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When Amy Powney was 11 years old, her parents sold their house and moved off-grid, swapping easy-access water and electricity for a private well and a domestic wind turbine. Many have assumed this upbringing ignited the designer and activist’s passion for sustainability. She says it had the opposite effect.
“That experience meant I understood where things came from — that you couldn’t just flick a switch for electricity or water — but it also made me obsessed with fitting in,” she explains. “As a teenager, that meant using fashion as a route to status.”
Today, Powney is the creative director and co-owner of the UK-based fashion brand Mother of Pearl, which was founded by her fellow co-owner Maia Norman in 2002. Back then, the brand was known for its artist collaborations and bold prints. Sustainability wasn’t part of Mother of Pearl’s DNA, but it was a small, independent label that leaned towards local production. Now, its foundation is “contemporary, responsible design”, which translates into relatively muted and minimalistic womenswear made from natural materials, ranging from £75 for a staple T-shirt to £650 for a wool coat with the brand’s signature faux pearl-studded shoulders. Powney joined in 2006 as a studio assistant, moving through office management and development roles before eventually taking on design and leadership.
Fashion companies from Vivobarefoot to Finisterre are opting for smaller raises of capital, moving beyond the idea that bigger is better in order to scale on their own terms.
Powney’s interest in sustainability came later, when she started researching the relationship between fashion subcultures, supply chains and the natural world at university. It’s now the foundation of her work.
Earlier this year, Mother of Pearl was the subject of a documentary titled Fashion Reimagined, which follows Powney on her 18-month journey to create the brand’s first sustainable collection in 2018. It covers many mainstream sustainability challenges: how to achieve supply chain transparency, reduce carbon emissions, and transition away from synthetic, seasonal garments pre-destined for obsolescence. But, it also tells the story of Powney’s personal growth as a leader, becoming more confident in her instincts as she challenges the status quo of an industry preoccupied with status, and battles the anxiety of selling clothes on a burning planet.
In the years since, this has translated into both aesthetic and business changes. Since the documentary, Powney has been focused on recalibrating the business’s financial model to enable more sustainable choices. “Our own e-commerce site has grown since we started down this path, because people have been more interested in the story and they’re more connected to it,” says Powney.
Gross sales revenue grew 40 per cent between 2020 and 2021, despite the pandemic reducing turnover. It’s grown a further 30 per cent since then. Sales order growth has seen similar success, growing 27 per cent in the year to 2021, another 32 per cent in the year to 2022, and 8 per cent in the year to date for 2023.
Mother of Pearl’s designs have also become more consistent and less trend-led, its supply chains have been shortened and suppliers unmasked, and the brand has stepped back from the fashion calendar in a bid to pursue slower, more sustainable growth.
A “life-centred” approach to design
Powney attended fashion school, where she says an understanding of fashion’s relationship with the planet was missing. “We need to scrap the fashion curriculum and start over. It’s not even scratching the surface,” she says. “We learn how to read and write in languages that humans created. We learn how to design in the way other designers have done before us. But, we don’t learn about the planet or how ecosystems work. We teach a human-centred approach when we need a life-centred approach.”
While making the documentary, Powney visited a farmer in Uruguay, who said he had never met a designer before, despite working with fashion brands for several decades. Spurred by the lack of connection, Powney flipped Mother of Pearl’s design process on its head. “Instead of getting our supply chain partners to create what I wanted, I worked with them to understand what they could create in the most sustainable and ethical way, and figured out the product specifications after.”
While certifications have made it slightly easier to source more sustainable fabrics off-the-rack since the documentary was filmed, Powney says, brands still need to approach with caution. “Say you’re working with wool, you need to ask: who is the farmer? Where are we getting the wool from? Who is spinning it, weaving it, dyeing it and finishing it? How is that being done? Is it organic, if it needs to be? Is organic even the right measure? Then you have to look at the social side of things — certain countries have tighter regulations for the treatment of workers. You have to unpick each single bit.”
It’s rarely possible to achieve perfection, she adds. Sustainable fashion is an oxymoron in itself, and trying to make it a reality means facing constant trade-offs. Mother of Pearl has also faced several incidents where suppliers have lied about certifications, says Powney. One supplier sold the brand BCI cotton labelled as organic. In these instances, Mother of Pearl writes directly to its customers to explain the situation openly, and removes any misleading tags on its e-commerce site, in a bid to avoid greenwashing or wasting products that have already been produced. “It’s a constant deliberation of the best we can do in any given situation.”
