Ethical apparel brand PACT | ORGANIC today launched a new campaign that aims to show how dirty the fashion industry really is.
“The Skidmark,” a new digital campaign produced by the creative firm Denizen Company, shines a light on the proverbial (and in this case, literal) stain the $3 trillion global fashion industry is leaving on the environment and people affected by its production. What starts as your basic sexy underwear ad quickly shifts gears, and (fair warning) comes to a rather explosive conclusion.
PACT | ORGANIC was founded by serial entrepreneur Brendan Synnott. In 2002, at the age of 23, Synnott co-founded the healthy snack company Bear Naked, which was acquired in 2007 by Kellogg for over $80 million. In 2009, he founded Revelry Brands as a vehicle to provide strategy, people and capital to new ventures; current Revelry holdings include PACT, pet care brand I and Love and You and candy brand Little Secrets.
PACT prides itself on making “clothes that don’t hurt people.” All PACT apparel is made with non-GMO organic cotton and promises to be free of toxic dyes and pesticides, and sweatshop and child labor. Through partnerships with Organic Content Standard (OCS), Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), and Fair Trade USA (PACT’s factory in Kolkata, India is the world’s first fair trade-certified apparel factory), PACT is working to ensure all of its products are manufactured ethically and sustainably.
So what led Synnott from food to fashion?
“The fashion industry is the second most toxic industry on the planet. Nobody knows anything about it, nobody knows where any of their clothes come from,” he says in a recent interview. “It’s an agricultural product just like food is, so why does it follow different rules?”
With PACT, Synnott joins industry heavyweights including Patagonia, advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, and initiatives such as the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute’s Fashion Positive on a mission to clean up textile and apparel production around the world.
“We want to change the apparel industry for good – like Hanes for the change generation,” Synnott asserts in the interview. “Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, Jockey– what do those brands mean? They’re all built around status and no transparency and accountability, and that just means nothing to the next generation of consumers. So I want PACT to be the basics brand for consumers that believe that they can vote with their dollar and they can impact the world with their dollar. They’ve revolutionized how brands interact with consumers - the big one that everybody knows is organic food, that’s what’s driving the way. It’s now starting to apply to more and more categories, which is just so awesome to be around.”