Hello and welcome to today’s edition of 100 Climate Conversations and thank you for joining us. Today is number 32 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents visionary Australians who are taking positive actions to respond to the most critical issue of our time the climate crisis. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. So it’s fitting that in this setting we shift our focus to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Before we begin and on behalf of Powerhouse, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the museum is situated. The Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I would also like to welcome any First Nations people listening in or joining us today and pay my respects to their Elders.

My name is Yaara Bou Melhem, I’m a journalist and documentary film director, and I often make public interest films that are at the intersection of art and science. Now, in a similar space, my guest here, Zoltan Csaki, has been blurring the edges of design and tech for some time now. He’s the co-founder of Citizen Wolf, an on-demand fashion label that is redefining clothing production to reduce pollution and improve ethics in fashion. We’re so thrilled to have him join us today. Please put your hands together to welcome Zoltan. Zoltan, I wanted to get a sense of you and your motivations, and previously you’ve worked in advertising, and I believe that Citizen Wolf is your third attempt at a startup. What galvanised you to take the plunge and start Citizen Wolf, in an industry that you weren’t familiar with.

That’s a great question. And I do think about that sometimes because fashion is a notoriously difficult industry. My – I graduated UTS just up the road here, I had a great time there. I did visual communications and international politics and went into the advertising industry, as you say. And I had many years there, successful career all around the world doing that, but I really got sick of the waste within that industry. And I had an idea to make a piece of software which I thought would help break down the barriers between the creatives and the clients. And I think if I was smart, I would have made Pinterest. Sadly, I’m not. And so, I quit my job, sunk all my money into creating this piece of software, which, you know, I’d had zero experience in in software. I shut that down quite painfully after a few years, but obviously I’d learnt a lot from that experience.

Around about the same time a friend of mine had – we’d been talking about trying to do some graphic T-shirts, you know, because we were graphic designers originally. And that’s always the kind of standard output, right, for a side project. And so, we did. We started doing that on the side of our full-time jobs and then that ended up turning into a menswear label. And I tried to scale that business, but I couldn’t. So again, few years later, quite painfully shut that down. But what I learnt from that experience was, I learnt enough about the fashion industry to know just how complicated and broken, effectively, it is. So yeah, at the end of the day, after shutting both of those businesses down, learning a lot from both of those experiences, Citizen Wolf is really the Phoenix, I guess, from the ashes of those two failures. But taking what I learnt in software and taking what I learnt in fashion and really trying to find the overlap in that Venn. And then my co-founder, Eric, he sort of brought the sustainability lens. And so if you think about that Venn diagram of tech, fashion and sustainability, we sit right in the middle.

And tell me how Citizen Wolf started. You founded the company with Eric Phu and Rahul Mooray in 2016. Tell us the origin story, what did you start out doing?

So, I just got back to Sydney and Eric the same and we actually met in the ad agency here in Sydney 20 years ago. And he went to Asia and had a very successful career there in advertising. I went to Europe and we both found ourselves back in Sydney around about the same time. I’d come out of these two previous businesses failures, and I was desperate just not to go back to advertising. He was out of advertising and kind of looking for the next thing. And so we were sitting down and just talking – and he’s admittedly short and he was you know, he was living in Hong Kong for a long time. And he basically just said, ‘look, it’s so easy for me to get clothes over there. It was never an issue. Anything I wanted, you know, there’s a tailor on every corner. It’s not expensive. And I come back to Australia and it’s just so incredibly frustrating, you know, that I have to literally get everything I buy altered. And why is it so difficult to find clothes that fit?’

That really was the genesis of Citizen Wolf. Because we started talking about it and we started – obviously tailoring has always existed. In fact, if you rewind pre-Industrial Revolution, that’s how all clothes were made for all people. So that’s always been there since the Industrial Revolution and even in the more recent past. Tailoring has been marginalised to, effectively, wedding dresses and fancy suits. And we were always – we were just surprised that the clothes that most people wear the least, frequently fit the best. And that inverse relationship just sounded silly. And so, we were like, well, what if we could use technology to effectively reduce the cost of tailoring to zero? And in doing so, opened the benefits up to the casual wardrobe. And no one else seemed to be really thinking about that. We set out quite clearly to re-engineer the way clothes are made at scale, because we just felt like the entire system was not only broken, but completely ass backwards. So, yeah, that’s how we ended up starting really.

So, we found a space up in Darlinghurst and that really was the first kind of micro factory. So, Eric and I hand measured and hand-cut about 2000 T-shirts out of that little space in Darlinghurst. We started very manually and we knew that that wasn’t the scalable solution that we were ultimately looking for, but we knew what we were doing was in service of building the technology, which we would later call Magic Fit, and really just starting to understand how a T-shirt’s made, you know, because I had that theoretical knowledge of like, well, I send it to the factory and it comes back, in my previous startup, but this time it was literally like I was the one that was, you know, manually moving the patterns and adjusting the cut and the fit for each individual customer. So yeah, really trying to intimately understand that product and T-shirts are really easy to make and in some ways very hard to sell. But we knew that if we got the technology right for tees, then we would be able to make more things in the future and they would progressively get hopefully easier to sell.

