Girlfriend Collective wants customers to love its products and wear them with pride. Designing for an audience that cares about where clothes come from, as well as how they look and fit, the founders of Girlfriend Collective made transparency a top priority. Its website freely shares the details of the production process so consumers can learn about its high standards and how it operates. Every part of the process, including sourcing materials, designing products, choosing facilities, and selecting partners, was carefully and painstakingly done with ethics and sustainability in mind.

Girlfriend Collective’s innovative leggings are made from 25 RPET recycled plastic water bottles combined with 21 percent spandex. The company sources its post-consumer water bottles from Taiwan, a country known as “Garbage Island” until its government initiated a sweeping program that put the small country on the forefront of global recycling. In communities throughout the country, people come together every night to sort their waste into containers for recyclables, food waste, and garbage. When they finish, neighbors linger to socialize until the collection trucks come, building relationships and community ties. In rural areas, various programs and volunteer groups set up micro-recycling centers where people can drop off recyclables and learn more about environmental stewardship. Whereas the United States only recycles about 35 percent of its waste, Taiwan now recycles 55 percent.

Once bottles are collected, they are sorted into various grades and sent to processing centers. Girlfriend Collective uses only #1 plastic, known as Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), to make its polyester yarn and fabric. Plastics containing BPA, which some believe pose a health threat, are never used.

The #1 bottles are cleaned and shredded at a Taiwanese processing center that is family owned and operated and has a longstanding history of doing things right. The facility is also certified by the Taiwanese government. Thus, in addition to having permission to process and resell plastic, security measures are in place, and plastic intake and output are carefully tracked. Certification means a lot in a world where lax standards often let unscrupulous recyclers purchase brand new plastic bottles, lie about their sourcing, and sell them to unwitting companies that want to use recyclables in their products. This is much cheaper than the process required to clean and process post-consumer bottles. It is also completely at odds with sustainability goals.

At the bottle processing facility used by Girlfriend Collective, bales of bottles collected from across Taiwan are weighed, logged, steam washed to remove caps and labels, and then separated by color. Clear bottles are used to make fibers for leggings, and colored bottles are sent away for other uses. Next, bottles are shred into tiny chips, washed again, bagged, and sent to the fiber-making facility. By weighing and logging each bag, the factory verifies that the output equals the input of plastic bottles used to create it. Thus, buyers like Girlfriend Collective know with certainty that the chips came from the same post-consumer bottles originally taken in.

Questions

1. What operations strategies are important at Girlfriend Collective?

2. In what ways do these strategies put Girlfriend Collective at a competitive advantage or disadvantage?

3. What short- and long-term impacts do Girlfriend Collective’s business practices have on the garment industry? On recyclers? On communities? On profits?

4. How might sustainability measures for people and production processes impact productivity? How can companies balance a desire for ethics with productivity concerns?