New business models are emerging in fashion, as brands both recover from a period heavy in layoffs and get accustomed to a remote workforce. Rather than hiring full-time employees for specific roles, companies are enlisting workers with expertise in many areas and supplementing them with outside experts. The results are constantly rotating teams and, overall, fewer limitations on what can be accomplished.

“It’s very fluid,” said Jasmine Mullers, vp and chief partnerships officer at Pangaia, of the fashion brand’s team. Pangaia is a sustainably-minded company. “We’ll come across an incredible material, and we’ll think, ‘Who can we work with to develop this further? How can we scale this? Who can we work with that would be able to showcase this material really well or communicate this in an exciting way?’ Or there will be an opportunity where we have a connection with an artist and want to work with them on something. It’s not a singular way of working, and that makes it exciting.”

Pangaia’s brand deck describes it as a “global collective” of scientists, technologies and designers. Launched in late 2018, it currently has a full-time staff of 94. Out-of-house collaborators to date include Takashi Murakami, Jaden Smith’s Just Water, and a large pool of labs and researchers. Pangaia declined to share most details of the agreements, but called them “mutually beneficial.” The materials and research partnerships, specifically, “combine investment, commercialization and research scale-up opportunities,” according to a brand spokesperson.

“Pangaia is an umbrella for innovation that comes out of various labs all over the world,” said Maria Srivastava, the brand’s chief impact and communications officer. “We’re very future-thinking; our philosophy is to have as many people as possible join our journey.”

In addition to selling its own branded clothes, Panagaia has a B2B business offering its innovations and materials to fashion brands and companies across industries. To date, those proprietary technologies include FLWRDWN, a safer, animal-friendly alternative to goose and duck down that launched in 2019; PPRMINT, a treatment said to extend the freshness of washed clothes; and C-Fiber, a textile made from seaweed.

Pangaia open-sources its technologies for the industry, after first integrating them into its own supply chain and introducing it to the customer as ready-made products.“Creative industries, like fashion and art, are inspirational to other industries, which tend to follow their lead,” said Srivastava.

After working in luxury fashion, at Valentino and Bottega Veneta, Mullers said innovation in fashion is most likely to come from newer, more nimble brands. “It’s harder for companies that have been around for a long time to make changes,” she said. Srivastava, for her part, spent 10 years at Burberry.

“We rely on partners to help us bring our message forward, and all of our partnerships need to have a bigger purpose,” said Mullers.

For example, the Murakami collab in May 2020 …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron