Responsibility
Responsibility
What Are Our Responsibility Ethos?
Taking a meaningful approach to responsible fashion and beauty involves disrupting the trend of mindless consumerism and actively promoting a more conscious approach to shopping and ownership.
The Challenge
Many fashion and beauty companies motivate shoppers to buy their products by instilling a sense of need and immediacy that is often unwarranted. While it may be an effective selling tool, it regularly results in unused items hanging in a closet or half-empty pots gathering dust on the bathroom shelf. Failing to provide care instructions to make those items last exacerbates the issue.
The Goal
Toward aims to shift the focus from ‘sustainability’ which is an undefined, much abused term, to ‘responsibility’. We need to go beyond eco-packaging, renting wardrobes and second-hand shopping, to think about sustainable development as a whole, taking social, economic and environmental factors into account. We don’t have all the answers at Toward, but we feel strongly about challenging the idea that protecting natural resources is detrimental to economic development. By setting clear, measurable and meaningful responsibility standards for ourselves, our brand partners and our customers, we hope to have a wide-reaching positive influence in the evolution of smart, responsible consumption.
Toward’s Approach
We are working with our brands to move the global shopping mindset towards an ethos of well thought out quality, rather than the current model of quantity and immediacy.
We challenge our brand partners to think about how they are marketing the social and environmental credentials of their products:
01
Are they encouraging shoppers to take a mindful approach to shopping?
02
Do they make it easy for them to choose and purchase responsibly made products?
03
Are they advising them how to care for their items, prolonging their usefulness and, eventually, explaining how to dispose of them in the least impactful way possible?
