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🌱 Ep 30. Behind the Label: How Data is Rewriting the Rules of Fashion with Jothi Kanayala and Atnyel Guedj (x Fashion District
210 Plays5 days ago
This is a special episode in partnership with Fashion District London
What if you could trace every thread of a garment – from the cotton field to the shop floor and all the way to the recycling centre – and understand its true cost? Not just the financial cost, but the environmental, social, and human cost?
That's the question at the heart of this episode. The fashion supply chain is one of the most complex systems in the world, and for decades it has operated largely in the dark. But a new generation of technology companies is changing that – gathering data, building transparency, and helping brands finally understand what is actually happening behind their labels.
We are joined by Jothi Kanayalal from Clothing Connected and Atnyel Guedj from Made2Flow, who together offer a fascinating window into what it means to truly know your supply chain.
What We Cover in This Episode
- Why the fashion supply chain has operated in the dark for so long – and why that is rapidly changing
- Why a garment label saying "Made in Bangladesh" tells us almost nothing – and why two thirds of a product's environmental impact lies in the invisible upstream tiers
- What Clothing Connected does day-to-day: onboarding suppliers across all tiers, automating compliance, replacing spreadsheets and emails with a real-time single source of truth
- What Made2Flow does: collecting "activity data" from facilities worldwide, running automated lifecycle assessments (LCAs), and turning incomplete, fragmented data into reliable environmental impact results
- The biggest barriers slowing brands' adoption of supply chain technology – from ROI pressure and fragmentation to digital literacy across developing nations
- The regulations brands can no longer ignore: Digital Product Passports (DPP), ESPR, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), and the Green Claims Directive
- How AI is beginning to transform data validation and verification
- How Clothing Connected and Made2Flow complement each other in a brand's data ecosystem
Key Takeaways
- Most brands have visibility only to tier 4 (garment manufacturer) and partially tier 3 (fabric mill). Tier 2 and tier 1 upstream data – spinners, ginners, raw material sources – remains largely invisible
- Without supply chain data, brands cannot ensure ethical production, avoid harmful substances like PFAS, calculate EPR taxes accurately, or prepare for Digital Product Passports
- Clothing Connected operates as a cryptographic ledger – more energy efficient than blockchain – and is multilingual, serving over 3,000 clothing suppliers
- Made2Flow's LCA engine is specialised in fast-moving consumer goods and textiles, able to work with incomplete data and fill gaps reliably using years of accumulated process knowledge
- The brands that invest in data infrastructure now will be far better positioned when DPP and ESPR regulations arrive for textiles in 2027
- This is no longer only a sustainability conversation – it is a financial and business imperative
Connect with: Jothi Kanayalal I Atnyel Guedj
Connect with me: LinkedIn I Insta I Buy me a coffee
Cover art: Photo by Siora, Photography on Unsplash
Music: Inspired Ambient, Orchestraman
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Transcript
Introduction to No Ordinary Cloud Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome back to the No Ordinary Cloud podcast, where we stitch together a rich tapestry of textile innovations, one episode at a time. I'm your host, Millie Tharakin, a textile innovator and researcher. And in this podcast, I give you a glimpse into the future, shedding light on innovations bubbling up at the intersection of textiles, emerging technology, craft and sustainability.
00:00:28
Speaker
This is a special episode created in partnership with Fashion District London, a dynamic hub for fashion innovation in East London, supporting startups with innovation networks, affordable spaces, business guidance, and investment opportunities.
Tracing a Garment's Lifecycle
00:00:43
Speaker
What if we could trace every thread of a garment from the cotton field to the shop floor and all the way to the recycling centers and understand the true cost of making it? Not just the financial cost, but the environmental, social and human cost. That's the question at the heart of today's episode.
00:01:00
Speaker
The fashion supply chain is one of the most complex systems in the world, and for decades it has operated largely in the dark. But a new generation of technology companies are changing that, gathering data, building transparency, and helping brands finally understand what is actually happening behind their labels.
Meet the Guests: Jyothi and Atnial
00:01:19
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by two wonderful guests. Jyothi Kanayalal, Head of Business at Clothing Connected, a platform that digitizes fashion supply chain and brings compliance, yeah ESG, and product data into one place.
00:01:32
Speaker
And Atnial Guj, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Made to Flow, a platform that measures the environmental impact of textile products at a scale that simply was impossible before.
00:01:44
Speaker
Together, they present two big pieces of the textile supply chain puzzle. And this conversation is about why supply chain visibility and traceability matters right now more than ever, and how brands and suppliers can start to prepare for upcoming regulations, such as eco-design for sustainable product regulation and digital product passports, and where the industry really needs to go next.
00:02:08
Speaker
Whether your work is in fashion, technology, sustainability, or simply you're someone who cares about where your clothes come from and where it's going, you're going to learn a lot from our guests today. So let's pop over and say hi to them.
00:02:27
Speaker
Welcome Jyoti and Atniel. It's wonderful to have you both here. i have been really excited about this conversation because your work really sits right at the intersection of fashion, technology and impact. And that's exactly where so many of the big questions of our industry are right now. The supply chain is well hidden behind this black curtain as far as I'm concerned. It's It's murky, it's fragmented, it's global and complex and consumers never see it. And brands who work within the supply chain often have very little visibility into it themselves.
The Hidden Nature of Supply Chains
00:03:00
Speaker
That's why I feel this is such an important conversation and a fascinating topic to discuss today, where we get to pull back that curtain a little bit on the fashion supply chain, acknowledge the mess that is there and also explore how you're gathering, organizing and making sense of a huge amount of that fragmented data from multiple sources along the supply chain. And it feels like a big, huge mountain to climb, but clearly ah you've both made it to the top of that mountain where you have this fabulous overview of the supply chain of various brands. So I'm curious to understand what that view is like for you both. And I'm also just looking forward to unpacking what your platform does and how it can transform the fashion sector. So thank you both for taking the time to share your experience and insight with us today.
00:03:45
Speaker
To begin with, I would love to invite ah you both to briefly introduce yourself, your company and your role. So let's start with Jyoti. Tell me about yourself, Jyoti. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting us on this platform, Eli.
00:03:59
Speaker
So I'm Jyoti. I am head of business at Clothing Connected. We belong to a company called Foods Connected. We've been working digitizing food supply chains for the longest time. And ah we started digitizing clothing supply chains around three years ago. We are a SaaS platform. We are a SaaS partner helping brands and retailers power their products with digital supply chain data. I've been in this industry for more than 15 years. I started off in design and product development. I work directly with supply chain across Bangladesh and India and South Asia for fast fashion brands. And when I started my work, I i i was working in Bangladesh and the Rana Plaza incident happened and that completely shattered my belief system as to how this industry worked. What we were consuming was not ethically produced.
00:04:48
Speaker
I soon
Rana Plaza Incident and Ethical Supply Chains
00:04:49
Speaker
started learning how the supply chain works. And after a few years, I decided to shift. to use all of this knowledge. And for the last couple of years, I've been working with innovators. i joined Fashion for Good and then I worked with Hugo Boss. So it's been a lot of scaling and implementing newer technologies to create and impact in industry, which brought me to Clothing Connected. And I've been working with them for the last few years to really digitize supply chains and create transparency and traceability in the supply chain.
00:05:19
Speaker
Great. We'll get into a bit more of what all of those words mean as well. How about you, Atneil? Tell us a bit about yourself and your company Made to Flow. Sure. So hi, everyone.
