OCTOBER 2017 FORBES ASIA | 25ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES
CEO Yael Aflalo, at her Los Angeles factory, discovered the wastefulness and pollution caused by fashion manufacturing after a trip to China in 2010.There’s an on-site masseuse, and employees have health benefits and
access to classes in career counseling, English and citizenship, which
are popular with the company’s heavily Latino workforce. The facto-
ry is also the hub for photo shoots, fittings, shipments and returns,
and engineering. Most remaining items are made in other local fac-
tories, with a few imports rounding out the collections.
To back up the sustainability claims, Reformation says it com-
pensates for 100% of its waste, carbon dioxide emissions and water
use by purchasing “offsets” that help pay for clean water, plant-
ing forests, capturing landfill gas emissions and wind power. It uses
eco-friendly and recycled fabrics, and it screens suppliers to pro-
tect against unsafe or unfair labor practices. Its labels include a “Ref-
Scale,” which shows customers the environmental benefit of each
piece through a breakdown of how much CO 2 , waste and water they
helped to save. Small changes add up: The making of a pair of Refor-
mation “seamed” jeans, for example, consumes 196 gallons of water,
compared with an industry average of 1, 656 gallons, and emits 5
pounds of CO 2 , far less than the average of 36 pounds.
While Aflalo drives a Tesla and geeks out over sustainability, eco-
friendliness wasn’t always part of her mission. The Beverly Hills na-
tive started her first fashion company, Ya-Ya, as a 2 1-year-old model
turned entrepreneur, after growing up watching her parents run a
clothing shop. She briefly enrolled at the University of California,
Berkeley, and then at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandis-
ing in Los Angeles, sold her first designs to Fred Segal and dropped
out. “Every time I took the clothes I had designed to a store, they
bought it,” Aflalo says. “I was like, ‘This feels right.’ ”She spent the next decade working on Ya-Ya but didn’t get seri-
ous until her late 2 0s. “I was just partying, being 2 7,” Aflalo says. In
2005 , revenue peaked at $2 0 million. When the Great Recession hit,
excess inventory bankrupted the company, leaving Aflalo with mil-
lions in debt. She took a year off, then made clothes for Urban Out-
fitters to pay the bills. On the side she bought and freshened vintage
dresses, selling them in a Los Angeles storefront in 2009 called Ref-
ormation. The dresses made money, so she opened a second store in
New York. It sold out on its first day.
A 2010 business trip to China changed her trajectory. Aflalo wit-
nessed firsthand the wastefulness and pollution caused by manufac-
turing and learned that fashion is among the world’s most polluting
industries. She was appalled that it took 200 to 500 gallons of water
to make one basic cotton T-shirt and hundreds of years for synthet-
ic fabrics such as polyester to biodegrade. She left China with a mis-
sion: to create sustainable clothing at an attainable price without sac-
rificing style.
She paid off her debts and began to focus solely on Reformation.
Eco-fashion was still seen as shapeless and “granola,” but watch-
ing industries like automotive go green without sacrificing product
quality convinced Aflalo that fashion was primed to change. She was
right. “Yael challenged the misconception in the fashion industry
that anything tied to being sustainable means that it can’t be cool,”
says Miroslava Duma, a Russian fashion entrepreneur who has in-
vested in Reformation. “It’s the perfect example of where the indus-
try should be moving. Reformation is for a new generation of cus-
tomers who want to consume with purpose.” F