[TEASER]
Female Voice: Once you start looking into different companies, you start realizing, wait, these companies I associate with every day, I had no idea that they contributed campaign funds to so-and-so. It’s interesting to me when people say they’re not political or not into politics. Anything you do with money ends up being political.
[Opening song, Winning by EJ Cali, up and under]
Male Voice: There’s room for people to be in business. There’s not room for every one to be in business and be fucking greedy and careless.
[INTRODUCTION]
0:29 Welcome back to Relentless, a podcast about the pursuit of farfetched ideas, unusual aspirations, or that perfect pair of sneakers. I’m the host, Maddy Russell-Shapiro. Relentless puts motivation under a microscope to investigate why certain people choose to spend their limited time and resources on a specific project.
This is the fourth episode of a series about the New York City menswear brand Noah and I suggest you start by listening to Episode One.
[SCENE: BUSINESS AS A VEHICLE FOR GOOD]
[Music fades out]
0:57 As you heard in those earlier episodes, Noah as a company is focused on designing cool clothes that are made to last. It’s also committed to sharing its own learning with customers: information about design influences, about fabrics, about environmental concerns.
Those efforts extend beyond production decisions. Here’s founder Brendon Babenzien,
I wake up, I read the news, and there’s 15 things I want to do something about and I can’t, so I get really frustrated. I can’t obviously write a check to every single thing bad thing that’s happening in the world. Floods here and fires there, these people being abused.
Noah exists as a means to grapple with the conundrum of doing business ethically in the apparel industry andit also provides a platform to address injustice.
Brendon: Some people, important information comes to them and they push it back. I don’t have time for that shit. I just gotta have fun or I gotta pay my bills. For me, I can’t not, I find it really difficult to get information about a problem or something that’s happening and then just turn it off.
Noah dedicates resources to supporting more immediate threats to people and planet.
Brendon: It’s very reactionary. Something happens, we’re like that’s bullshit, what can we do. Then we contribute. If we’re talking about an issue and we think it’s cool to talk about, visually, we can’t just use it. We have to make sure we write that check to help it. We can’t just say, “Free the Children.” It looks cool, it sounds cool. But unless we write a check to actually help to free the children, we can’t use the graphic. That’s when things get interesting because the fashion industry is pretty famous for utilizing cool moments and ideas without really giving back to it.
2:40 Free the Children. Brendon is referring to a fundraiser t-shirt that Noah sold in June 2018. The proceeds were donated to pay legal fees for immigrant families separated at the southern border of the United States. The t-shirt is white. Printed on the front, “Free the Children.” Printed on the back, a graphic of hands pulling apart a chain. On one sleeve, the words “Fuck Stephen Miller!” Stephen Miller, the presidential policy advisor who is behind a lot of the most hardline immigration policies of the Trump administration.
When three successive hurricanes pummeled Puerto Rico in the summer of 2017, extensively damaging the infrastructure of the island, Noah sold a t-shirt as a fundraiser for relief efforts. The shirt featured an image of a prop plane above a parachute carrying boxed supplies and the statement “Climate Change is Real.”
These rapid response efforts are designed and manufactured quickly, in limited quantity, and usually with a strident, emphatic tone that is jarring and, to people who are upset or enraged, appealing.
And if not everyone who buys a benefit t-shirt is doing so because of the cause, that’s ok. The money gets raised all the same.
So Noah supports different social causes and then,
Brendon: In other cases it’s more environmental stuff. Like having Sea Shepherd as a permanent thing on our website where you can check out and donate to Sea Shepherd when you shop with us.
Noah supports 1% for the Planet, a campaign for businesses that commit 1% of all sales to vetted environmental nonprofits. For now, Noah directs its donations to Sea Shepherd, an activist organization focused on defending, conserving, and protecting biodiversity in oceans. 1% of Noah’s annual sales are redirected for environmental preservation.
[SCENE: PRICING]
4:20 Despite all the very real opinions and concerns that guide the designs and the production of Noah’s merchandise, ultimately everything does come down to transactions. This is, after all, a business. And every element of work accrues to the ultimate cost. What we pay as customers. Are Noah’s clothes expensive? Brendon says,
If you ask a 15-year-old kid, our stuff is expensive. If you ask a 40-year-old man who has been shopping for a while, he thinks our prices are incredible.
Well, someone who has been shopping for a while might still be accustomed to underpriced clothing. So much retail clothing these days is relatively cheap.
