From Seed to Farmer to Closet: How ‘Ecopreneur’ Marci Zaroff Is Bringing Justice and Radical Sustainability to Fashion

For the past three decades, Marci Zaroff has been on the front lines of environmental leadership and social justice—and one thing has always been clear: Everything is linked to everything. “When you look at water, energy use, climate change, chemical use, waste, social justice—across the board, as I started to go down this rabbit hole, it became very apparent to me that you can't really support one part of the agricultural equation when you're looking at organic and ingredients at the farm level,” says Zaroff. “You have to really connect the dots with these lifestyle sectors.”

Zaroff has been a powerhouse in opening the consumers’ eyes to those dots, which include the full spectrum of products in our ecosystem, from beauty to food to fashion. A self-described “ecopreneur,” she works tirelessly to educate about the complex and dark layers of the clothing manufacturing world, unveiling the human and environmental cost. She also provides innovative solutions. As the founder and CEO of ECOfashion Corp,  a “greenhouse of brands” that includes MetaWear, Yes And, and Farm to Home, Zaroff has been instrumental in building companies that create truly sustainable products, while giving the makers—which include the farmers—equitable support. 

So much of Zaroff’s work is evident on our day-to-day. (One fun fact: She coined and trademarked the term “eco-fashion” in the 1990s.) Yet there are still so many aspects that we can’t see, like her fight against the negative impacts the fast fashion industry has on cotton farmers. But whether or not we see it, Zaroff’s efforts are impacting us all—and she’s making this world more just one thread at a time. As she says, “we’re all a part of this collective ecosystem.”

Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited and condensed. To listen to the complete and original version with Marci, Eva Yazhari, and Ed Stevens, visit The Beyond Capital Podcast.

A Conversation with Marci Zaroff

What is the scale of the fashion industry's challenges, and how did this journey begin for you?

I embarked into fashion coming off of organic and natural food, as well as beauty products. I saw this whole missing link in this wellness and environmental consciousness and humanitarian equation. Most people don't realize fashion is one of the leading air and water polluters in the world. When you pull the curtain back on the fashion industry and you unveil the human and environmental impacts of fashion, the magnitude and multitude of those impacts is very significant.

When you look at water, energy use, climate change, chemical use, waste, social justice—across the board, as I started to go down this rabbit hole, it became very apparent to me that you can't really support one part of the agricultural equation when you're looking at organic and ingredients at the farm level. You have to really connect the dots with these lifestyle sectors.

Fashion is something people love, right? It's got so much cachet.  Taking everything that I had learned in food and beauty, I essentially segued and started to integrate the learnings with the mission to revolutionize the fashion industry through education, inspiration, innovation, and collaboration—to shift the paradigm and bridge the tribe in the boardroom and the treehugger and the fashionista, and demonstrate that style, quality, fit, color, comfort, and price are not exclusive with social and environmental responsibility.

How do you find a balance in the world of fashion and consumption and society expectation? 

There are many different spokes in the wheel of ecofashion or sustainable fashion. I mentioned some of the high-level topics like water, energy, and climate change. When you look at the areas of focus in terms of impact that you want to home in on, then you would make different decisions as a result of what you just asked. Circularity is a very big part of the sustainable fashion movement today. You have rental, you have reuse and repurpose with companies like Renewal Workshop and The RealReal, where you can buy essentially vintage wear. So you're not buying new fashion, and you can even swap that clothing in your closet. In fact, a couple of our brands right now are looking at having these rental closets in conjunction with buying, so you actually have a choice.

When looking at buying something new, that's where you start to look at chemical use, climate change, impact, water use, social justice, waste. That's where I'm a huge advocate of organic and regenerative agriculture, which ultimately segues into organic fashion and home textiles. It’s no differently than if you're buying a finished food product and you want it to taste good, but you want it to be healthy and you don't want it to be destroying our planet. It’s the same thing with fashion: You can buy great stylish products that are also better for you, so you can look good, feel good, and do good in the world.

It's also better for the environment. The root of a lot of my life work is organic agriculture. I look at how we can use soil as our greatest solution to climate change, which ultimately cotton is such an important crop. Even though it's more than 3 percent of the world's agriculture, it uses 10 percent of the most toxic carcinogenic pesticides. It’s the most heavily sprayed industry in agriculture.