00:05:31
Speaker
and my name is Etniel. I've been working industry a bit more than 20 years now. I'm a merchandiser by profession. That means I think in numbers. I worked first in luxury and then I moved to mass market and then I decided I need to be closer to the supply chain. So I went to work for Italian fabric manufacturers and that was not enough. So I went to manage production lines in China, in Zhejiang province. And It's funny, Jyoti, that you mentioned also Rana Plaza because I remember it very well. It happened a week after my wedding. And um that that was a shock, I think, to all of us. So as well, that was very similar at the time where thoughts about how things could be different started affecting, I think, many of us. And I started getting more and more into different sustainability initiatives. The first LCA lifecycle assessment that I did was in 2014. It took six months and everyone said, that's amazing. Today at Made to Flow, we do literally thousands per day, a little bit different. And that eventually led to, together with my other co-founder Tal Shogol, that we founded Made to Flow almost six years ago as a decarbonization platform. so at At the time we went to tell companies and they thought we we're crazy. We told them one day you'll measure the impact of all your products.
00:06:47
Speaker
Today, there is a regulation that's about to come out, to the DPP, the digital product passport. So we're not entirely crazy anymore. And our job is mostly about looking at supply chain, either from a product-led, product perspective, ah reverse engineering and understanding exactly what happened to do an LCA, understand the impact hotspots. Or from a supply chain perspective of measuring the facilities themselves and helping them, either ourselves or with our many partners, to decarbonize, build the action plans, follow through, and eventually make sure that the the brands or the suppliers themselves, because a lot of our clients, for example, our suppliers, can reduce the impact over time.
00:07:28
Speaker
Jyoti, what specific problem or failure in today's fashion supply chain are you trying to solve with Clothing Connected? And why is it so important for brands to address these now rather than later? I mean, I guess the regulations are almost here now, so they can't really wait for too long. But why do they need to get on board right now?
00:07:49
Speaker
The problem that we're trying to solve is really managing the entire supply chain, understanding every tier that has participated in creating a product. Now, as a consumer, when you buy a T-shirt, you see a label, it says is made in India or made in Bangladesh. That's just the garment manufacturer. That's where the garment was cut, make and produced. But there are so many other tiers, so many other suppliers in this value chain who we have no visibility to, not just the consumer, but also the brand or the retailer.
00:08:21
Speaker
So by not having visibility to this product that may have actually traveled 40,000 or 80,000 miles, we completely lose transparency to two thirds of the impact. And we know that scope three emissions actually come from raw materials and textile processes. So we don't know who our spinners are, who our knitters and weavers are, um where our raw material source is, where it's coming from. And by losing all of this, we are also not able to understand what has gone into our product, what has gone into our material. And we we will never be able to understand the impact that it creates in terms of environment, if it's a health hazard for humans, if this garment has been ethically produced. And then at the end of life of of the garment, you also don't know what to do with this garment because you have...
00:09:07
Speaker
Absolutely no understanding of of what has gone into the materials. So you don't know how to recycle it, how to sort it, how to best repair it. We need it now more than ever because one, digitizing your entire supply chain can help you make sure that your suppliers are compliant.
00:09:25
Speaker
For example, you you can make sure that your garment does not have PSAS. And the only way to make sure is to know what your vet processors are using um in this process.
00:09:37
Speaker
And also just to ah optimize your supply chains. Now, every time a brand goes to a manufacturer, it's all about cost. At the end of the day, they want to buy garments which cost the least.
00:09:51
Speaker
Although there are labor wages and costs in place, it still comes down to where can I buy the cheapest? And this will avoid a lot of such issues. And then when it comes to materials, I may be using the same material that another department is using. If I have a few departments, menswear, womenswear, kidswear, I'm able to optimize and say, look at the entire material pool and say, this is a material that the other department is using. Can I use the same?
00:10:22
Speaker
So you're able to optimize your supply chains. You get a lot of return on investment and you're able to tap into the impact by looking at what materials you're using and how you can actually ah use better materials instead.
00:10:33
Speaker
That's on the point of supply chain. And of course, there are regulations that are coming in place. Like you said, there is digital product passports that's coming in for ESPR that's coming in soon for textiles in 2027, which requires the brands to show where their materials have produced, the origin, but also the impacts. That is creating environmentally, socially, there's ethical product response, ah producer responsibility, the taxes that are coming in that are already in place in EU. So every garment that is being sold, brand will have to pay taxes on the garment that is being sold and also on the packaging.
00:11:12
Speaker
Because now it's the onus of the producer to take care of what happens after the garment is being sold, after the end of life of the garment. ah So they are essentially paying for recycling, sorting of these garments.
00:11:25
Speaker
To understand all of that, you first have to digitize
Digitizing Supply Chains: Benefits and Features
00:11:29
Speaker
your supply chain. You have to bring them all onto one platform and see data in real time. Only when you collect, you collate this data in real time, integrate with other partners, layer this data ah with someone like made-to-flow who can give impact values, you'll be able to see what is the impact that you're creating, what are the materials that you're using, what is the product that you're providing to your customers, can you improve the quality, the durability, can you bring in circularity and closed-loop solutions? Yeah, all of the above.
00:12:02
Speaker
Okay, wow. that's ah That's a lot of reasons you've just given us. Atniel, what key problems in the supply chain is made to flow focusing on solving? And why do you believe that it's really critical for the industry ah industry's future really for us to fix this problem?
00:12:19
Speaker
it's it's I think that Jyoti said a lot of the things that we think exactly the same way. At the end of the day, it's all about primary data. You know, if I look back at my career when when I started, it's exactly pretty much around the time where we favored less understanding and less data for ah speed.
00:12:40
Speaker
And that was the name of the game. And speed is very much the name of the game. That never changed. It got just got even more. But we're at a at the different point of the cycle where without the data, without that control and understanding,
00:12:56
Speaker
there's not gonna be any progress, we're stuck. So we we got to the bottom line of not knowing anything. We understand now the consequence of not knowing about our supply chains, right? Because like ah around 20 something years ago, we understood, oh, we can just send an email to someone on the other side of the world and we'll get a product and everything will be fine. And we have all the infrastructure to do it and get a sample and fix it and so on.
00:13:18
Speaker
And I don't almost don't need to know anything. And it's fast moving consumer goods, not just fashion or textiles, yeah? And now it's different because ah we we are facing, obviously, regulation. ah We're facing the need to be more responsible towards our clients. It's not just, oh I want to do good in the world, but rather we have completely lost trust, I think, with our clientele, with consumers, and we need to get it back. And it's also financial.
00:13:45
Speaker
Because the the the prices of energy, of water, of a lot of things that we transition our production to certain places because they were deregulated and prices were very low. That's it. We got to the bottom line. There is not. That magic factory that 15, 20 years ago we were looking, I'll find that factory that does have the price. They don't exist anymore. That's it. Bottom line, we got it. So now it's different.
00:14:07
Speaker
Now we need to know what's going on. We're going to an area of control, of understanding. And with that, obviously, our main point of view is it's decarbonization, reduction of the impact in general. I said decarbonization a lot, but it's a lot of different environmental impacts. It can be chemistry-related, can be water-related, and so on. But it's the reduction of the impact across the supply chain by analyzing the data that we're all talking about, right? And it's linked to financials. Those that will not do it, Those that are afraid to spend the money now on the infrastructure will wake up one day and their FOBs are through the roof and they never knew what happened and what hit them. So now is the time to work with your supply chain towards it. It's not a fight towards who offers me a better deal, but how do I work more steadily with my supply chain, understand what's going on and work with them for a better product, better everything.
