BUSINESS

Ending Textile Waste

Roboro is on a mission to make fashion more sustainable

By Stella Karron

While 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.” “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

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.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBORO 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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partner with other brands and upcycle designers and host their collections on our online shop.” Another branch of the company is its business-to-business model. “We collect deadstock fabric from factories and brands in downtown LA as there's a huge fashion district down there,” Clark said. “We collect materials that are otherwise going to be thrown away and we have a large inventory that we use for our collections.” Aside from connecting with other LA businesses for materials, Roboro partners with businesses to further its own sustainability. Roboro partners with companies that want to replace soft goods that would normally be made out of virgin materials. “We develop products and make them out of upcycled dead stock,” Clark said. “Right now, we're working with a restaurant in LA that wants to do upcycled aprons and other different merch items for their brand.” Roboro’s collaboration with other companies doesn't stop at the producing point. Clark also consults with businesses on how to be sustainable from the ground up. “I help them establish a sustainable supply chain, help them develop the products, get patterns, make samples, all that good stuff,” Clark said. “We also offer textile waste management solutions. So that's collecting dead stock material from other brands.” Roboro collects fabric waste from Hollywood productions and other large clothing brands in LA. They recently collected fabric from “The Mandalorian” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Clark said that Roboro’s success is in part because they are based in LA. “We had all the resources, factories and brands,” Clark said. “LA was the best place to set up the model, to prove that it works. I've set up a pretty sustainable business model that I'm now hoping to replicate in other manufacturing hubs. So the Northeast, and even the entire East Coast.” Currently, Clark is on the East Coast working on creating a sustainable supply chain for a sustainable, non-toxic children's toy company. “They want to manufacture in the U.S. and avoid shipping back and forth across the country,” Clark said. “I'm working to build out their supply chain on the East Coast and replicate the Roboro model there and it's harder. We don't have the same resources in LA, but the more we're able to normalize it, the more it's going to bring the cost down, which is the most prohibitive thing right now. Upcycling is really difficult to do at scale. It's very labor intensive. For the first several years, I was laughed out of factories. But now people see the merit to it. So just getting the people who have already been in business for a hundred plus years on board, that's changing the most ingrained mindset because that's their bread and butter. If we could change their mindset, we can change the consumers.”

Roboro

roboro6.com Instagram: @roboro_official Recently, Roboro created a custom upcycled dress for Academy Award nominee Charlotte Sanchez, who was the line producer for the three-time nominated animated documentary “Flee.”

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