People think, I'm wearing cotton, it's supernatural. And yet when you pull the curtain back you see the chlorine bleach, formaldehyde, heavy metals and all the toxic chemicals going into the processing and the dying, not to mention on the ground: the pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, GMO seeds. And there’s the social justice side. A lot of people don't realize that in India, every half an hour a cotton farmer is committing suicide, because they’re getting stuck on this pesticide treadmill and they're leveraging their farms to banks in partnership with the seed and chemical company.

There are so many layers here. The point is, if you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem and we can all wear the change we wish to see in the world by being educated and knowing how to be a part of this movement—and there are a lot of different ways to be a part of it.

For someone who wants to reevaluate their consumer choices in the fashion world, what are some best practices you recommend?

Fortunately, it's a little bit of be careful what you wish for. Everyone in the fashion industry today is drinking the proverbial sustainability Kool-Aid. At this juncture, you've got this spectrum of light green to dark green. The simplest way to make decisions to start to participate in this movement would be—as I mentioned—buying used, buying repurposed, or renting. And then reading labels and looking for brands, products, and companies that are further on that [sustainability] spectrum.

When I talk about my brands, whether it's MetaWare as a B2B manufacturer, we look at ourselves as the intel inside of sustainable fashion. We have an office in India; a team on the ground. We are navigating from source to story, a full turnkey plug-and-play model for other brands and retailers. So we're making it easy for other companies. From there, we birthed three of our own house brands. In our case, everything is certified to the GOTS standard, which is the platinum standard for a finished textile. This means it’s free of all pesticides and GMOs, as well as all harmful chemicals, including down to the packaging. Every touch point in our supply chain, from farm to finished product, is part of the approved standard. So the finished product is what gets certified.

So after the renting and reusing, the thing would be look for certified product, whether it's certified to the GOTS standard, certified to the Fair Trade textile standard, or certified to the Cradle to Cradle standard, which focuses on renewable energy, social justice, water stewardship, as well as material health and material reuse.

Is it hard to get the farmers to get on board with these sustainability practices? 

When I'm in the trenches with the farmers, I see two things they probably care the most about: 

One is supporting their livelihood and being able to put food on the table. And the current system with fast fashion has crammed farmers and factory workers down to levels that are inhumane. At factory levels, you still have slave labor. At the farm level, they're the ones that are being asked to do basically all this work and then practically give away their cotton, not even make back what they've had to invest, especially in lieu of the high costs of the chemical inputs. So first you addressed what we call zero budget, natural farming, where we take them off the old system of having to buy GMO seeds and all these toxic expensive chemicals that continue to get more expensive. And if they are taking loans, which they're paying 50-60 percent interest rates on, we try to wean them off. We get them GMO-free seeds. We teach them how to make their own fertilizers using cow, dung, cow urine, turmeric, and all these different ingredients. Then ultimately, they start to see the soil come back to life. It’s important to remember that farming that’s been using conventional agriculture has really depleted and destroyed the soil, which is why the regenerative agriculture movement is so important. It's not even about sustaining; it's about rebuilding and regenerating our soil so that soil is healthy and can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. 

Then the second big concern of farmers is: They're on the ground, they are freaking out about what's happening with climate change. We see it from a distance, but this is their livelihood everyday. So they're very sensitive and they're desperate for solutions. We take the approach of: How can we make sure that we protect them and their futures while minimizing the toxic inputs that they're using.

How many farmers get on board?

There is obviously the element of supply and demand. The more demand that's out there in the market, those conversations are certainly sparking more interest at the farm level. Farmers are very community-oriented, especially in the tribal villages. We have our own project called RESET, which stands for regenerate, the environment, society, and economy through textiles. We provide training, we provide seed support, and every step of the way we're helping them. But there is resistance on the ground because they're scared. These farmers have been lured in by these chemical companies told that they're going to have these grandiose yields and  better systems. They're misled and they'll, most of them are illiterate. So they believe it because at the end of the day, they see dollar signs, they see a better yield, and they see a way for them to make more money. And unfortunately that's not what's happening. And now that they're waking up to that, they're hungry for some other way to go forward.

But if you look at their history, this is how their parents and their ancestors were farming. We’re taking them back full circle to that place where they knew how to, intuitively, use these kinds of methodologies that are inherent to organic and regenerative agriculture, like crop rotation and intercropping and ways to help build the soil.

At the end of the day, once you have proof of concept, which we now have, they start sharing it with their friends and the other villages.

