How to Make the Fashion Industry Sustainable #30

Podcast
Written by Nick Halaris

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on 🎧The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring two inspiring civic entrepreneurs—Eliana Konsker and Brigitte Canty—the co-Founders of Zero, an ecommerce marketplace for sustainable fashion brands.  Frustrated by a world that always seems to push sustainability all the way back to consumer choice, Ellie and Brigitte are working to build a product that will actually change industry standards from the inside out.  Their company Zero is focused on promoting fashion brands dedicated to holistic sustainability.   

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Youtube or on your favorite podcast platform.

I wanted to have Ellie and Brigitte on the show to learn more about the sustainability problems in the fashion industry and to highlight the work they are doing with Zero to improve the industry.  In this wide-ranging discussion we cover:

  • Zero’s innovative approach to providing consumers with genuinely sustainable choices

  • Why the fashion industry has such a big ESG problem

  • How labor practices in the fashion world make consumer choice a tricky affair

  • Why a consumption-obsessed culture coupled with all the problems and pitfalls of tech enabled psychologically manipulative advertising creates the not-so-perfect storm for unsustainable fashion

    &

  • Much, much more 

We also explore the idea of circular economy and learn what motivated Ellie and Brigitte to dedicate their lives to sustainability. 

I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning-in!      

Love this episode? Please rate, subscribe, and review on your favorite podcast platform to help more users find our show. 🙏 Thank you

Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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