Get to know better: Slow Fashion With Linean

When I returned to Indonesia to enjoy the Chinese New Year holiday, I had the opportunity to meet and get to know the founder of one of the local Indonesian brands, named Manda and Raisha. We talked about many things that focused on the eco-friendly clothing business that they are currently working on. As a fashionpreneur who has entered the industry, Manda and Raisha shared a lot of knowledge to apply in my future career. In the fashion industry, trends change very quickly, and in fact, many impacts occur due to fast fashion. Some fashion entrepreneurs in Indonesia are already concerned about this issue and starting to move and educate Indonesian people with sustainable fashion or slow fashion. Manda and Raisha also talked about their strategy to establish their clothing brand to survive in this industry. Below is a glimpse of my conversation with Manda and Raisha.

How do you enter the fashion industry?

After I graduated from college, I decided to work in several start-up companies from 2014 to 2017. Some start-up companies operate in different fields, ranging from fashion e-commerce, food and beverages, and media. I chose to work in a Start-up Company because we can learn a lot of things from the start-up, starting from how to build, grow, and survive in the business industry. Working at a start-up also allows me to communicate directly with CEOs. After working for around four years, I finally decided to build my own business. Manda is more dominant in the development of business, and Raisha has a role in designing clothes. This division makes us able to complement each other, focus, and work well to develop our business together.

What is Linean?

Linean is a local Indonesian brand that we established together in 2017, which focuses on creating ready to wear collection with the concept of slow fashion movement and less (or) zero waste. This brand exists with the aim to educate Indonesian people on the importance of preserving nature and the environment, which can be started from small things such as through clothing. The primary step taken by Linean to protect our earth is to become an eco-friendly clothing brand that uses natural fabric for every piece of clothing created. We want to act for the better direction of the fashion industry.

What are the inspiration and motivations behind the establishment of Linean?

Environmental problems in the fashion business have become a big issue since a few years ago. Through a movie with the title of "The True Cost" that they watched together, Manda and Raisha felt that this was an issue that needed great attention from all people worldwide. The film tells a story of leading brand companies globally, which carry out production processes in small countries such as Bangladesh. The film also showed the factory's unfavorable condition until the building collapsed and killed 1000 workers inside the factory in 2013. Even though they hold large companies (like H&M, Zara, etc), the factory's safety and their benefits are not commensurate with what they have done for these brands. That is why Linean was founded as a slow fashion brand that highly values the process behind the production of clothing.

What makes Linean different from the other local Indonesian clothing brand?

Some of the things that distinguish Linean from other brands are our branding concept, where we focus on the 'circle of life' concept. For every piece of clothing that we produce, Linean uses natural dyes such as ginger, jelawe, secang, etc. We also use eco-friendly material such as linen that derived from hemp plant fibers. We do this as support the slow fashion movement. We are sure and confident that applying good things to the world of fashion business can also produce a good life circle in the future. Moreover, climate change is getting worse from day to day.

What is the reason for choosing linen as the main basic material?

Every price of the product that Linean offers will use fabric with an eco-friendly base material. Every season, we will innovate to try various other eco-friendly fabrics. For starters, we decided to use eco-friendly fabrics which are most easily found in Indonesia since if the demand is high from the community, we will find it easier to supply them continuously. Shortly, we can also create a collection by recycling wasted cloth or leftovers fabric from factories in Indonesia.

(Photo reference: Instagram.com/linean)

What kinds of obstacles are encountered when running this business?

As a slow fashion brand, the obstacles we encounter are more on the production process's problem. We do not target the worker, which makes the production process takes quite a long time compared to the other brands. Sometimes, we also incorrectly predict when the production process is complete, so the collection's launch must be delayed for a while. The last one, some customers feel that the prices we offer are quite high and make them switch to buy other brands. Therefore, instead of selling, Linean also tries to educate customers about respecting the garment process, which makes it more expensive.

What do you think about current Indonesia's fashion industry?

We are aware of many things from fast fashion closing in several locations such as Forever 21, H&M, and Mother care. It cannot be denied that many things must be changed since the increasing amount of clothing rubbish exists throughout the world. Even this type of waste is tough to be reprocessed by nature. This problem is a task for us as creators in the fashion industry to focus on finding a way out from this big issue. One way is to start the concept of recycling, where we use the old-useless materials and turn it into a product worth using.

From the conversation that has been conducted with two of Linean's founders, we get a lot of information and knowledge about the importance of starting the slow fashion movement. Small changes that are cultivated every day can have a big impact on the world.

(Photo reference: Instagram.com/linean)