We are living at a time where fabrics like Tencel and others are rising to the more consumer awareness level. How do they stack up with organic cotton?

There are probably three core fabrics that use the two first ones. Organic cotton is our most prominent fiber that we use, and that is because I am, as you know, a soil junkie and advocate and, and believe that, that giving people great t-shirts and denim and, and bedsheets and robes and all the things that are part of this movement. So organic cotton is a big one.

Secondly, Tencel. I've been a huge fan and business partner of Lenzing that makes Tencel lyocell. I've been educating with them and for them for over 25 years globally. We’ve just recently integrated Tencel into our apparel, as well as into our home brand, Farm to Home.

Then the third fiber we use, and not as often because there is still an environmental issue with polyester, even if it's recycled, is our PET, which is recycled poly derived from plastic bottles that are broken down, turned back into a pulp, and re-spun into a fiber.

It does solve for one of our greatest environmental issues. It’s taking plastic bottles out of landfills. However, what we've discovered is those fibers, as they're broken down even more, they shed microfibers. Every single synthetic fabric in history, from polyester to nylon to acrylic, they shed microfibers. And those end up going to our water systems, our rivers, and ultimately our oceans. Studies show as high as 90 percent of fish today are, showing traces of microfibers in them.

What is Tencel?

Tencel is the cellulose that's extracted from the eucalyptus plant. It's made using a non-toxic solvent because eucalyptus is very soft. It grows on managed tree farms, and you can grow it without water and without chemicals. Then it's manufactured in Lenzing’s closed-loop system. So all the byproducts are used efficiently. It's a very, very eco-friendly fiber, and it's three times stronger than cotton and  it's FSC certified. I'm a huge fan of Tencel.

Does sustainable eco fashion have to be more expensive? Do you think it'll change over time?

When I coined and trademarked the term eco fashion in 1995, people thought I was crazy. No one's ever going to buy into that, Marcy. And I said, wait, but I want to style the world of change. And I want to change the world of style and they want to bring these worlds together—because I'm that person.

There are three stigmas that have always come with sustainable fashion. One is that you have to give up the things you want: style, quality, fit, color, comfort. The second is you have to pay more. And the third is, well, how do I really know?

My mantra has always been to break that second stigma and to democratize organic and make it accessible and affordable for everybody. The way to do that is to understand how to navigate a supply chain, starting at the farm level, which is why I'm so deeply immersed in the whole farm part of the business model that we have, because I couldn't go to a factory back in the day when I started this movement and say, Hey, can you make me a product and then make sure it's all sustainable. They didn't have that knowledge and that, and the resources and the understanding I've been building up from the supply chain, from the source. What that's taught me is the reason that sustainable products have been considered overpriced, and even organic food there was the ‘whole paycheck’ stigma, right? 

In the case of textiles, what people don't realize is that a shirt, a dress, an apparel product can change hands seven to 10 times in this supply chain, from the farm to the spinner to the knitter or weaver, to the cutter, to the sower, to the dying, to the finishing, to the printing to the packaging, to the shipping. And so when you start to get in on the ground floor of a product, you can cut a lot of inefficiencies out of the supply chain. You can cut a lot of brokers out, a lot of managers out, and the more vertically integrated you are, the more you can add value to your product, but still drive with value.

This isn't about sacrifice or deprivation. We're not taking style and quality away from you. We're starting at building a full supply chain. We're building the finished product for you. And it's low impact dyed. It's eco-friendly and certified organic or recycled or circular.

In the early days when I worked with Target, and I launched their first organic product, it was the marketing department that was driving that initiative. And they didn't know what they were doing. They just wanted to tell a story. And for the product design and development and sourcing teams, it wasn't like their wheelhouse either. The marketing teams are often being told to stay on the sidelines while sourcing and production and design teams are the ones driving these sustainability initiatives. So it's helping the whole industry start to move to another level. 

Of all these global collaborations, across major home and fashion brands and manufacturers, we are now seeing so much increased demand and supply, so price points have come down in general. You can find sustainable fashion in your high end designers, like Stella McCartney, all the way to your fast fashion retailers like H&M. I think we've gotten to a place now where there's something for everyone from a price point standpoint. It really is about leading with no compromise on price or design.

To learn more about Marci Zaroff and all her eco-initiatives visit marcizaroff.com. 

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