00:15:02
Speaker
So before we go in deeper, i just want to get a few jargon out of the way so that listeners know and understand what we mean by certain terminology. And something we hear a lot is visibility and traceability. It just seems to be this umbrella term for many things to to happen today. So can you both very briefly explain what, and maybe Jyoti, you can talk about visibility, what that means, and Atniel, if you take traceability, what does that mean along the different tiers of the fashion chain? And also from your experience, now that you started collecting data, where are the the common big data gaps that you're seeing along the supply chain? Where where' is the data missing or difficult to Atniel? Yeah.
00:15:45
Speaker
Traceability. Traceability is the action of discovering who did what. That's the easiest way. So we all know BOM, Bill of Material, right? If we're in the industry, we, most of us don't entirely know BOP, Bill of Processes. So who did which process?
00:16:02
Speaker
Traditionally, and that's very much linked back if we talk Corona Plaza and all of that. Traditionally, it's understanding a chain of custody. I made a garment, so I bought a fabric and trims and someone made a fabric and they bought yarns and so on Very traditional cut and sew kind of route, right? But we that's vertical.
00:16:22
Speaker
You know, imagine a line that goes vertically up to the back, to upstream back to the cotton field, for example, right? or multiple fields and so on. And we have also horizontal.
00:16:34
Speaker
So especially in the multi-tiered ah production that is textile, you often have different facilities doing different actions. So in the fabric level, for example, you have one facility that might do knitting or weaving, another one that that might do dyeing, and another one that might do other wet processes.
00:16:53
Speaker
Visibility is the ability to discover and prove who did all these actions and basically disclose it. And Jyoti, what about visibility? It's understanding who your tiers are and what your value chain looks like. Now, brands have visibility to tier four, which is the garment manufacturer. We say we have four tiers in the garment industry. Now, the third tier is the fabric mill. They are the weavers, the knitters, also the dyers, the wet processors and the dry processors.
00:17:24
Speaker
Some of the brands and retailers have visibility to tier three as well, because sometimes they nominate which fabric needs to go into which garment or who is the producer that you should be working with. They have tie ups with mills. So there is visibility to tier four because they're obviously directly dealing with the garment manufacturer. And then there's a tier three because maybe there's a nominated mill they are working with. Now beyond that, tier 2 is the spinner and the jinnah, the spinner who has actually spun the yarn and passed on this yarn to the fabric mill to either weave or knit your fabric.
00:18:00
Speaker
And then the jinnah who has collected all the raw materials from the farmer collective or from the different farms to make bales of this fiber to have passed on to this to the spinner. Now there is absolutely no visibility or touch with tier 2. And the most difficult data to collect is tier two to tier one.
00:18:22
Speaker
Because imagine this one bale, for example, of cotton may have come from from five different farms. Now, there are organizations like Better Cotton that, again, have this chain of cu mass balance. They have this chain of custody model where they collect cotton from different farms, different farmer collectors, and they certify that this is a Better Cotton or God certifies that this is GOTS through their certifications.
00:18:48
Speaker
So there's hardly any visibility to where actually your raw material is coming from, unless there are bigger brands who use physical tracers, they use fluorescent inks or some sort of a DNA, generative DNA manipulation where they can trace this product at the end. In general, beyond tier three, tier two and tier one visibility is quite less, it's diminished. Also, you have to consider the digital literacy.
00:19:16
Speaker
Because we are working with developing nations and underdeveloped nations that have abundant resources that harvest a lot of these raw materials, they often are not, you cannot really bring them on to a digital platform.
00:19:31
Speaker
So while we completely help with product backward traceability, we give them visibility up to, up from tier one to tier three. What a platform is able to do is we've been able to onboard at least these three tiers up to tier three. And now brands have complete visibility and they are able to map their entire supply chain for every single product, for every single material that goes into the product ah using the bill of materials, using the other tools that we have on the system.
00:20:02
Speaker
Thank you. Now we're going to focus a little bit on Clothing Connected itself and the platform services that you provide. So Jyothi, when you talk about ah digitizing the supply chain, what does that actually look like day to day for a brand and its supply using Clothing Connected? What do they need to do?
00:20:19
Speaker
So the big one big chunk is supplier management and compliance of these suppliers. So what the tier one suppliers do is they invite their tier two and tier three suppliers to be onboarded.
00:20:31
Speaker
As soon as these tier two and three suppliers are onboarded, we know what what their business activities and sub activities are. So we know if they are a web processor, if they are into dyeing, laundry, the compliance rules are automatically triggered on our system.
00:20:44
Speaker
And it's a very automated task-based system. So As soon as they are onboarded, they get a set of documents that they are asked for, questionnaires to fill, there are audits that take place. So that completely ah takes care of managing the supply chain and their compliance. And then the other bit is product data.
00:21:04
Speaker
So what we do is when a brand onboards all of these suppliers, they essentially communicate with tier one suppliers and all the communication is on the system and everything is task-based. So as soon as a brand say sends an order to a tier one supplier or garment manufacturer, they get it as a task on their dashboard saying, you have been sent this order and there's a data request form attached to this order. The form automatically fetches the entire supply chain information from the bill of materials.
00:21:37
Speaker
Depending on what materials and what fabric has gone into this product, they verify if this is the correct supply chain. If not, they declare the supply chain that went into creating this product.
00:21:48
Speaker
And then what we use what we do by collating all of this data product... tier level product data is that we create BI reports. We create a lot of different dashboards that give them visibility to their sustainability metrics in terms of what are the materials they've used across the period or across the quarter, half yearly. They're able to filter down and see where they are in terms of their targets. If they have a target of, say, I want to hit recycled cotton to 75% in two years, they're able to see where they stand in terms of, am I at 35% right now? What am I sourcing the most? Who are my top 10 suppliers? How can I really optimize the supply chain? How how can I improve, use alternate materials or preferred materials that will improve circularity?
00:22:38
Speaker
And we also do a lot of API integrations. So we integrate with their internal PLMs. We also integrate with external platforms like Metaflow, which can add value to the data that we are already collecting by fetching say impact or fetching we we are integrated with intertech so we collect all the lab data so they have visibility to durability and quality of their garments where is it that they're going wrong the most where is it that the tests are failing the most in terms of the materials. So there's a lot of room for improvisation of products and optimization of the supply chain, reduction of impacts. So that's what we do on our platform.
00:23:20
Speaker
It really surprises me every time how brands have been sort of flying blind for decades. um You know, it's suddenly now they're starting to see where they've been heading. um So from what i gather, you sort of help brands kind of bring together a single source of truth for their supply chain data, right? that And you use sort of emails and spreadsheets and... We re replace all of them. There are no emails, there are no spreadsheets. Everything's real-time data.
00:23:49
Speaker
You kind of bring all of that into one place and and and it's just much easier for them to look through and understand. I think you've you've mentioned the different types of data that you collect. How does your platform handle data quality and verification to make sure that that information is complete and trustworthy? That's a really good question. so So once a supplier submits a certain document or questionnaires, it's validated either by tier one or by the brand or the retailer themselves.
00:24:17
Speaker
Although we've removed a lot of manual work and digitized it, still there's a little bit of validation and verification that needs doing by the brand itself. But this is very quickly changing with AI in place right now.
00:24:29
Speaker
We are looking into AI to completely validate the documents, automatically validate the documents ah that come onto our platform. And we are also looking at integrations. ah We've already built a few like InterTech. We've been looking at other integrations like the ZEHC and the HIG, which automate the Zedex. We are integrated with Zedex on our other platform called Foods Connected. We are automating data verification as much as possible through integrations and with the use of AI.