Like, for example, a wardrobe staple:
[Music, from Pelham Academy, up and under]
a dyed cotton t-shirt with a pocket. At JCrew, a pocket tee is $29.50; at The Gap it’s $19.95; at Uniqlo it’s $14.90; and at Target, $9.99. At Noah, a pocket tee is $52.
Nylon swim trunks at JCrew are $69.50 and nylon swim trunks from Noah are $148.
So, if you shop regularly at JCrew, Noah will seem expensive.
[Music fades out]
If you shop at Patagonia or APC, then the prices will be less jarring. In any case, it’s arguably not so important whether you subjectively interpret prices as high or low. What matters is whether you determine that the cost is worth it. Is it a good value? Part of that value proposition is that Noah doesn’t spend money on advertising. Yes, advertising is a cost that gets passed onto us as customers. It sure does. And Noah doesn’t do it.
5:59 Brendon: The wool-cashmere suitings, whether it be for sport coat, jacket, trousers, whatever, it’s a wool-cashmere blend, it’s 95 wool, 5% cashmere, from the UK, from various mills in the UK, where any other company in the world using those fabrics, the jacket would be at a minimum twice the price of ours, sometimes three and four times the price of ours.
Maddy: Just because that’s what they can get away with?
Brendon: I don’t know. I would imagine yes, to some degree, the brand position is so high that if they don’t charge those prices their customer won’t know what the hell is going on. In other cases, it might be necessary for the way their business is structured. I don’t really know the answers to those questions. All I know is that for us, we can make a garment and because we don’t wholesale and because we don’t spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing every year, we can afford to give it to you at a much better price. Factor in the fact that we’re not really greedy, that probably has something to do with it as well. Could we charge more? Should we? Maybe. But, it doesn’t make sense. We talk about our customers. And I already know, a lot of these garments, they’re a stretch. They’re a stretch for our customers. But the prices people see from us are, they really can’t be any less. If they could, I would. Any less, and I go out of business.And we’ve tried to explain that as well. If we don’t make a certain margin, we just won’t be around next year to have this conversation.
7:25 Every move a product makes in its progress towards an end user has a cost. And most of those moves are totally invisible to us as shoppers. Designer Corey Rubin provides an example of costs related to making a graphic t-shirt like one from Noah that I own, a black t-shirt with images on the front and back of swimmers with arms extended outwards, arcing their bodies mid-dive.
Corey: When you’re paying for a t-shirt, you’re paying for the idea but that’s not the main thing. We have to get that t-shirt sampled. And in the sampling process, people print by hand. Let’s say it’s a photo t-shir, that’s: at least 10 to 14 screens that need to get burned, 10 to 14 inks that need to get color matched and then printed on that one shirt. There’s times when the sampling fee, if it’s not a super high-number shirt, for whatever reason, we just don’t think enough people will want the shirt but it’s important to make, that takes up a margin no other company would be happy with. Where we choose to make them, they have their own certifications and that also adds up.
8:48 Brendon is serious about achieving quality in every single thing they make and sell. Even the socks.
[Music, from Pelham Academy, up and under]
Brendon: Take something as silly as our socks. They’re $24, that’s an expensive sock. But I will put our sock up against any fucking white sock in the world for that price. Go to wherever. I won’t name them but go buy your ten socks for ten bucks and they will last you three months and they will fall apart. Buy one pair from us, you will probably have them for years before you have to get rid of them. Wash, wear, wash, wear. Keep their shape, super comfortable. Literally, you will spend four times with that other company what you spend with us by the time you’re done. [Laughs]That’s where it gets interesting. What are consumers concerned with? Good products and have their own style and not need brand new shit every day? Or want to wear the latest and greatest that they might not even wear next year?
Keep in mind, Noah isn’t producing large quantities of anything. For example, according to its blog, last season, spring/summer 2019, it made 204 campus jackets and 146 pairs of double snap board shorts. The shorts retailed for $188. The jacket was $368.
[Music fades out]
10:05 Brendon: I wish the industry would make it easier for us to make great product and not have to be so expensive. If you want to make 12 of something, factory is going to charge you more. How are they gonna, how can they do it cheap? They have to pay people to make 12. By the time they’re done, they’re not even up to speed because they’re still figuring it out. If you’re making 1000, by the time you make 100, you’re in a rhythm, you’re blowing through them quickly, then you can charge less. Our fundamental business doesn’t really allow us to reduce the prices as much as we’d like to. We’re using some of the best fabrics in the world in some cases, expensive.
