Building the Anti-Zara: How Traceability In Fashion is the Future
ASKET's founders, Jakob and August, who met in business school, studied the world's most profitable fashion company and decided they'd do the exact opposite. And, it's working.
ASKET
The Pursuit of Less. Our promise is to restore the value of garments by creating meaningful essentials: A permanent collection of zero-compromise pieces, their stories uncovered and told. We can’t live without clothing, but we can make the pieces we choose to invest in count.
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What if we knew everything about everything we bought? Nuts to bolts, cradle to grave, all of it. Would we make better choices? Would we treat our stuff better? Jakob and August, founders of ASKET, are betting the farm on YES.
ASKET was founded on the principles that we should buy better stuff, less often, treat it with care, and wear it until, well, as long as possible. This is the antithetical business model to some of the world's most successful fashion companies that rely on our need to chase the next and newest trend through continuous consumption and irreverent waste. We can't continue to live like that (quite literally), but convincing people to abandon their addiction to the cheap, pretty, disposable lifestyle is a heavy ask.
In order to prove their quality ASKET took an unusual step: they make public all of the thinks the know about their clothes, form how the fibers are sourced, the mills where the clothes are assembled, all the way through to how often you should wash it (hint: not as often as you think). They have a stated goal of 100% traceability and transparency, a lofty, but noble pursuit. In this episode we talk about how far along they've come, but also what it takes to create a business that is the polar opposite from what success has looked like in the fashion industry.
Check out our deep dive on transparency in clothing and fast fashion.