Future Possibilities Sets Out to Advance Future Sustainability
While sustainability may be front and center for denim brands working to lessen their impact, if the concept isn’t just as front and center for consumers, there’s only so much the industry can evolve.
That’s why Future Possibilities is working to carry the sustainability conversation forward, to make it more consumer-facing.
Carved in Blue chatted with Soorty marketing and communications manager Eda Dikmen to gain some more insight into the Future Possibilities platform and what lies ahead for it.
Carved in Blue: Can you tell us a little about Future Possibilities?
Eda: For a while now we’ve been asking ourselves, do we really know the value of innovation? Are we bringing the consumers into this dialogue of value?
Sustainability has become an overexposed term. It is essential to merge transparency, technology and responsible design together. This is how we came up with Future Possibilities, our platform that travels the world to build dialogue between different layers of the supply chain. While innovative manufacturing solutions and technology take our design process further, we believe it is essential to present these innovations in a language that will relate to the end customer. This is why we are presenting a matrix of our responsible journey in full transparency. The Future Possibilities platform covers responsible materials that make the core of our design process and responsible manufacturing achieved by our engineering expertise.
Koen Kuik
Carved in Blue: Where have you been highlighting it?
Eda: The platform started its journey in a pop-up in Shoreditch, London. We were later in Amsterdam during Denim Days, in Nashville, in Munich and came back to Amsterdam last week to hold a whole week of open days in our Amsterdam office. The platform aims to involve as much people as possible in the conversation. The main goal is showing all the responsible materials and manufacturing methods that go into Soorty’s denim production, simply because, in most cases, the end customer lacks this information. We want them to be able to touch, feel, experience all these; and this is why all the spots selected have/will have a way of touching the end consumer.
Carved in Blue: How many people have been part of the experience?
Eda: We have had a whole week of open days this time, three sessions a day accompanied with breakfast, lunch, aperitif. We’ve hosted brands (sustainability departments or denim development teams), schools (designers of the future—a crucial target audience for us since Soorty sincerely values design for purpose), NGOs that are working very hard to make sustainable fashion not a choice but the regular way of our industry, collaborative platforms that move fashion forward, and also our communication partners who have influence on so many individuals about the decisions they make and the options they have. Hence the number of people who have joined varied each and every time and it was around 150 people in total. Yet, we think the message has already started to be transferred to a wider audience.
Koen Kuik
Carved in Blue: What do people find most surprising to learn about materials?
Eda: The truth is the end consumer does not know what happens at the backstage of denim production. In some cases, they do know that it all starts with cotton, but what happens in between is totally vague. This is why we have decided to work on this experimental method of showing the intermediary steps.
Future Possibilities involves various stages of experiences that engage its audience. The primary one is our cotton to garment table where we showcase each and every stage of production—to visualize that you don’t put cotton in a machine and get a pair of jeans in the end. The customer/visitor is always surprised to see that there are so many steps involved, that there is so much effort going on at the backstage, and no matter how much it is interrelated with technology, there is still a lot of human touch going on.
The second step is our denim curiosity table. Here we show different responsible materials and manufacturing methods that can be involved in Soorty’s denim production. Soorty offers fabrics that are both fashionable and sustainably produced. By offering a selection that emphasizes on the environmental impact, we let our customers make decisions that are not only good choices, but the right choices. The denim curiosity table enables the visitors to touch, feel, play with different fibers, for example, and this changes the perception a lot. Not only do they get the chance for self-improvement, but also recognizing the different available options make the customers ask the right questions the next time they visit a store. Or, if we are talking about students studying design, this awareness enables them to truly design for purpose.
Carved in Blue: How do you think people relate to their buying decisions or design choices?
Eda: Sometimes people are just not aware of the options they have. There is already a lot of noise in the environment that surrounds us; everyone is trying to sell things and communicating it so loudly that we are afraid sustainability has become an overexposed term. Future Possibilities is all about discovering the options, creating an awareness, opening up a perspective that makes you look at the same thing from a different window. It aims an average consumer to check what the piece of item they are buying is made of the next time they go shopping. To ask questions to the store employees, question the price on the tag but also all the steps behind it.
Koen Kuik
Making changes is not easy; it takes time, dedication, investment but most importantly the will to disrupt the existing game. One company cannot change the whole system or perception of how things are being done. We can only bring the change along when we act collaboratively among various stakeholders, including the end customer. The end customer has a great power in the game, but sometimes, they are simply not aware of it. This is where experimental and informative experiences like this come along.
Design and development are key points of sustainable production and a responsible lifestyle. In the end, great design is about a greater purpose. Considering that the life cycle of a product starts already when being designed, at its core, design is about improvement and making things better. Design thinking is the key to developing goods that allocate and utilize correct resources efficiently. This is why at Soorty we are offering our world of denim, designed for life. Coming together with designers, showing them how we approach our job utilizing the choices we have is quite inspirational to them we hope that the possibilities reflect to their thinking as well.
Carved in Blue: What are your future plans for the Future Possibilities global tour in 2019?
Eda: The Future Possibilities platform will continue to travel around the world, get in touch with stakeholders and make people realize the options they have when they are shopping, designing, living. While various options are in our agenda for the rest of the year, the ones that are more clear are New York and Los Angeles in the U.S., one in Istanbul, Turkey and another one in Amsterdam, the denim capital of Europe.