The founder of Kowtow didn’t expect to find her label’s clothes being sold on Facebook, and she definitely didn’t expect to find whole Facebook groups solely dedicated to reselling them. Instead of shying away from the reality that – whether due to changes in style, size or wear and tear – clothes have an expiry date, Gosia Piatek embraced it.
“We should be keeping that within our community and celebrating it,” Piatek tells Broadsheet. The New Zealand slow-fashion brand is turning 20 next year, and approaches the two-decade milestone with a horde of loyal customers in tow.
Kowtow wanted to find new ways to reward that loyalty, so it introduced a revamped customer rewards program: The Collective. The new scheme means customers earn points not just for purchases, but also sending garments for repair and for resales. “We’re rewarding people for doing good,” Piatek says. “First of all, we wanted to be able to keep garments away from landfill, so the program was launched [with] a circularity-first approach.”
As part of the new initiative, Kowtow has launched Relove, the brand’s own second-hand platform. Kowtow purchases customers’ previously worn garments and resells them online and in-store. Though currently only available in New Zealand (with imminent plans to expand to Australia), Relove has proved popular. “We’ve hardly advertised it and it’s just flying in and out the door at speed,” Piatek says. “We put a rail down in the store and it’s gone within days.”
To handle the volume of clothing, Kowtow’s office cloakroom has been converted into a makeshift Relove sorting room. Mismatched, colourful garments from past seasons sit on the racks and shelves, labelled with condition reports. “It’s such a celebration of all the unique prints and checks and colours that are bespoke to us because we work from … raw cotton,” Piatek says. “Ideally, we would see [the] same garment come back multiple times.”
A dedication to keeping items in circulation is embedded into Kowtow’s DNA. Since 2018, the label has offered free repairs and has repaired more than 1500 garments. In New Zealand, they’re done by in-house garment technician Ruby Chappell. For pieces in Australia, Collingwood-based social enterprise The Social Studio takes care of them.
Kowtow is still figuring out how best to deal with garments that are beyond repair. One experiment – currently happening in the office kitchen – involves biochar, where old Kowtow garments are turned into pure carbon, then supercharged with seaweed, before being used as mulch for the office tomato plants.
The community-building, sustainable mindset behind The Collective can be found throughout Kowtow. Last year, it publicly released an open-source handbook on how the brand transitioned to being plastic-free.
The fashion label has worked with some manufacturers since its inception, like the folks who make Kowtow’s cotton jersey collection. Just recently, one of Kowtow’s manufacturers (as well as his wife, mother and daughter) came to visit New Zealand from India and stayed at Piatek’s home. “When you work with suppliers that are Fairtrade certified … there’s an underpinning of kindness,” Piatek says. “They’re partners, they are not just random people that we price out a garment to.”
In some ways, Kowtow has been trying to become more eco-friendly for 20 years. “It’s [been a] full circle into reduction,” Piatek puts it. In its time, Kowtow experimented with new fibres and new markets, captivated by the pull of the global fashion industry – before realising that wasn’t where it wanted to be.
“We suddenly realised we were scatter-gun and not being staunch to our values. [During lockdown], we eliminated all other fibres apart from Fairtrade organic cotton. And now what we’re working on mostly is circularity … We are genuinely able to close the loop because of the minimal amount of ingredients that make up Kowtow.”
At the same time, Piatek recognises Kowtow is “very ambitious,” citing her intention to open five more stores in Australia. “Ideally, one store is just Relove. That would be the dream, but we need the community to get behind it.”
