Aflalo, who is now 38, hadn’t given the matter much thought. She figured that since Reformation repurposed girly dresses from flea markets and vintage shops, hand-sewed them with new flourishes, and resold them in one storefront, it was already sufficiently green. Nevertheless, the naturally curious (and extraordinarily ambitious) Southern California native started reading up on both ethical manufacturing and various strategies to scale the company.
In 2012, with the money she had made from Reformation’s early years, along with a side project producing private-label clothes for Urban Outfitters, Aflalo relaunched Reformation as an e-commerce business centered on a two-story factory in downtown Los Angeles and three stores, two in New York and one in L.A. In 2014 it had revenues of $25 million and now counts Taylor Swift, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Rihanna, and Emily Ratajkowski—stylish women who don’t lack for designers sending them free clothes—as paying customers. “I love that their pieces are feminine but always supercool and have the perfect low-maintenance vibe,” Ratajkowski says.
Karlie Kloss, a Reformation investor, is in talks to collaborate with Aflalo on a capsule collection, cementing the label’s It status. “Karlie is very fashion, but she’s also very ethical and earnest,” Aflalo says.
The brand’s tag line—“We make killer clothes that don’t kill the environment”—means that best sellers like a maxi wrap-dress ($258) and an off-the-shoulder crop-top ($58) are made from deadstock fabric or sustainably sourced material manufactured abroad. Online, each piece is accompanied by information on both its carbon and water footprints, and each shipment to customers includes a “RefRecycling” label that allows clients to send in clothes for repurposing. Aflalo has even assigned a team to figure out how to lower the environmental impact of Reformation’s Web site itself. “The Internet has a really crazy carbon footprint,” Aflalo says.
Just as impressive as her ambition to make socially responsible and relatively fast fashion (new collections, like a recent collaboration with French street-style star Jeanne Damas, are released weekly) is her ability to create clothes that appeal to such a wide variety of cool young women. Aflalo, who dropped out of both UC Berkeley and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, does this via a design process akin to crowdsourcing. Pieces from a navy sweatshirt emblazoned with the words Cindy Crawford across the chest ($118) to a skintight lace-up dress ($118) start out as ideas brainstormed in a group session that are then whittled down by Aflalo and a handful of colleagues who poll the rest of the staff of more than 250—mostly women in their 20s and early 30s, a.k.a. their customer—as to whether they’d buy the piece in question.
Reformation’s distinctly of-the-people ethos, along with its mission to create conscientiously, isn’t a mere business differentiator: It’s the whole point. “The prevailing sustainable platform—‘Buy less, use less’—isn’t a scalable strategy,” Aflalo says. “You buy clothes because you really want them. The sustainability part is for us to figure out.”
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