Kate Gookin: Entrepreneur In Ethical Fashion
Where do our clothes come from? Who makes the clothes that fill your local shopping mall? How much was that person paid? How old is the person who hemmed your pants? These are questions that you may have never asked, and unfortunately, the answers are far uglier than you might hope.
Humanitarian at Heart
When Kate Gookin, a twenty-two-year-old fashion lover in Portland, Oregon, began asking these questions she did not like what she found. In her quest for knowledge, Kate learned that there are far more slaves in the world today than anyone would like to admit; significantly more than there ever were in the African-American slave trade that this country was built on, as heinous as that was. The issue of modern day slavery is that it gets very little attention because, even though essentially every American owns something that was made by slave labor, most (though not all) of that labor actually occurs overseas. Today’s fashion industry is built on the backs of predominantly women and children who are forced to work under inhumane and often dangerous conditions for little or no pay. For Kate, this reality was unacceptable. “I’m not ok with slavery. I care about people and I’m not ok with people being treated this way, whether its inside or outside the borders of my country.”
In Kate’s research about how clothes were made, she also learned about the effects of textile production on the environment and how the fashion industry is harming the planet with pollution. With water pollution, air pollution, sound pollution, and the like, the fashion industry is making a mark on the world and it is not a positive one. Kate says, “Having learned about all that pollution, I now take great care in paying attention to where my fabrics come from and what they are made of. For example, I will never use polyester. Don’t even get me started on Polyester! I hate it!” For those who don’t know, polyester is made of micro-plastics. Every time polyester is washed, those plastics disperse into the water in the washing machine, which then goes back out into the ecosystem. There are technologies that are working on ways to filter that out, but as of right now it is still a large problem. Polyester is only one example. There are countless other ways that the different kinds of fabrics and the ways in which they are being produced have an impact on the ecosystems of this world.
“These issues made me angry in a way that made me ask, ‘What can I do to change this?’…You vote with your dollar, and often times that is the loudest vote you can have.”
— KATE GOOKIN
Kate knew that if she was buying something that was cheap then that meant that there was a sacrifice on the other side by someone who was paid poorly. With that in mind, she made the personal decision to downsize her wardrobe and invest in clothes that were well made by people who were treated with decency and paid fairly.
As someone who loves fashion, Kate began to shop in the ethical clothing space but couldn’t find the kinds of clothes that she wanted to wear without spending more money than she could afford. Instead, Kate decided to take matters into her own hands. She called her mom, borrowed her sewing machine, and got to work creating something that she wanted to wear. She went to a fabric store that sold recycled fabric and bought some fabric for six dollars. “I had an idea for a jacket. I had never sewn before, mind you, but I had this idea and just decided to go for it. As I constructed this jacket, I found out that not only could I do it, but I was weirdly good at it! When it was finished, I wore my jacket to the grocery store and someone stopped me and said, ‘Wow! Where did you get your jacket? It’s so cool!’ I left the store and cried and just felt like, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’” That jacket was Kate’s introduction to making her own clothes. And she didn’t stop there.
It is Kate’s mission to make an ethical, sustainable, & Inclusive difference.
Fiber
In 2018, Kate established her own ethical and sustainable clothing company called Fiber. Fiber is a small-batch clothing company that sells catalog and one-of-a-kind pieces. Kate says, “I started with recycled fabric, so that is kind of deep in my soul. I love it.” In addition to the one-of-a-kind, recycled fabric pieces, Fiber also uses environmentally friendly fabrics that cause no air, noise, or water pollution during production. Kate’s signature “Fiber Tee” (pictured above) comes in multiple colors, patterns, and a wide range of sizes; on Fiber’s website it is referred to as “The Tee That Started It All.”
Fiber makes everything to order and all production is done in-house, which in Kate’s opinion, is how things should be made. In this day and age, people like instant fashion, but that’s not the best way for things to be created. At Fiber, when a customer makes a purchase, the piece is cut and sewn specifically for them. This form of production reduces waste by not creating an excess of items with no recipients in mind. It also eliminates batch flaws.
“Ethical and sustainable fashion means that you are paying your people well and that the way that you make your clothes does not harm the planet. Those are the basics for a company that claims to be ethical and sustainable. But beyond that, with my own company, Fiber, I also have a high value for inclusion.”
— KATE GOOKIN
A seat at the table
In Kate’s experience as a consumer and entrepreneur in the ethical and sustainable fashion world, she has found that there is a “very strange gap” in representation. Because it’s a smaller market, Kate recognized that representation is not very diverse in the sizes or ethnicities of their models. Even non-ethical or non-sustainable large businesses have notoriously not done a great job at handling inclusion; “There aren’t many brands that I can think of off the top of my head that do representation well; AIRE is one of the very few that does a very good job at it.”
With her brand, Kate aims to challenge exclusivity and make fashion more accessible. When discussing the business aspect of inclusion, Kate remarked, “It is honestly sickening how many sustainable and ethical brands only run up to a size large, which is a size twelve, when the average woman in the U.S. is a size sixteen or eighteen. Brands are literally not even marketing to the average woman.” She found that, generally, even if they do run larger sizes, their models are typically small in size and caucasian. It is Kate’s belief that there needs to be more representation in size and ethnicity. “Even as a business owner who is white and lives in America, I think it is my responsibility to be as educated as possible and to surround myself with and learn from people who aren’t like me so that I don’t perpetuate the system that I am so frustrated with at times.” Kate found her opportunity to have her voice be heard in ethical fashion because it is a small community with smaller businesses. With her own brand, she is making her voice heard.
“To the dreamers, the go-getters, the adventurers, the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, the loud ones, the wild ones, the quiet ones, the ones with imperfections, the ones with stretch marks, cellulite, and the ones that don’t fit the status quo: you have a seat at our table.”
— FIBER
For Kate, engaging in the ethical fashion space is not about owning her own business nor is it about the money. It is Kate’s mission with her brand to make sure that people feel good about themselves, feel like they are being represented, and know that there are businesses out there who want to hear what they have to say. “I’m here because I genuinely care about what I do. I am not here to make a ton of money. How we relate to clothing is a mindset, and if I can be a part of changing someone’s mindset that is all that I could ask for. There are people who may never buy something from me, but as long as they come to my website and see themselves and feel seen that is all I care about.”
It is that heart and passion that brought Kate from her first jacket to her now growing business, and she is making a change one piece at a time.
If you would like to support Kate and her mission, visit https://shopfiber.co/.