Why no one wants to buy local fashion

Or, how apartheid f*cked South African fashion designers

Cape Town Fashion Week wrapped up this past weekend and the surprising frequency of colour and print (the majority of runways this year have been grey and self-serious), it’s gotten me to thinking what it takes for local fashion designers to get South Africans to buy into them. Especially as we’re in an economic slowdown and now more than ever, no one’s really looking to dropping racks on tops and skirts.

Every marketing authority asserts that the key to retaining customers is building trust, maintaining quality and nurturing relationships. Brands should be open about their pricing structure, whether and why they’re making price hacks or shrinking product sizes, and continue to make people feel like they’re getting value for money. Ideally, if this is all done right then even the people who really can’t buy now will remember you much later.

I think trust is a big problem area for South African fashion brands.

And I think it all goes back to poor governance and lazy management from the apartheid government. Let me explain.

Hanging by a thread

A while back Modupe of African Fashion Weekly published a piece on the pandemic of all local brands immediately labelling and marketing themselves as luxury. The TL:DR of it was that they were setting themselves up. Luxury brings a lot of high expectations that aren’t always necessary to meet and in doing so, you’re inviting anger and resentment when you’re not able to meet luxury standards - construction, packaging, customer service, even general image quality. No one likes to feel like they’re being scammed and with a fashion ecosystem as small as ours, the failing of one might as well be the failing of all.

Even further back, one of the more prominent fashion stylists in the country sent out a bunch of tweets about the appalling quality of the garments she’d source from young and emerging designers. The stitching was loose, seams weren’t properly finished, what was pictured was not was shipped, so on and so on.

Turning the clock back once more, I want you to think of the South African retail space prior to the arrival of Topshop, Zara, H&M and We Are Egg. To a time when the best way to shop international brands was to hop on a flight because shipping was that bonkers. To a time when we only had Edgars, Foschini and Mr Price and the girls were presenting out-of-season garbage. This was before Instagram and DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands, before the IG boutiques and thrift resellers.

Local stores were inundated with cheap, Chinese imports, or last year’s products that didn’t sell in the Global North. There was a great disconnect in what you would see online and in magazines and what you were faced with in-store. I can’t name more than maybe two or three independent local brands in this time - especially ones that were producing and manufacturing locally. It wasn’t commonplace for the big retailers to do so either.

But it wasn’t always like this.

You can’t keep letting these guys win

Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Kimberly are today full of defunct, abandoned or debilitated factories, CMTs and textile mills. For most of the 20th century, we had a thriving textile and clothing industry, a great source of employment for women of colour. If you’ve ever listened to your aunties rant or picked up vintage Woolworths, you’ll notice the superior construction, fabrication and overall quality of clothing from this period. Almost everyone I know has a direct family member who was a seamstress or tailor in this time, yet these factories, CMTs and textile mills aren’t brimming with labour.

It’s not entirely clear to me what the exact map of the textile and clothing industry was around the 1900s to 1940s but World War 2 forced the South African economy to become self-reliant and this period birthed several booming enterprises manufacturing the country’s fashion. To support this, import tariffs were increased and the government made several efforts to encourage local textile farming and production. Not too dissimilar from the early 2000s, the country relied on imports which were largely problematic: end of season, haphazard quality control, limited sizing and colours, etc.

Before World War 2, we were mostly putting out sheeting and canvas - not suitable for every day clothing. These protections led to South African made cotton, which by 1952 accounted for 60% of the textile in the country.

Labour was obviously cheap. The industry’s work force was first populated by poor, white Afrikaner women before being open to coloured, Indian and Black women once those white women were able to enter “higher-skilled” and higher-paid work. This allowed local manufacturing to grow at a significant rate and by the 1960s, the majority of South African retailers relied on made-in-ZA products.

But I guess the apartheid government was just too helpful and by the 1980s, manufacturers grew lazy and uncompetitive. They did the bare minimum in sourcing, trend forecasting, maintenance and quality control. They could get away with it, of course, since economic sanctions meant South Africans didn’t have any other options.

This made democracy the harbinger of death for the industry. And in a few years, Thabo Mbeki’s administration would institute legislation allowing for an almost unfettered influx of cheap, Chinese clothing just in time for the dawn of fast fashion - clothing produced in the fastest and most cost-efficient way which was meant overproduction, labour violations, and shoddy, shoddy work.

Local manufacturers couldn’t compete and retailers opted to merchandise their stores with these products because it was cheaper and faster. In this way, you can see how the general perception that local = bad has come about.

South African designers, your problems are many

Our fashion designers don’t have to just deal with the regular giant hurdles of trying to sell clothing but a historical prejudice against them as well. Besides having to contend with 1000+ styles a day Shein, the prestige associated with brands like Zara, and a cottage fashion industry (with some of the worst marketing and PR I’ve ever seen oh my god), local talent also has to make the effort to convince an almost uncaring public that their products matter.

Fortunately, I think a lot of the tenets of sustainable and slow fashion can assist in this regard. This is my advice. You can, of course, take it with a pinch of salt.

1. Become obsessive about your supply chain
   Listen, your overseas counterparts can afford to look once at fibre content or take a mill’s word that something is cotton or organically farmed. You can not. Do as much research as you can in the point of origin, fibre content, the conditions of labour, where you can find local alternatives.
   

2. You have to know everything about garment construction (sorry)
   I know it’s common practice for a lot designers and creative directors to not actually be sewists themselves but that’s not going to fly. If you are to assure the absolute most quality, you need to have a thorough understanding of clothing. I’m talking fit, tailoring and sizing issues (like how the majority of standardised sizing only accommodates B and C cups while a lot of South Africans are well above that). Learn everything about fabrics and how to manipulate them, understanding the construction techniques that make things last, what constitutes comfort, that a corset dress should have boning (I swear to god, this will be 13th reason).
   

3. You need to talk a lot more
   Bestie, open up that throat chakra. There’s no fighting social media, honey, and the best brands document everything. You’ve got to create a story, a narrative worth investing in - something that makes people want to support you and care about you. This does not have to flowery paragraphs about your heritage or the place of women in patriarchy, it can be as simple as showing the people who make the clothing, the design process, the steps you’re taking towards being greener, even crowdsourcing feedback.
   

4. Stop telling people to DM you for prices
   You’re competing with everyone, love, and that includes large organisations that can make, market and ship a product before lunch time. Stop making it difficult for people to shop your products. Invest in quality product photography (the kind of stuff that at least shows the front and back of an item abed), include relevant insight in your product descriptions (where was this made, how should we launder it, what’s the zipper situation), and put your prices out in the open. You have two seconds to capture attention and it will not be spent on Instagram comments and DMs for the most basic of information. If you’re worried seeing the cost will scare people away, have you considered that a) those people were never going to be your customers and b) this frustrating practice is scaring them away anyway?
   

5. Please, for the love of God, build a website
   You know that South Africa has one of the most advanced banking systems in the world yet we also have such high crime rates? Our criminals are advanced and playing 4D checkers. The least you can do to assure someone that they’re money isn’t going to end up on rented bottles at Saint while they’re at home naked and empty-handed is having an easy-to-use website with verified payment options and an SSL-certificate (that little lock that appears next to links on your browser). You’re also limited your reach and brand awareness if you’re running everything on a little Instagram account.

I’m sure there’s a lot more advice other people can give - I’d love to hear it in the comments - but the point remains that it’s time for local designers to accept that no one wants their stuff. Unfortunately you can’t wait for the day real eyes realise, you have to be twice as good right now.

You know you love me
xoxo Khensani