00:25:03
Speaker
And at a technical level, what is most innovative about Clothing Connected Model and how it you know models the supply chain across the different tiers? I think one one big thing I have to credit our system for is that it's multi multilingual.
00:25:20
Speaker
In the Foods Connected platform, we have 70,000 suppliers who are using our system, help our platform across countries across the world. Around 3,000 now on the clothing platform. We are a cloud software company. We are essentially a cryptographic ledger, very similar to a blockchain, but we are less energy intensive in comparison to a blockchain.
00:25:43
Speaker
And I think those are some of the benefits. The other thing that's great about the platform is the user interface. because our suppliers are so used to using spreadsheets, documents, emails. We've tried creating a platform which gives a very similar look and feel, but it's just that you're doing it online. So it's a lot of tables, a lot of filters.
00:26:05
Speaker
Once you sign into the system, it's very intuitive on how you can use the platform and how one tool leads automatically to another. And like I mentioned earlier, we are completely automated in terms of tasks and our system is very agile. So one brand may have requirements of a certain due diligence requirements that other brands may not. it may vary and even the audits they do, the the questions they ask may vary from one brand to another. So we have a template based system where when we onboard a brand, we do a current state analysis of where they are at. We try understanding what their essential needs are and we then create specific templates for them that only their suppliers would have visibility to.
00:26:55
Speaker
and that only they would be using and no other brand would be able to use the same. So it's very agile in a way that the system works the same way way for every brand and for every supplier, but what the information that you see that you are asked for, the rules that are set up are very different according to the needs of the brands on the retailer sensors.
00:27:15
Speaker
Brilliant. Now, coming to Made to Flow, Adniel, how is your platform
Focus on Decarbonization and Environmental Impact
00:27:20
Speaker
different? What kind of data are you collecting and what kind of dashboards are you creating which is different?
00:27:26
Speaker
Our job is to um complete data. I think we didn't understand what we were getting ourselves into when we started. on the sense ah Honestly speaking, looking back and we had conversation with people over the years and they said that you guys are just don't understand the the trouble that you're getting into.
00:27:45
Speaker
In a way i'm very happy, but it took a couple of years to get to where we are, where we said, okay, the industry doesn't have enough data. So connected needs certain data and we can complete it in order to understand the environmental data. So we are feeding off on product data and then what we call activity data.
00:28:09
Speaker
to To illustrate a point, there is zero need data. to ah understand if a product had a silicon finish or the type of dyeing that was necessary to be able to bring a good product to the market, right? It's nice to know this, but you don't have to do it to have a good product that will sell well. So this is exactly our job to do it. And then we need to also understand ah what's the energy footprint, so energy bills, the machines that was used and so on. So we are what we call off-system data gathering. Basically, we're not we can present things on a platform or send it to Connected, for example, right? The results. But the entire data gathering methodology is about wherever the supplier is, whatever their language, ah whatever is their preference, and so on, an email, a WeChat, a WhatsApp, all these kind of things, they can get a link with the data that is missing and will complete it. And our job is to be those facilitators, those that will make it easier. And if there's something that i take with me from my career when I was managing production lines was that my thing could change all the time. Someone would be offered just a little bit extra and then move to the facility next door and so on. And that happens all the time. So we cannot have these expensive trainings and all these kinds of things. So our job is to take unstructured data
00:29:35
Speaker
Unstructured activity data will help us with environmental calculations eventually to be able to get it a few inches further of accuracy so that we really understand where the impact is.
00:29:47
Speaker
Could you tell me a little bit more about activity data? what What kind of data is that? What goes into it? So activity data is, for example, think about your electricity bill.
00:29:58
Speaker
How much coal are you using? What kind of wastewater stream do you have? If you have an ETP, so basically internally a facility that will help you recycle, refilter, reuse some water, what is it? There's like 32 different subtypes and so on, and their energy consumption and their ability to do the work and how much they filter and bring back the water, all differ. This is what generally is referred to as activity data. On top of that, you have the very specifics. jet dying or in to that effect, you have you know tens of different types of machines and they have their own specifications and so on. So all of this is the type of data that we feed off from with the key understanding that you never have all the data possible.
00:30:48
Speaker
It's a puzzle. You keep building puzzles and you'll never finish all of them. And you need to be able to complete them in a reliable manner. So you learn from every situation to be able to complete the puzzle so that you don't stop because you work on ah on a deadline, you need the information on time and so on. And so you keep bettering and rebuilding these puzzles along the way. So do you actually have people on the ground at these factories sort of ensuring there's, you know, what machine people are using or how do you gain that information? How do you make sure that it is true?
00:31:21
Speaker
that would be dramatically expensive. ah Something like that, physically impossible. Or there were times that we will often ask, do you put meters on machine? So for example, there are areas in the world where I see more and more metering appearing.
00:31:37
Speaker
Portugal, very advanced. Pakistan, Bangladesh is now starting. Vietnam, I see it more and more because these are new facilities with a lot of money coming in. So there's more metering data that is coming in and it's very helpful. But no, the vast majority of the industry i have no meters, sending people all across the world and so on. And we've done data collection for more than 53 countries. That would be dramatically complex and almost physically and economically impossible. So what we did is basically try to understand over the years what data is available, right?
00:32:12
Speaker
And so you can ask for energy bill. But you cannot necessarily know the exact energy consumption that was on a specific lot, in the specific sub-process in that specific production, right? So you need to understand that, for example, a type of ah exhaust dying, with let's say a beam machine, with acid dyes, for example, could be 21 kilowatt hours per kilo.
00:32:42
Speaker
For example, the entire pre-process and the process itself, yeah the pretreatment and the dyeing itself. Whereas other situations would be only 3.8 kilowatt hours. keto one hours right So it's taking incredible amounts of data, computing and cross-referencing all sorts of data together to be able to calculate it as accurately as possible. And as you can imagine, the more data you put into a system, the smarter it can become and the more and more accurate When you both talk about so much data, it almost hurts my head. I'm glad, you know, it's not a human sitting and crunching all this information. Once you have collected and cleaned the data, how do you translate that into impact results or scenario modeling that brands can then actually use to change suppliers or processes or materials?
00:33:34
Speaker
So I think this is one of the things that we managed to figure out quite early because I know there's there's a few of us out there in the market that managed to do, and I'm very, very proud of the LCA engine that we built that is really specialized in fast-moving consumer goods in general, but really, really in textile. And so the ability to understand the many properties forks in the road that you have. So if you have that kind of gauge, if you have that kind of knitting, if you have that kind of weaving, if you have this kind of product, so many nuances that let you understand what is normally happening. And that helps us, one, guide the questions that we ask to uncover, get that prior data. And second, be able to, if there is any gaps and so to complete them correctly, right?
00:34:25
Speaker
And so today you can have the entire road, roadmap of everything, what we would call, so as I said, the bill process, all the processes, the impact for it. And in LCA, Lifecycle Assessment Terminology, the complete inventory table. So every line of calculation, obviously an inventory table is impossible to consume when you do a a thousand or 10,000 products or even just a couple of hundreds because it's way, way too much information. But you have the ability to go and visit very, very nuanced data when you need to, whenever you need to go and try and understand and go deep into something. At the same time, you can have the different levels of reporting, of aggregating and seeing the big picture.
