publication, we’re always keen to know where brands have employed technology to solve quantifiable problems. I’ll pick one example for you. So I know you’ve worked with 3D / digital product creation, as we call it, as a way to reduce waste. Tell me more about that. How did that pan out? And do you have any examples of technology areas where you piloted something and maybe it didn’t work out?
Yeah, so we do work with 3D design. We’d love to work with 3D design all the time, in fact. But at this point, we just can’t afford to because we don’t have an in-house full-time employee that does it, and nor can we afford one.
So there’s a proportion of the products that we’ve developed that we have designed in 3D, using CLO, and we then ask the customer to vote (using email and social media) on which styles they’d like us to put into production based on those 3D assets – so zero sampling. We take sales before we’ve made a single sample, and we’ve proven that that model works.
There’s a tan and camel check product on the site at the moment that’s 3D, and there’s another one, a chambray, going up next week. We haven’t made a sample of either of those yet, but we’re taking preorders and we’ve seen some sales already. We would love to do that for 70%, or maybe 80% of our range.
We can’t afford to do it yet, but our plan is that we’ll 3D model everything before we sample, we’ll ask for the customers’ responses, and we’ll put it on the site with a pre-order option. That brings with it some customer service and delivery challenges at time, but broadly speaking 3D modelling has really worked for us.
The other tech area that works for us is just the QR code, which has a batch ID inbuilt into the product. It’s a basic product passport that we can scan and we know when a product was made and when it was shipped.
But I think the problem, in a small business (or really any size of business I suppose, with technology is that you can get caught up in things that aren’t actually going to drive consumer interest or revenue growth.
So 3D is an example of something that does drive revenue. Digital product passports and product IDs are an area that can be a bit of a black hole of interest because you’re concentrating on those and not focusing on improving your Meta ads or your Google ads and or your in-store experience and customer service – all of which do drive sales.
I think what you said there tackles my penultimate question, which was going to be where you would recommend brands of a comparable size to yours invest their time, their energy, their money in technology, talent, marketing, and so on. It sounds like the answer to that is very much what’s going to drive revenue growth and value and what’s going to contribute meaningfully to product outcomes and product quality. Because that, ultimately, is going to be what takes your vision to the next stage.
Exactly right. You invest in good product, well-marketed, with a good story, and at a good margin, and that will help drive the business.
In terms of technology, don’t overlook the obvious bits of technology like Shopify, Xero, Klaviyo, Google Analytics and so on. And then, if you’re built on the cleanest system you can be, as a startup, try and develop digital product passports in-house. They’re not that complicated. And then the more you know about your supply chain, the more you can influence it, and the more you can tell a story around it.
That homegrown DPP system is an interesting angle. We’ll have to come back around to that one in the future. My final question is an inevitable one, and it comes up every time we speak to a brand like yours, that has a model that’s slightly out of lockstep with how the wider industry works. Can what you’re doing scale? And should it? Because bigger companies will listen to this and file it away as an experiment, assuming it only works because it’s narrow in scope. Are they right? Or are they missing the point?
They’re missing the point. Of course we can scale, because we’re creating good products that people want to wear at a reasonable margin, and we’re offering durable products that last, and an overall style that people want to buy into.
What we’re doing underneath is creating products that are cleaner, better-thought-through, and offering a considered take-back programme. As long as you don’t get distracted by potential financial black holes such as take-back that isn’t properly balanced with new sales, that can scale.
The other thing to consider is that, when you make a commitment to being cleaner, there have to be some compromises along the way. Because without profitability we are not sustainable. And without sustainable profitability we can’t create a more sustainable solution in the longer term. You have to accept that while you’re growing the business.
Without a doubt, though, lifecycle impact assessments, taking product back at end of life, using cleaner fibres, and knowing your supply chain – those are all simple things that should be actively being worked on by medium-to-large retailers. That doesn’t mean they have to change their business models. It just means that they need to work towards those things and measure their successes.
You can take product back and profit from it, rather than letting eBay and Vinted take that profit. You can study your supply chain to map it right down to the farm – not on every product at once, but on some products. And you can start to run lifecycle assessments on those products where you do know the supply chain. You can move towards slightly better fibres and start removing some polyesters from your range.
But you also have to create a product that people are prepared to buy, at a price they’re prepared to buy it at. So don’t try to be too perfect. Aim to improve and operate in a more efficient way.
I think that perfection paralysis is a very real and tangible thing across the industry. Nick, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks very much. Hopefully I’ll see you again.