Brendon is describing economies of scale, the fact that cost goes down the more you produce of something. So why not make more so it will be less expensive for the customer? Beau explains that,
For us, the feeling of over-producing and having to discount product and then even after discounting product potentially not sell a large portion of it, seems like the most wasteful practice of all.
Brendon elaborates further,
Just the idea of doing volume doesn’t bother me. But generally what comes with doing volume is all this other shit, that’s what bothers me. You can’t really do volume unless it’s cheap anyway. That’s what drives volume, is price. We’re never going to use shitty fabrics because I don’t want to make stuff that’s going to fall apart in six months.
11:24 Noah intentionally has a high-low range in the collections it produces, and the story is incomplete without the high end, without the 628-dollar baby camel hair hoodie, without the twelve hundred dollar wool trench coat.
Brendon: The only other choice I would have is to just not make those types of items. And that’s no appealing to me either. It’s not a complete story. And we have customers who can afford those things. And some of those who can’t afford them today are going to grow up, make a better living, change their attitude about where they spend their money, then they will be able to buy those things and see the value. It’s a much longer story for us. It’s an educational process for the customer and for us.
And the educational process, it works,
Female Customer: They just dropped these nice tweed trousers and the multi-paneled corduroys. It’s a hefty price but I know it’s worth to buy.
Maddy: Can you say more about that? I think for a lot of us their price does seem high.
Female Customer: If you look at their product descriptions, where they sourcing the wool from is good, unstitched hem. If you look at the quality of the clothes, you won’t be disappointed with what you’re getting honestly.
12:34 You might not be disappointed, but you still probably have to budget for prices like these, which Brendon acknowledges,
Where it gets really complicated for us, and for me personally as someone who grew up not having much money, is the fact that there's no way around charging more for these. It's just that simple, you pay more for them. No way around it. Fabrics are expensive, garments cost more.
And you know we have had people be like cool, really like what you do but it’s really expensive. A lot of young people or a lot of just people can't always afford what we make and as I said earlier this is another situation if you can't be everything to everybody. You know people will say like, I’d rather go take my 200 bucks and go buy five garments on Broadway from you know the bigger brands, the fast fashion brands, whatever, and fair enough if that's what you want to do, go ahead. It's your personal choice and I get it. But the irony of that is that those five garments will be out of your life before the single garment that would cost the same thing.
It’s so difficult because what we are talking about now is an entire restructure of our values as a society right. And in a weird way it’s going back because you know 50, 100 years ago, people didn’t have the wardrobes that we have today, they have a lot less stuff and I would argue that it forced them to be a lot more creative in their choices and you know we look back for Style. I don’t look next to me right now for good style. A lot of our style icons right now, they’re not very good. They’re not going to hold up over time. We’re not going to be looking at some of these pop stars today and being like, 25 years from now, 50 years from now, look how good they looked! They look ridiculous. They don’t have good style. They can buy everything they want. They’re on trend. They’re technically fashionable, but they’re not very stylish people, they’re not creative people. They’re just buying brands.
[SCENE: RETHINKING WARDROBES]
[Music, from Pelham Academy, up and under]
14:30 One of the ideas that I continued to mull over as I was reporting on this story was this: What if I decided to prioritize purchasing things that were high quality, that were made to last? What if I budgeted to spend more per item and buy less overall? For someone like me who doesn’t know a lot about fabrics, who isn’t totally confident in my own ability to assess quality, it’s a little daunting to plan for shopping decisions that have to be made so thoughtfully. But I like the idea of building a wardrobe that’s meant to last, a collection of clothes that fit me and reflect my personality, things that I will probably want to wear for a long time. And good garments, they can be tailored. They can be adjusted over time as my body or as styles change. When I think about my clothing choices that way, the prices at Noah start to seem more feasible, more reasonable.
I’m not the only one whose shopping standards are starting to shift,
[Music fades]
Maddy: What informs your decisions about where to spend money on clothes?
Male Customer: It has to be a piece that I really want to wear and could see myself wearing on a daily basis but also a store that has a good mission in terms of how they want to serve their community and the world.
[SCENE: COMPETITION]
15:39 Noah’s priorities are durability, quality, human rights, and environmental preservation. Together, those represent a reconsideration of the apparel industry’s longstanding modes of doing business, including the use of marketing for education rather than manipulation.
Maddy: Are there other brands you look to for inspiration or who are on the same page in terms of effort and willingness to mold their business to do things responsibly?