00:35:11
Speaker
And I think this is the game between when do you need to go really deep and when do you need just, okay, give me the but bottom line, where is my problem so I can start taking care it. Yeah. Now we'll go into more general questions for both of you. What are some of the barriers of entries that you've seen for brands? Jyothi, you mentioned about these kind of technologies being used in the food industry for a long time and it's it's well adopted, but what is slowing down the adoption of these technologies in the fashion sector? I think the the fashion industry is a very fragmented industry.
00:35:45
Speaker
We've been discussing supply chain for such a long time. The supply chain does not exist in one country or not even in two countries. it It's across so many continents. I wouldn't even say countries.
00:35:56
Speaker
So for the longest time, like Atinel mentioned before, brands only worried about where they could get their garments produced. Everything else was not their problem and everything else was not their issue because they were sitting so far away from the supply chain. They did not really want to bother about who is the fabric supplier, who is the dyer or where is the raw material coming from.
00:36:21
Speaker
But like you said, there are so many regulations that are being put in place right now. I strongly believe that these legislations are driving ah the industry and this change in having to manage the entire supply chain and having to understand, be transparent and traceable. And this change, we see it as a sudden change, but it hasn't happened all of a sudden. It has happened gradually over the years. It is surfacing now more as a change because we have more and more conversations about it because there's strict deadline to this regulation that is in place.
00:36:57
Speaker
So there's more visibility to what is being done. i think the biggest barrier is brands. At least the smaller and the medium brands, the growing brands, they only look at return on investment.
00:37:10
Speaker
They look at their profit margins. Every department, every team of merchandisers who are looking at certain products or looking at the department, they are given KPIs for their given targets, ah they're given goals. And those goals are always numbers.
00:37:28
Speaker
And those goals have never been impact. numbers until now. They've always been sales numbers. And when the conversation has always been about profit, brands have been hesitant in investing not just into digital, um into a digital platform, but also into new generation materials, into recycled materials, into anything that may increase their cost by a certain percentage. And that's been a huge topic for these brands and retailers until now. But these they are finally seeing that when they're able to digitize their supply chain, when they're actually able to see their data in real time, they're able to utilize this data and...
00:38:11
Speaker
The return return on investment in this is huge. They're able to reduce their impacts. They're able to create public reports. They're able to be answerable to authorities who ask them where their fiber is coming from. If their cotton is from China, is it from Xinjiang? Can you prove that it's from Xinjiang?
00:38:31
Speaker
So they're seeing a lot of benefits ah right now than ever. But definitely these there are regulations these are regulations that are completely leading the way into digitization and into accepting alternate materials, creating new newer pilots with these technologies, with newer innovations in textile.
00:38:52
Speaker
so I can see how this could be benefiting brands and they kind of have to follow these regulations. What's the barrier of entry for suppliers at Niel and why should they care? Why is it important for them? Because it feels like it's all to help the brands.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I guess suppliers are there to serve the brand, but it feels like a lot of effort for them. What do they get out of it? First of all, some doomsday words. We we are facing, in my opinion, a great extinction of supplies. A lot of the supply chain will disappear in the coming years.
00:39:28
Speaker
It's not economical. It cannot work. It doesn't It's not adjusted to the current business models and so on. The the name of the game was very simple in the last 20, 25 years. Everyone were slaves to the planogram. You didn't produce according to what you sold. You produced to how much you fill in the store. you had insane amounts of square footage that you you needed to fill out. And so you just check in product one after the other and the sales will take care of it and you'll manage That business model is gone or is dying, however you want to look at it on the timeline.
00:40:01
Speaker
Things are changing dramatically. Consumers behave differently, how they deal with their products and so on. So today, if you think about it, when production got to a lot of the places where production is today, right? is because of deregulation. There was no regulation. And regulation is if you want utilities, energy, water, and so on, because in a lot of places, and it's not a question of global north, global south, or however you want to call it. Also in the global north, there's a lot of places where water is deregulated and the pricing doesn't reflect what it should be and so on. ah But you have utility, you have the overheads, the cost of the personnel, and you have the cost of the commodities, the the cotton, the viscose, the whatever you're buying and so on.
00:40:46
Speaker
All these costs are going up. That's it. It's a fact. They're going up. They're going to go back faster and faster. And if you don't have control, if you don't have visibility, if you're not going to take care of your efficiency, if you're not going to make sure that tomorrow you can supply your own energy, you're going to get stuck.
00:41:04
Speaker
Look at Bangladesh when they increased prices. What was it? Two years ago, after five years of luck, the increased prices of the natural gas, what it meant for the bottom line of a lot of factors.
00:41:16
Speaker
that is happening, of how the energy market in Pakistan has basically collapsed and had the rise of biomass and so on, which are ah only those that were smart enough, that were capable, that could foresee the future. And that's across the board. Every country on earth, wherever you produce, everything's going to change.
00:41:32
Speaker
If you're not going to have control, if you're not going to take care of your efficiencies, forget for the good of the earth, forget for your community. Yeah, simply economics. That's it. If you're not going to do it for the economics, you're not going to survive tomorrow. It's as simple as that. So, yes, the brands are saying, I have goals. So now you have goals and they're very aggressive and you're going to foot up the the bill and you're going to pay for it. And so on to a certain extent.
00:42:00
Speaker
Yes, but this is not just being, yes, correct. It's it's still a ah bit of power struggle of who has the power and who says what. But if suppliers will not take the initiative right now, then I don't know if they survive 2030.
00:42:17
Speaker
You both mentioned how important the regulation has been in driving these technologies and the adoption of these technologies. These are, you know, mainly eu regulations that are coming out for products that are coming into the EU. And correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, garments are still being manufactured for other parts of the world. And for a lot of other parts of the world, these kinds of data points and information doesn't seem to matter as much. Or do they? i don't know. You can tell me about that.
00:42:44
Speaker
So so let let me jump in on that. They do. So first of all, we're a global market. So if you're going to behave, you cannot deny that the EU market is one of the most important markets out there.
00:42:55
Speaker
So whether it is only 10%, 20% or 90% of my sales, it's massive. And if I'm going to have an entire system adjustments just for that market, it means I'm going anyway do it for the other markets.
00:43:07
Speaker
So we, it's amazing. We have clients in Canada, in Australia, on purpose, I'm saying countries that quite far away, right? That they are like, we need a DPP. And and ah we we tell them, you are aware you don't have such a regulation. But it doesn't matter because their competitors that compete there in that geography are behaving the same way that they do in Europe. So that's it. It's a global regulation. Plus, it's not the only regulations. Right? There are three stricter regulations, some of them very strict in China, in India, and a lot of other regions.
00:43:40
Speaker
So it's an entirely global thing. I know that we look very much at the US and we would expect them to be more ahead of the game than what they are and without getting into politics or anything like that. It doesn't matter.
00:43:52
Speaker
It's a global market. So if a region like eu is leading, it's not always leading in all the regulations. There's other places that have very strict regulations, EPRs and other things.
00:44:04
Speaker
That's it. it's The entire market behaves like this. That's really encouraging to hear. okay so if we had a sort of mid-sized clothing brand listening in right now who feels quite overwhelmed by all this data collection and regulation, what is the first maybe pragmatic step you would tell them to take tomorrow to get on the right path with supply chain data and impact management?
Steps for Better Supply Chain Data Management
00:44:27
Speaker
Jyothi?
00:44:28
Speaker
So we work with medium enterprise brands as well. And I i know that brands that even make a turnover of 20% twenty 25 to 40 million pounds a year. They also have to declare their modern modern slavery.
