We don’t do sales.
Not at EOFY. Not on Boxing Day. Not on Black Friday. Not the mid-season sales. Not the end-of-season sales. And definitely not those ‘last chance’ stacked discount sales when stock still isn’t moving so maybe another 20% off the already up to 80% off will tip enough people over the edge...
Why?
Because sales are a huge part of what's wrong with the default business model in fashion, symptomatic of a series of poor decisions made months before to prioritise profit over planet.
By contrast, here at Citizen Wolf we make only what we sell. It's a radically simple idea but it has the ability to change fashion for good.
Re-engineering a broken system.
Most brands overproduce by 40% instead of making what they know they can sell.
The insanity of the fashion industry is best encapsulated in the concept of “full-price sell through” which is the percentage of goods sold without a discount during any season.
It’s the metric most retailers use to define success and though it varies between brands (and seasons) 60% is considered industry standard. Which is just another way of saying that most retailers have already accounted for discounting 4/10 units before they've even started!
The alternative way of looking at this is that most brands overproduce by 40% instead of making what they can sell – which is about right because we already know that ⅓ of all garments made every year go straight to landfill unsold.
If you're not on-demand, you're not sustainable.
Quite clearly the industry has a massive structural problem with overproduction and the result is the never ending sales cycle.
By contrast, here at Citizen Wolf we make only what we sell, in our Sydney factory.
It massively helps that we only sell our clothes direct to you online, rather than through a series of greedy middlemen. It also helps that we charge a fair price rather than gouging every extra cent of margin that we possibly can.
We also believe that making a difference must be a conscious choice and one not rushed. In much the same way we make conscious business decisions to site our carbon neutral factory in Australia to minimise our impact on the planet.
These decisions don't come cheap and so neither should our clothes.
- We're B Corp certified – which basically means both Mother Earth and Mother Teresa have board seats.
- We're Ethical Clothing Australia accredited – which means everyone gets paid Aussie award wages.
- We're carbon negative – we offset 5x the amount of carbon produced in creating your garment to save our planet.
- We offer free repairs for life – because the most sustainable option is to keep wearing the clothes we already own.
So no, we don’t do sales for good reason.
