Since its founding ten years ago, Swedish slow fashion brand Asket has been a vocal critic of the conventional fashion industry.
The label, which is based around a single permanent collection made in Europe from natural fibres, led its messaging with the idea that reduced consumption is central to achieving sustainability goals. Its tagline: “the pursuit of less.” It publishes impact receipts, breaking down the environmental cost of each product and once plastered a wall on one of Stockholm’s busiest shopping streets with a mural declaring “Fuck fast fashion.”
But these days the brand is a little less iconoclastic. In a challenging market, Asket is switching tack, rebranding to emphasise its focus on timeless design and craft excellence. All its sustainability efforts remain in place, but they’re no longer a central plank of the sales pitch. Its new tagline: “permanent design, obsessively refined.”
“Our previous communication was overly focussed on the responsibility question. … To move the masses, we need to go back to the product,” said Asket co-founder August Bard Bringéus. “We’re not going to sway the industry by climbing on top of a mountain and screaming ‘fuck fast fashion.’”
Asket is not alone. A generation of brands that helped pioneer the responsible fashion movement are recalibrating their messaging, letting their clothes, not their values, do the talking.
The shift comes amid a brutal market shakeout that has seen many sustainability-focussed brands go under over the last 18 months. The so-called “slow fashion recession” reflects a broader market slowdown that has hit responsible brands (who typically have a higher cost base as result of their commitments to climate-friendly fibres and good working conditions) doubly hard. A glut of greenwashing, economic anxiety and shifting social-political winds has also dampened the appeal of values-based marketing.
“Unfortunately, there’s sustainability fatigue,” said Bard Bringéus. Consumers just want to be able to buy something nice and rely on the fact brands are doing a good job under the hood, he added. “The product needs to act like a Trojan horse.”
Green Fatigue
When British stylist Anna Foster launched her upcycled denim brand E.L.V. Denim in 2018, the concept of turning old jeans into new products was still fresh.
“Now every single brand says they’re sustainable,” said Foster, who still only works with discarded fabrics, though her repertoire has expanded from denim to include other materials like wool jackets, corduroys, silks and unwanted hotel linens. Plenty of fashion companies say they upcycle now, but they mostly work with leftover “deadstock” fabrics, and often only for a portion of their collection. Using up overstock is just “a very sensible business decision,” said Foster.
“It’s exhausting trying to be a poster girl for true sustainability because you’re competing with everyone that has a toe in it and really I think you need to have a full body in it,” she added. “I can’t compete with larger brands with bigger ad pockets who are appropriating our terms.”
Consumers are equally exhausted. Over the last decade they’ve been bombarded with climate-friendly marketing, much of it little more than greenwashing. Those who care are increasingly cynical. Most just don’t want a shopping trip to feel like they’re prepping for a research paper and never did.
“[Sustainability is] no longer seen as a competitive advantage. … With all the greenwashing it just became, like, how do you even navigate what’s real and what isn’t?” said consultant and brand strategist Dana Davis, who ran sustainability, product and business strategy at Mara Hoffman before it shuttered last year, becoming the slow fashion recession’s highest-profile casualty.
Politics isn’t helping either, especially in the US, where a broad-based backlash against “woke capitalism,” increasingly institutionalised by the government, has encouraged businesses to pull back from commitments to diversity and sustainability.
“I’m seeing more brands in the US not wanting to talk because they don’t want any spotlight on them from the US government,” said Davis. “Everyone’s being a little bit more cautious.”
It’s the Product, Stupid
In February, Foster ran an installation during London Fashion Week, bringing her entire supply chain to central London, from piles of rescued denim to washing machines and a sewing station.
For Foster it was a capstone moment to show off the hyper-local production line she’s spent seven years building. All of the brand’s products are made within a five-mile radius of its east London studio, further reducing its environmental footprint. But now that the show is done, the designer doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“Now when I say I’m a sustainable denim brand, people roll their eyes. They’ve just had it,” said Foster. “We want to focus on our products and let our products do the talking. … The quality of our product is equally as impressive as our sustainability credentials.”
For many brands, the shift in focus reflects a deepening understanding of what makes shoppers tick. The frothy, VC-backed market of the 2010s, when direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and Allbirds made the pitch for a friendlier form of more ethical capitalism, has given way to a more sober reality. Exuberant projections that consumers would shop their values haven’t played out.
“The data is very clear. … We know unequivocally that even if people say they want their clothes to be made better, more sustainably, not made with forced or child labour, we know that is not their primary driver to purchase,” said Carrie Ellen Phillips, a co-founding partner at strategic consulting and communications firm BPCM. “No one will buy pants if they look terrible.”
It’s a lesson many of the earliest movers in the sustainable fashion space learned the hard way. Brands from Bono’s Eden to “positive impact”-based retailer Maiyet struggled to gain traction and penetrate a broad consumer base. What’s different this time is that consumers are much more educated about the fashion industry’s environmental impact, and while sustainability may not drive sales it can clinch them and act as a motivator for brand loyalty, experts say. Slow fashion brands are switching up their narrative to fit this new reality, emphasising product quality, craft and creativity, without dropping their underlying sustainability commitments.
“The industry is just going through a reckoning of what resonates with the customer,” said Davis. “We’re seeing more of everyone figuring out how to shift narrative, so they’re not leading with sustainability, but the things they’re talking about ultimately tie into sustainability.”
This year, Asket completed its capsule menswear collection, capping its product line at 50 items. The company has committed to not adding anything new, but it will refine and elevate its existing lines.
“We need to lean more into the product and the poetry,” said Bard Bringéus. “We need to find a way to add more desirability to the product, leaning on the belief that it’s always better that an Asket product is sold than an H&M product.”
Sustainable Growth
Asket is hoping its new strategy will help stimulate growth. The company closed 2024 with revenue of 156 million Swedish krona ($16 million), reflecting low-single digit growth from a year earlier, a significant slowdown from previous years of double-digit expansion.
Going forward it’s aiming to up the pace, targeting annual growth of 15 to 25 percent for the next three to four years and to maintain the track record of profitability it’s sustained for four of the last five.
But whatever marketing wrapper surrounds the brand, its expansion plans are capped by the commitments to responsible operations that remain at its core, said Bard Bringéus. “We don’t have crazy growth ambitions,” he added. “One of the key things we want to prove is that you can run a business like ours without planned obsolescence and expand in a viable way.”
Foster agrees that a greater emphasis on product isn’t a signal that her underlying commitment to sustainability is wavering.
“In 10 years time when everyone’s moved on, we’ll still have our core ethos and values at heart and I won’t be using virgin fibres,” said Foster. “I just hope there’ll be more there with us.”