00:44:45
Speaker
According to the Modern Slavery Act, they have to declare the supply chain. They have to put out a public report on sustainability. And it can be overwhelming because all of a sudden, there may be a brand that is suddenly going and they have to do all these things that they were never meant to do. I think the easiest situation stage would be or step would be to first map out the entire tier four and the tier three. So go stage by stage, tier by tier.
00:45:14
Speaker
And when they would use a platform like ours, it would make it very simple. They have to first list out everything that they are missing.
00:45:25
Speaker
Is it supply chain compliance that is their focus? Is it product traceability that they are most worried about? Or is it their country of origin of their raw material sources they want to understand most? Is it the impact that is their prime focus for the next three or five years? Once they understand which bucket is it that they're first trying to tackle, they completely understand focus on going tier by tier with or without the platform, they will slowly get at a point where they'll understand almost like a to-do list. If I have to tackle supply chain compliance, these are the due diligence steps that I have to put in place. I have maybe six of them in place. I don't have the other four. How can I bring them in? If I want product visibility by tier,
00:46:17
Speaker
Do I know who my fabric source is? Do I have a bill of materials in place? Does my bill of materials have only fabric or do I also have trims, packaging, finishes?
00:46:29
Speaker
So trying to expand the data collection step by step, stage by stage, depending on what their priorities are. I think that could hugely help. And that is our approach as well. When we start working with a brand, we do a current state analysis as to where they are at the minute. What is the data that they've already collected? Where are they struggling?
00:46:50
Speaker
And then we do a future state analysis of this is where you could be and this is what your supply chain could look like in the next three years or four years. You will have visibility to data. You did not have visibility to earlier. Your impact values may go up because we have case studies that have proven so with other brands. We also utilize data.
00:47:12
Speaker
the learnings that we've got from by working with these other customers and by working with a supply chain that is very similar in a parallel industry that is foods, where we work with 130 brands. ah So what we do is essentially bring in that knowledge.
00:47:29
Speaker
and collaborate them ah with them, have a partnership with them to understand that we will be a platform that they will use and they will work on. We also onboard all of the suppliers for free of charge.
00:47:44
Speaker
We train all of the suppliers. We do a lot of hand-holding. We do a lot of implementation when we begin. So the first step is really for them to understand what they need. The second step is, of course, to digitize if they have the means and the resources too.
00:47:58
Speaker
Brilliant. Anything to add there, Adnia? Yeah, I think SMEs have a huge opportunities right now because everyone is looking at the regulations and not sure. And, you know, there's there's regulation at the same time, there's certain deregulation of the regulation at the EU level. Yeah, it's happening both at the same time. Right now, the game is the game of big companies, not of smaller companies. But this is where things can change, where the bigger brands are still on the fence and they' not sure and they're being very careful because there's bigger implications simply from being of a larger scale. And as a smaller entity, you have the opportunity with the different texts that are being offered of all of us on the call today. Suddenly they could do a leapfrog.
00:48:42
Speaker
and really not just better their business, being more efficient, which is necessary and so on, but to have the ability to communicate that with their consumers and gain trust faster than the big guys out there. i think that's a massive, massive opportunity that those that leverage on it will dramatically benefit in the coming years.
00:49:05
Speaker
Very encouraging bit of news there for all the mid-sized companies which might be feeling overwhelmed. I think nothing works like a good example also to convince people of the the potential of platforms like yours. um So can you tell us an example where the data from your system led a brand to change a product or material or um supplier um and what difference that made to their impact or business performance? Wow, I can give a few examples.
00:49:33
Speaker
I can see if it's something that stuck into mind, it's very, very particular, but there was a certain pouch that was done that is used for vehicles, whatever. And the impact was roughly two and a half kilos CO2 per product.
00:49:48
Speaker
they produce 850,000 of these per year. And that could have been reduced to just under one kilo. So you can do the math. It's insane numbers, right? That's just on the product level. And on a supply chain level, it is is incredible because we, on supply chain level, you you don't measure in kilos anymore. You measure in tons of CO2, right? These are slower processes, but once they happen, they're repeated over and over. And it's the difference in cubic meters of water, in tons of CO2 can suddenly be massive, not to mention that also financially and the relationships, the relationships between the brands and the suppliers became, we could see it became so much stronger because they were forced to have a discussion.
00:50:41
Speaker
So you take that one t-shirt that the dyeing change or ah the consumption of material was different, or there was a certain reuse of things. These are tiny examples, but the real story, in my opinion, it leads to much better relationships. And these were relationships that were, I have a product I want to do Here's a BOM, send me a sample. Whoever sent me the best sample and the best pricing wins.
00:51:04
Speaker
And suddenly it's an entirely different conversation. But for that, by the way, everyone needs to understand their role, the supplier needs to understand they they're also a supplier of data, they're service provider, not just goods provider. The brand needs to understand that it should nurture ah relationships.
00:51:20
Speaker
And so it's an entire ecosystem of benefits. love that um How about you, Jyoti, an example from your platform? Yeah, of course, I can't name the brands or the suppliers, but um I can give an example of a retailer that's been using, of course, all the retailers, they have these top five or top 10 suppliers who they give their core quantities to and they're the biggest in volume.
00:51:45
Speaker
So one of the sourcing hubs that was supplying to this brand, they reported after one year that they improved their compliance by 40%. And 40% in this industry is is, yeah, in one year is a big number. And also what this other retailer did was they, a few materials, they did not understand where those materials were coming from. They were non-conformant materials, ah specifically non-conformant man-made cellulosic fiber that they were not supposed to source, which It's a material that's not allowed, not approved by the canopy
Ensuring Ethical Sourcing Through Traceability
00:52:22
Speaker
green button.
00:52:23
Speaker
They were completely able to trace down where that material came from, which product that material went into, which season that product was at and completely changed or helped the supplier change ah their tier mapping.
00:52:39
Speaker
for the repeat products for the next season. So there's been a lot of such improvements. And also this this retailer was, along with a lot of other retailers in the UK, they were scrutinized or asked where ah certain products that they put out in the market came from because it had the label made in China.
00:53:01
Speaker
When it says made in China, immediately everyone's thought goes on. has this Has there been forced labor involved in producing raw materials for this garment?
00:53:13
Speaker
This was the only retailer that was able to go back with complete breakdown of data of where every single product came from, all the tiers that were involved in the product, the location, the country of origin, and they were able to confirm that it was not from an area that involved forced labor.
00:53:33
Speaker
And no other retailers were able to give back a ah proof or a validation of having made in China and this product not containing the material that came from forced labor.
00:53:47
Speaker
Great examples. Now, zooming out a little bit, what's one conversation the fashion or textile industry desperately needs to have, but it isn't? What would you want people to be talking about?
00:53:58
Speaker
Hathniel? Yeah. yeah There's there's so so many, really. but Just one today. I think that we we are having finally, after many years, the right conversations, right? Think about it, things like catalysators, like um No Logo, No Me Cline came out, what, 1997? And here we are today talking about traceability and so on in a more organized kind of manner. So the conversation is there.
00:54:29
Speaker
I think it's the scale of the conversation. So today we having the right conversation, we understand impact and traceability and understanding and data and digitizing all this.
00:54:42
Speaker
do Exactly the conversation to have, but how much of it are we doing? And there's a tendency to go in just a little bit, just do this, just this section. No, that's it.
00:54:55
Speaker
The conversation should be about how tomorrow everything is on it, how everything is connected, how we know about everything. This is it. It's about understanding that technology is mature enough, that the scale should be there. There is no reason that in 10 years, we are not dramatically more advanced than the phase three of the DPP, which basically get you to tier three and so on. Yeah. And ah and and we we need to understand now is the time that I'm going to connect everything and I'm going to have that demand to understand the impact and who did what and have those deeper conversation and not just with a select few.