Brendon: I don’t know if there is anyone in our space, that I know of, no one near us culturally who comes out of skate or street or even fashion, in men’s, young men’s, I don’t see it. Patagonia has been a massive influence, obviously, I think what they do is incredible. But they’re in the outdoor world. They have an audience who is really ready for that message. We are coming at it from a place where sometimes people are hearing some of these ideas for the first time. The idea that, hey, that t-shirt isn’t just the cost of making it but the cost of shipping it and environmental damage. Sometimes people are hearing that for the first time. Or for the first time hearing that their choice as a consumer sends a message about what is and isn’t ok to bigger business. Cause if you keep buying, they don’t really feel the pressure to change. If you stop giving money, then they have to listen to you, they have to operate the way you want them to operate.
17:21 Other brands may not be making all these same efforts, or at least not yet or not as visibly, but imitators abound. Despite all the community building, Noah faces a very real challenge from its own success. The fashion industry, it has taken notice. Noah is pioneering, pushing forward, and other brands are picking over its design ideas, and adopting them as their own. During the time that I was reporting this story, another New York menswear brand opened a new store one block north of Noah’s flagship store. The interior of the store looks, well, nearly identical to Noah’s. The furniture, the potted plants, the display of art books. It is an astonishing feat of mimicry.
I asked Brendon how it feels to see his work imitated.
That’s always going to happen, right? You do something, if you do it well, people are gonna be like yeah, or if you’re shining a light on where things are heading, giving people information, telling them, this is where it’s going, ok cool, we’ll go there too. So part of it is great, part of it is cool, if we can influence other businesses to act responsibly and be more considerate, that’s outstanding.
If people want to come in and take what we’re doing and it’s not genuine for them, then I revert back to my kid with a skateboard in my hand, fuck you. Very matter-of-factly, which probably isn’t appropriate, but that’s just my automatic reaction.
Once I get over the shock of things like that, past the initial shock and frustration, you know what, whatever, because we’re going to do something tomorrow and the next day and next week and next month and next year, we’re gonna move in this direction and whatever, who cares. That’s kind of how you have to deal with it. The good things you put into the world, be proud of. And things where people shouldn’t touch what you do, just ignore it, keep your head down, and keep going. I still believe that the genuine nature of things always wins out.
19:17 Keep your head down and keep going. At Noah, everyone is energized and focused. They’re pretty earnest too, a quality that is easily mocked but in this case accompanies an unflagging zeal and ambition. In rejecting sustainability, in rejecting the idea of an absolute perfection, the Noah team is able to move forward nimbly while hewing to its moral compass. And the direction in which Noah is heading, it’s one that is beyond clothes.
As co-founder Estelle describes,
Clothes are great, we want to design amazing classic heritage but fun exciting clothing, that’s going to last for a really long time. But what’s more important than that is the stuff you do while wearing the clothes.
[CLOSING]
[Music, Wonder by EJ Cali, up and under]
20:01 In the next episode, building community in a retail store,
Male Voice: We love to sit on the couch and have a conversation with you.
And how a deep belief in the primacy of individuality drives Noah,
Brendon: To me, that’s the most punk thing you can do, be yourself and stick to your belief structure and not join the herd.
For today, I leave with you a few more questions to prompt action. How do you decide how much money to spend on individual items of clothing? What do you think about before deciding something is too expensive or if it’s affordable for you? Do you find there’s a correlation between how much you spend on a garment and how many wears and washes it can sustain? Which clothing in your wardrobe has proven to be the most durable and longlasting?
On our website, The Relentless [dot] org, we’ve posted more information about transparency in pricing and tips for selecting clothing that you will love and be able to wear for a long time.
Join the conversation on Instagram at The Relentless Podcast.
[CREDITS]
[Song fades out and Look At the Stars by DJ Synchro up and under to end]
21:12 Relentless is produced by me, Maddy Russell-Shapiro, and is recorded at Bryght Young Things with the help of Dan Navetta. Sara Holtz was the editor for this episode.
Music for Relentless is provided by Building Beats, a nonprofit that teaches young people in New York City’s schools how to DJ and make music. Today’s music was produced by DJ Synchro, EJ Cali, and students at Pelham Academy. If you like the music, if you like this show, please consider supporting Building Beats!
Everything you need to know about the show and this series is available on our website, The Relentless [dot] org. Subscribe to the podcast through your listening app so you don’t miss the rest of the season.
And come back for the next episode!