Accidentally Zero Waste – Part 3: Fast Fashion to Zero Waste

If you looked at my resume, you might be surprised that I now own a zero waste company. Until making the decision to go full time with Planet B, I spent nearly a decade directly in or supporting the fashion industry, which we all know is very much NOT zero waste.

In hindsight, fashion was a bit of an odd choice for me. I wasn’t the little girl who read fashion magazines or loved shopping. It never dawned on me to care what the other girls in my class were wearing or what celebrities did. I was a nerdy, introverted kid. I wore boys’ jeans and t-shirts and hung out with animals (specifically horses) and played pretend in the dirt at an age where that was definitely uncool. But still, I somehow found my way there. Fashion was a career path that in a way, chose me.

When I was a freshman in high school, I signed up for a photography elective. The class was full, and instead, my school placed me in a sewing class. I conceded, as I knew sewing was a practical skill, but little did I know, the decision to take this class would change my life.

When the needle of my machine hit the fabric of my first project, that was it. I took to sewing like a fish to water. It was the first thing in my life that just came easily to me. Project after project, I got better and better at the different stitches and techniques, and I was hooked. It was thrilling to make something out of nothing with my own two hands. I couldn’t get enough.

My parents got me my very own sewing machine for Christmas, and I spent every free hour I had sewing. I taught myself to make all sorts of accessories – everything from Vera Bradley style duffels to saddle blankets for the horses I rode on the weekends.

By junior year, I had silently and unknowingly made a name for myself around school as “the girl who sews.” My skills caught the attention of the drama teacher. She was having a hard time finding costumes to rent for the spring musical, and much to my surprise, decided that it would be a perfect opportunity for me to showcase my talents. So, she asked me to design and make the costumes for a cast of about 50 high schoolers. I was given complete creative license and an unlimited budget. I rose to the challenge and was asked to do the same for the following year’s drama productions.

As a junior, it was time to start looking at colleges and deciding what I wanted to major in. Sewing was the one thing that I had ever truly excelled in, and everyone around me knew it. So, riding the high of seeing my creations come to life, I decided to attend Marist College and chose a double major in Fashion Design and Fashion Merchandising.

My advisor and professors encouraged me to pick just one, as the workload would be intense, and nobody had ever completed that particular double major. But people telling me I couldn’t do it only made me want to prove them wrong.

I struggled. A lot. Once I had made it beyond the foundational sewing classes for my design degree, and I had to research trends and design clothing someone would actually want to wear, I was lost, stressed, exhausted, and constantly on the verge of a meltdown. I blamed it on our professors being rude and judgmental, and slowly went from loving to sew to dreading it. I was barely skating by no matter how hard I tried. But in my 20-year-old mind, I had to prove everyone wrong. That was the plan, and I was sticking to it no matter what.

When I finally graduated, I had accomplished my goal. I made it through both majors in 4 years, and now, it was time to become a designer. But in a panic to have a job as soon as possible after graduation, I decided to take a position at Macy’s in their IT department with plans that it would be a temporary solution. It wasn’t what I was “supposed” to be doing, regardless of the fact that I actually quite liked the job.

After 18 months of tireless applications, I was finally offered an assistant designer position at Justice, a tween girls apparel store with offices that were luckily in Ohio, which was where my husband (we weren’t married yet) was living for grad school. Although I had absolutely no interest in living in Ohio, I knew I had to make the move both for my relationship and my career.

At first, Justice was great! I was SO excited to finally be doing what I had set out to do. Now, nobody could say I was wrong. But once the initial excitement wore off, I started to struggle once again, and I was miserable. This time I blamed it on not liking Ohio.

Luckily, my husband was almost done with his schooling, so I began to look for design jobs elsewhere. Maybe I’d like it if we were living somewhere more interesting like Seattle or California. But as I continued to apply, and continued to become more and more frustrated with my job at Justice, I was becoming suspicious that maybe this was not the right career path for me.

And one day, soon after my husband graduated, I was standing in the middle of an Abercrombie & Fitch taking sneaky photos, suffocating on the intense smell of cologne, and it suddenly dawned on me. I could not possibly care less about fashion if I tried! I’d never cared about it! I’d spent all this time, and all this energy on something that made no sense to me because someone told me I couldn’t do something, not because I actually wanted to do that thing. I wanted to sew, and to make things, not send drawings and specifications across the world for someone to do that part for me.

The worldview I had built myself for nearly the past decade came crumbling down, and in the blink of an eye, my future went from being crystal clear to a black hole. I was terrified and I was angry because in all my stubbornness, it had never occurred to me to ask myself if this was really what I wanted for the rest of my life.

This, combined with a few other “interesting” life events, led my husband and I to make the decision to quit our jobs and move in with my parents back in New Jersey. While moving back into my childhood bedroom at age 27 with my husband and two cats was an incredibly humbling experience, it was the best decision we could have made, and was the reset I needed.

It made me think back to how when I was growing up, I never played school or house. Instead, I was constantly making up “companies” of which I was the CEO. As a little kid, I was constantly drawing horses at the top of printer paper for my “stationary company” or setting up lemonade stands, or making friendship bracelets and trying to sell them at the end of my driveway. Even as I got older, I was making and selling things like tote bags or makeup cases to people I knew. It was my idea of big fun!

I decided then that I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. Needing to make money so that we could eventually move out of my parents’ house, I applied to and accepted a job at a company that made software for the fashion industry. I had used the software in my time as a designer, and though I knew wouldn’t be a career, it could help me build my management skillset while buying me time to come up with what my company would be.

And there I stayed for 3 ½ years. We bought our own house, and I slowly started to come back to myself. No longer was I stuck at the mall doing trend research on weekends. Instead, I was digging in the dirt again, growing vegetables. I was spending time with animals and adopting pets left and right. I was finally coming back to my element and becoming the person that my 10-year-old self would have been proud to see me grow into. And a few months before my 30th birthday, I sat down at my sewing machine, and it was finally fun again. I made myself a small collection of reusable produce bags because I was getting frustrated by bringing home so much plastic from the grocery store, and was transitioning to a zero waste lifestyle.

It was summertime; my garden was exploding, and my bees making more honey than we could eat. So, I decided to give away veggies and honey and a few of the reusable produce bags I had made to my friends, family, and neighbors. Sharing sparked conversations around how I grow my vegetables organically and care for my bees, and why we should use reusable bags over plastic. I realized that I thrived on educating others about the things I deeply cared about – nature and the environment. I finally knew what I wanted my business to be, and in October of last year, I started roughly outlining the idea for Planet B.

You see, our goal at Planet B is not to sell products. It is to educate our customers on how to care for the earth and the creatures that inhabit it, and to live a life that makes our inner children proud.