00:55:36
Speaker
Great. How about you, Jyoti? I think the conversations are there. I want to challenge the people who are involved in these conversations. I don't think we have still reached the right people who have to be involved in these conversations. Of course, we have the head of sustainability and the the head of sourcing and all these people.
00:55:59
Speaker
individually and as teams in sitting in the industry who are deeply passionate to really create this change and improve the products that we're selling, have a big impact.
00:56:09
Speaker
But the ones who actually need convincing, the CEOs and the CFOs and the people who put the money to scale these technologies are not in the conversation.
00:56:20
Speaker
And I think that's the challenge that we need to put out there. How can we reach and convince them, make them believe that this is something that's coming, that's coming fast in terms of regulations, but also in terms of them having the onus of responsibility in what they're putting out in the market, what they're selling to their customers and how ethically they're producing the garment. Now we're going to zoom out even further and and get you to take off your work hats and just come as yourself and tell us a bit about, you know, where you're from, where did you grow up, what's your background? Tadniel?
00:56:56
Speaker
Sure. So i am as I used to apologize to my university teachers, I'm French-Israeli, which means I'm very direct.
00:57:09
Speaker
I to tell him I'm very sorry. i'm not meant it to come off wrong. It's cultures together that creates people that tend to be quite direct. It's ah it's it's a problem. I'm working on that. But yes, I was born in France and I grew up in Israel.
00:57:25
Speaker
And I was very, very, very fortunate in the industry to have really... be part of this and see everywhere from being yeah involved in re retail in the UK, which is a very particular ecosystem and so on, to seeing fabric manufacturers in Italy, to to experiencing it firsthand in China and the production lines, and finally understanding everything and and and and I think, for example, experiencing understanding the people that I, my job was to go and get a cent less from them and now being partners together to reduce the impact together. I think from that perspective, especially when asking when, ah where from and all of that in our industry, which is very global,
00:58:10
Speaker
It's so something that i'm very feel very fortunate that I'm part of and can keep seeing things from very different perspectives. Absolutely. i
Personal Stories and Multicultural Backgrounds
00:58:21
Speaker
love that. And while I did a little bit of research on you, I realized that you speak a whole number of languages. So, you know, Hebrew, French, that explains you that, you know, that's your background. Italian, Dutch and a bit of Chinese. I mean, have you always had a love for languages? Is it self-taught?
00:58:39
Speaker
How do you do that? Well, i'll I'll tell you that I failed German in university. Okay, and Make2Flow is a German company, so it's a huge problem that I say this.
00:58:49
Speaker
ah the The issue was that I was doing my bachelor degree and I had to learn Dutch and German at the same time. That doesn't work very well. You can do either which. You cannot do both at the same time. Very bad idea.
00:59:02
Speaker
i I love languages. Really. I think that there's something incredible about it. I'll tell you something personal. So my wife is Chinese. So i told my daughter now that shes she's turning six soon, that we're going to start learning the characters and everything. Oh, lovely. And I told her, I'm with you. We're going to do the characters together. so let's see who who gets it better because I can understand pretty well, but the characters not so much. So now in the coming few years, have a new goal. Let's see if she gets it before me. Yeah, ah nice. ah That's wonderful. It's such a skill to to be able to learn languages. I really envy that. Now, Jyoti, tell me about yourself. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?
00:59:46
Speaker
I'm half Indian, half Pakistani. I was born and brought up in India, south of India, Chennai. I actually was a software engineer engineer in my previous life. I started off as a software engineer. I was there in that field for two years. I was quite bored of being in front of laptops and just coding and I'm generally a more creative person.
01:00:07
Speaker
ah And I really used to like art and fashion. In my second year, I took part in this, this is a funny story, I took part in this reality show. It was called Let's Design, which was like the project runway of India.
01:00:21
Speaker
and I ended up winning, being the winner of this reality show. wow And I told myself, okay, I'm going to apply to all the best design universities in India.
01:00:34
Speaker
And even if I get through one of them, it's a sign I should be a designer. I shouldn't be making fun of the laptops, coding. I got through all of them and I say, okay, these are multiple signs. And that's how my transition to fashion happened.
01:00:49
Speaker
And I soon after moved to Bangladesh. And yeah, my world completely changed after being in Bangladesh. I've seen everything, the Rana Plaza incident, the strikes that used to happen during the elections. I also lost a colleague to a terrorist attack that happened in one of the...
01:01:10
Speaker
ah restaurant of bars very close is actually, 200 meters from my house. Bangladesh has seen some really challenging times um politically.
01:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that has completely shaped the way I see the industry, the way I view the world. Now I live in London. I've been here for the last six, seven years. i yeah, I moved here to do a dual master's and I've been here ever since. And it's been really nice to see brands, retailers, see the industry finally get warmed up to making these changes and to to creating a change. Yeah. And in in my part time, I paint. I do a lot of art. Yeah. These are exciting things I do on the side.
01:02:01
Speaker
ah It's interesting because you seem to sort of exist exist between two extremes. So, i mean, if anyone knows the politics, India, Pakistan is just, you know, they're extremes, but you've sort of lived in the middle and and grown up in India. And then you did software and then you went into fashion and you've...
01:02:17
Speaker
You won in a competition where you didn't even have any training in fashion, but you so you kind of went from one extreme to the other. And now in your job, you're sort of bringing the two together again, ah which is wonderful. That's quite a story. i was curious now, you know, running a startup and setting up a business is highly stressful and you're wearing multiple hats and pulling your hair out and all of that. How do you take care of your sort of physical and mental health in the process of all of it?
01:02:47
Speaker
yeah Or do you? You know, this is a conversation that we have all the time internally. it's um It's very difficult.
01:02:58
Speaker
It's on the verge of impossible. You work in all sorts of ah crazy hours and there's always a feeling that you need to compromise on something. And so I honestly, if you can find an answer on how to do it properly,
01:03:12
Speaker
I would love to know. we we really i know with Tal, ah my co-founder, our CEO, we talk about it a lot and try to see how we do, but it's it's never really, really enough. When when you have a a startup, it just consumes everything and you have great responsibilities for for everyone in the company, for your clients, for what you're doing. You keep asking yourself questions.
01:03:37
Speaker
It's a never, never ending kind of thing. But also at the same time, you know, it's not something that was thrust upon the people that do it. We chose it. I have only one person to blame. That's it. It's it's ah' ah it's a bit late. It's just trying to figure out how we do all of these things together, sometimes managing more than others, sometimes less.
01:03:59
Speaker
Jyoti,
Maintaining Well-Being in Startups
01:04:00
Speaker
how about yourself? You said you do bit painting. That sounds good and healthy. Anything else? Yes, I actually have ah i'm i'm i have some really good co-founders and the global VP I report to, Duncan, they're very supportive. very They're completely involved in how Clothing Connected works and we sit on strategy meetings together and decide we we create a roadmap of how would the future should look like. and how we can really help the industry in building their supply chain. So on the work front, it's quite sorted. Thanks to people above me who are doing the work and giving me the support that I need. But I still do wear multiple hats. It's me and another colleague of mine, Dan. We are two people who handle everything in Shodding Connected, from product innovation to business. implementation to client support to bringing new clients to marketing so it does get a lot but I look at how I can ah derive satisfaction from many different things and not just from my job so I start my day every single day Monday to Friday I start my day with a workout either with a strength training or a yoga and That's already one thing done in my bucket list for the day. So I already go in with so much endorphins and with full energy, with a lot of dopamine. I make my breakfast. I have my breakfast with my partner in the morning. And then the entire day, obviously, is dedicated to work. And in the evenings, I paint. I've been painting a lot more because the show is coming up. I sit opposite a beautiful green park. So I'm actually very thankful of all the things and grateful of all the things that I have in my life. So it automatically reduces the stress that I have at work. Also, thanks to my friends and my partners. Yeah.
