B U S I N E S S
Ending Textile Waste
Roboro is on a mission to make fashion more sustainable By Stella Karron hile working on Hollywood film sets, Jillian Clark started to reflect on the impact the large productions had on the environment. “With the enormous Hollywood budgets, they would still shop at fast fashion stores,” Clark said. “It was the easiest. They have the largest selection, quick turnover, easy returns. And at first I thought, ‘If we have these huge budgets, why aren't we supporting smaller brands? Why aren't we funneling that money into more local businesses?’” In addition to lack of support for small businesses, the sets also produce a tremendous amount of waste. Clark said that Hollywood throws away a lot of fabric whether that be from the costume department set or the art department. For Clark, the turning point in her sustainability journey was watching the documentary “The True Cost.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBORO
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Jillian Clark is the founder and creative director of Roboro, a Playa del Rey-based company whose mission is to end textile waste and make the fashion industry more sustainable. “I saw that and I was almost embarrassed that I didn't know the global impacts of the fashion industry,” Clark said. “I've been working in this industry for over 10 years, and of course I knew about sweatshops. Everyone knows about them, but you don't see them.”
Once Clark looked at the industry from an outside perspective, there was no going back. “It was one of those moments of like, ‘Well, this is what I'm doing now,’” Clark said. In 2017, Clark founded the clothing line MeWe, where the
clothes were made from fully recycled materials. “It was inspired by a mural that was in Venice, it was my favorite mural,” Clark said. “It was right on the canals on the side of a house. It's sadly now been painted over, but the mural had the word “me” and then underneath “we” so it looked like a reflection. I was trying to come up with a name and reflect the idea of thinking of the larger group, rather than just yourself, because fashion is such an individual choice. Even if people say, ‘I don't care what I wear,’ you do, you make a choice about what you're wearing. Knowing that this very personal individual choice could have a global impact was where MeWe came from.” Two years into MeWe, Clark rebranded the company into what it is now Roboro and operates out of its Playa del Rey studio. “I’d had the company for two
years at that point and had just been making products and selling them at pop-ups and online,” Clark said. “And while I enjoyed the creative outlet, It wasn't profitable. If you want to make the biggest impact, one t-shirt isn't going to do it. You need to sell a thousand t-shirts.” In addition to reflecting on the struggle of reaching consumers as a small business, Clark wanted to expand the mission of sustainability on a broader scale. At Roboro, the mission of the company is to end textile waste everywhere. Textile waste is the second most polluting industry in the world, after oil, as clothes are produced fast, cheap, and without concern for the environmental impact of what will happen after the clothing is worn. Roboro has three branches, all striving towards the goal of eliminating this waste. “One branch is our atelier where we have in-house collections,” Clark said. “We
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