One of the big challenges is that the goalposts for sustainability keep moving. “I realised five years ago that conventional cotton is an absolute no-go,” says Powney. “So, we started using organic cotton. Now, I realise that regenerative is better, and organic alone isn’t enough. You can never sit still and just accept what’s in front of you. You have to look for new developments and constantly ask where you can do better. Unfortunately, fashion is so fast-paced that you have to slow it down to be able to do that.”
Rethinking the brand’s financial foundations
In 2017, Powney won the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, which she says boosted her confidence as a designer and emboldened her to set off on the path she did. The money from the prize also helped create the farm to finished product ‘No Frills’ collection and the documentary about it. “By documenting this process, Amy incited a critical conversation on industry shortcomings and granted individuals with the understanding and responsibility to make better choices,” says BFC CEO Caroline Rush. “She is a true force for change, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.”
In trying to build stronger relationships with suppliers and reduce its carbon footprint — Mother of Pearl shortened its supply chains, pursuing integrated suppliers where possible, or clusters in a close vicinity if not. “As well as saving on middlemen, we also saved on packaging, transport, customs and duties. It didn’t always happen like that, but, more often than not, we found ourselves in a better financial position than before,” says Powney.
One significant change since shifting to a more sustainable business model is the growth of Mother of Pearl’s direct-to-consumer business. Pre-pandemic, this represented less than 5 per cent of overall revenues. Now, it sits closer to 40 per cent, and growing. “We haven’t gone back to wholesale in the same way because I won’t work with wholesale customers anymore who won’t do the right thing,” says Powney. What that means in the context of wholesale partnerships is consistency with the ethics that sell Mother of Pearl’s products. “If you want to promote our brand as being sustainable and talk about our credentials of paying our supply chain, you need to pay us too. In a lot of situations, wholesalers just want to squeeze you as far as they can.”
Mother of Pearl still produces four collections each year, but Powney says these are 75 per cent smaller than those produced before 2018. The brand hasn’t shown at fashion week since pre-fall 2020, and its core collection — bestsellers designed to be timeless, which are never marked down — now makes up 55 per cent of total revenues. Both of these changes have allowed the brand to offer its staff a better work-life balance, says Powney, since the brand controls more of its operations.
Despite the changes made to date, she says Mother of Pearl is still taking too many natural resources, so the brand is planning to invest more in regenerative agriculture and circular business models. One reckoning Powney has yet to figure out is growth, an increasingly contentious topic in the sustainable fashion sphere, as experts encourage brands to — at the very least — decouple financial growth from material resource extraction, or, in a more serious bid to achieve climate targets, pursue something akin to degrowth or Doughnut Economics. Many brands are dipping a toe into these concepts by trialling circular business models such as rental, resale and repair, something Powney is beginning to explore through an alterations service with UK startup Sojo and a resale partnership with sample sale and consignment company Curate Rotate.
It’s still not enough to keep climate anxiety at bay, which Powney says has heightened in recent months. “The world is on fire. Fish are washing up on the beach dead because the sea is too hot. Humans are dying because of extreme heat and wildfires. It’s overwhelming,” she says. “The fashion industry — not just fast fashion, but luxury too — is part of the problem. I think a lot about where my business will sit in 10 years time. Will people really care about fashion when they don’t have food on their table? What is fashion’s relationship with the future?”
Key takeaway: Since taking the reins in 2013, Mother of Pearl’s creative director and co-owner Amy Powney has been transforming the business towards more sustainable practices. From shunning fashion shows and slowing down production, to building shorter, more transparent and less transactional supply chains, Powney has attempted to reconcile the business with her personal ethics, and sought to redefine success amid the quickly worsening climate crisis.
Correction: The farmer Powney visited while filming the documentary was based in Uruguay, not Trinidad. Mother of Pearl was the subject of the 2023 documentary, Fashion Reimagined, not the creator as a previous version of this article implied. The film was directed by Becky Hutner, produced by DUCK Productions and released by MET Films. (03/08/2023)
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