01:05:51
Speaker
That's wonderful. Gosh, I feel like Atniel and I can both learn a lot from that. I need to do a lot of that actually. and Thanks for reminding us that that's important and it's possible. I had to.
01:06:04
Speaker
And the painting, which is not exactly something that's squeezing in 15 minutes, you it's not this tiny thing. It's a whole extended one of some. We just need to learn how to do it, right? I don't know.
01:06:18
Speaker
She's got extra hours in the day that we don't. So last couple of questions, guys, hang in there with me. I appreciate your patience. This is maybe dipping into a personal story. So I believe textiles have the power to fulfill our senses and our soul. It's very intimate.
01:06:33
Speaker
Could each of you share about a piece of fabric or a garment that holds deep personal value for you and a story that's connected to
Personal Connections to Textiles
01:06:43
Speaker
it? So it doesn't have to be something that you can still use or wear or, you know, but it's still, you hold on to it because it's very, very special.
01:06:50
Speaker
Wow, you know, it's um its endless. I can talk about flowers, but in the sense, if it is a Momotaro denim that I have that i don't fit into anymore and we' never will, and I still hold on to it because just touching that rough selvage denim and so on, or a a cardigan from when I used to work at Pringle of Scotland and and brings up these memories and also the make of it and so on. So I, it's for me, textile, and especially the the touching of the fabric is immediate bringing memories and thinking of different periods of time or, or different things. And for years, I used to go to Promete Vision and essentially what you do is a, it's an attack on your senses to patch all these fabrics. And I tried to estimate once that you're, if you do the two, three days in certain times, you can see like thousands of designs and it's like
01:07:45
Speaker
you You cannot even comprehend this, but all of this, I think that's that's why with all the difficulties of this crazy industry, that's what makes it also wonderful because it's so so connected to the emotions. Absolutely.
01:07:59
Speaker
Jyoti? That's it, you hit the nail. I think it's the emotional connection, the emotional bond that we build with some of ah some of the things that we own, especially textiles, because they touch asking their honors the entire day for how many other the amount of times we wear.
01:08:17
Speaker
I can't name just a single piece of garment or cloth that... I'm super attached to, but I do remember my mom, it's passed down from generations, has this one black sari that is completely hand sequined with black sequins and hand embroidered. It's such a beautiful sari. I think it's, it's, definitely older than me. I think it's around 45 or 47 years old. My aunts have worn my sister, me, my mom. I don't think I would ever be able to get rid of it. And I don't know what I'll do with it. Like it has to pass on from legacy to legacy.
01:08:55
Speaker
A lot of Indian textiles, at least hand looms and hand embroidered, have that special emotional connection for me. Last one for the day. If you could start over, what would you do differently?
01:09:08
Speaker
or what would you tell your younger self, Agniel? Wow, that's a very difficult question. Deep. i mean i ah don't I don't think I necessarily think of doing something different. I can now have perspective and understand, but I would say that what I've really learned, and especially in last couple of years, is really understanding how it works in the relationship of brand supplier and really understanding
01:09:39
Speaker
how to maintain these relationships. And now, like, for example, we made to flow that we're the in-between. don't necessarily always hold that relationship directly, or but we connect these relationships and make them deeper.
01:09:52
Speaker
I think understanding of how the focus on the relationship rather than that next T-shirt, that next shirt that needs to be on the market and i need to have the sales to and the margins and so on, I think that could have really helped do things better. That's beautiful. Thank you. Jyoti? I think I would tell my younger self to just take more risks.
01:10:13
Speaker
From a very young age, have taken on a lot of responsibilities for my myself, for my for my folks, for my family, me my extended family. And my decisions, a lot of my decisions were driven based on, okay, am I still able to provide everybody, ah make sure that everyone's fine? And there was very little, I was averse to risks. I wouldn't take risks. So I think I would tell my youngest loves, everything's going to be fine. and Just take some risks and live your life.
01:10:46
Speaker
Well, maybe you didn't realize it because you did. Taking a risk jumping from software to fashion is massive. um especially in a country like India, where, oh my goodness, that the dream job is to be a software engineer. Maybe you've taken a list and you just haven't realized that you have. Thank you so much. And Atniel, I'd love to close on this note because it is all about the people.
01:11:09
Speaker
and the relationships. And I think work settings and factories and brands and all of that is just, I always believe they're just stages, areas or performance spaces where we get to build relationships because ah at the end of the day, it is all about the people that we work with and what we can do together and how we can change things because we collaborate and build those deep relationships that go beyond just the business and the product, as you mentioned.
01:11:35
Speaker
Thank you so much, both of you. I absolutely love that conversation. Really appreciate the generous yeah insights that you've given us into the the fashion sector and also just the hopeful message of how things can change and and platforms such as yours are making a difference. It's fascinating really to pull that curtain back on the supply chain with you today and see not only how complex and messy it can be, but also how much possibility there is when the right data is gathered, organized and made useful for people.
01:12:06
Speaker
It's also great to see how your platform complements each other as well and work together, making it frictionless for brands and suppliers to get that bigger picture from the top of the mountain and also the granular data when they need it.
01:12:19
Speaker
So I really appreciate the clarity you brought to us on the topic and the honesty in sharing both the challenges as well as the opportunities. I know the listeners will go away with a much better understanding of where the industry is heading and the role your workplace in that journey. So thank you for joining me. Had a lovely conversation. Thank you so much, Aston Lee.
01:12:39
Speaker
Thank you very much.
01:12:47
Speaker
Wow, what an eye-opening conversation. I hope that gave you a much clearer picture of what it actually takes to bring the fashion supply chain into the light. Two things really jumped out for me. First, that a garments label tells us almost nothing.
01:13:01
Speaker
Two thirds of a product's environmental impact lies in the invisible upstream tiers that most brands have never had visibility into. And secondly, Atniel's point that the industry has spent decades optimizing for speed and cost at the expense of knowledge, and we've now hit the rock bottom of that road.
01:13:21
Speaker
The only way forward is data, transparency, and collaborating closely with your supply chain rather than working around them and finding cheaper options.
01:13:32
Speaker
With regulations like digital product passport and ESPR arriving fast, the brands that build their data infrastructure now will be the ones best place for what comes next. There is a lot of activity and discussions and regulations that are being developed at the moment around these topics of DPP and ESPR, especially in the EU, as you might be familiar with. So this is something ah that I will definitely keep a close eye on and maybe get another guest who can go a bit more in-depth, especially into the digital product passport when there is more clarity in that space. So do subscribe to the podcast so you can find out when that episode drops.
01:14:10
Speaker
but Please share this episode with anyone who might find it inspiring or valuable. Your support to spread the word about the podcast is deeply appreciated. If you enjoyed this episode, consider buying me a coffee using the link in the show notes. It helps fuel those late night editing sessions as I bring you these stories. A review from you would mean the world to me and help other listeners find this podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Stay tuned for more episodes and don't forget to subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of textiles, technology, craft and sustainability. Until next time, I'm Millie Parakin reminding you that there's no such thing as ordinary cloth.
01:14:48
Speaker
Every thread tells a story.