Let’s talk about the problem that you’re trying to solve more broadly. What is the core issue that you’re trying to tackle?

So quite simply, far too many clothes get made every year. Overproduction is the default in the industry. It’s also – it’s the sacred cow, really at the heart of the fashion industry. No one wants to address it. No one wants to talk about it. But the problem is, as a result of all of this overproduction, one in three pieces of clothing made every year goes to landfill unsold, often with the tags still on, often with holes punched through to preserve brand equity. Not that there’s anything wrong with those clothes, just that the brand who produced them doesn’t want to dilute their brand, so they literally just destroy it before they landfill it.

Which is just extraordinary.

It’s wild. And Burberry got in trouble about this many years ago, but they were not the only people doing it. You know, everybody does it, sadly. And so that is a wild stat. You know, that’s just absolutely insane when you think about it. So, one in three pieces of clothing – to put that in perspective, that’s something in the range of 30 billion pieces of clothing. It’s just – the magnitude is unbelievable. And fashion is an industry that touches literally everybody, every day. All around the world, there are millions and millions of people invested and working within the industry, but it’s all predicated on inaccurate forecasting. And so that’s the problem. Nobody knows. Nobody can predict the future in any domain, but certainly not what people might want to buy in the future. And so, the issue is all of these production decisions based on guessing and crossing your fingers and hoping that at some point in the future somebody is going to want to buy those things.

So, 40 per cent of clothes made every year are sold at discount, which is the first indication that there was too much production in the first place. It’s crazy. Again, we just thought that it was so crazy because if you flip it around and start from first principles, really what we do at Citizen Wolf is quite simple in the sense that we just ask people what they want and then we go and make it. There’s no guessing. And as a result, we have zero waste and zero landfill. And it’s just inverting the system. We’re not reinventing the wheel. Our T-shirts, apart from the Magic Fit, are no different to anybody else’s T-shirts. But each one that gets sold already has a home. And so that’s a really critical distinction.

And that sort of intercepting of waste is also really important when it comes to climate change, because the statistics on this are quite extraordinary in terms of how much fashion waste and fashion industry contributes to climate change. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

So depending on which report you read, fashion is said to be the second most polluting industry on earth. But a fairly indisputable fact came out of the World Bank in 2019, which says that fashion is responsible – in that year, responsible for 10 per cent of global carbon emissions, set to rise 50 per cent within the decade. So, by 2030.

And to put that in perspective, that’s more than the aviation and shipping industry combined.

Correct. So, 10 per cent in 2019 going up to 15 per cent of the global carbon budget – the entire planet’s carbon budget – going up to 15 per cent by the end of this decade and then fully tripling to 30 per cent by 2050 if nothing else changes, right? If the system just continues as it’s going. Unbelievable, right in its magnitude and it’s also completely against the Paris Accord that our government and everybody else has signed up to. And the truth of the matter is the industry is self-regulated and they’re saying a lot of good things, but very little is happening to address, combat and really stop that wild increase in carbon. That’s just what we do at Citizen Wolf is – our whole position is the system needs to change.

What is it about the fashion industry that makes it such a large emitter?

That’s a hugely complex thing –

Because the fashion industry is quite complex and the supply chains and the production process is quite complex. Can you break down some of those elements for us to give us a sense of where the problem is?

Yeah, a huge amount of the carbon emissions in fashion comes from the material stage, as it does in almost everything we make, right. That’s not a statement that’s limited to clothing. And I guess the problem is so much of clothing these days contains polyester and other petroleum-based fibers, right? So they’re made out of plastic, which is in turn made out of oil, which is a nonrenewable resource and it’s incredibly destructive to extract that resource, to get to the point where it becomes like a stupidly cheap piece of clothing on the rack at insert big global retailer here, you know, and I think it’s something like 60 per cent of all clothes are either polyester or fully polyester or contain polyester in some respects.

That’s a change that’s occurred in the relatively recent past as the fast fashion industry has chased cheaper and cheaper prices, right? And none of the negative externalities of plastic or petroleum are sort of built into the industry, let alone the prices that people pay at the checkout. So, you know, materials is a huge part of the problem. You referenced this sort of like incredibly atomised supply chain of fashion. So, it’s not uncommon in fast fashion in those big brands for one product to traverse multiple continents in its journey to become a product. You know, the stuff gets grown somewhere, it gets cut somewhere else, it gets sewn in a different country and then ultimately gets shipped all over the world. So yeah, just the logistical supply chain creates huge amounts of carbon as well. So again, when we were thinking about Citizen Wolf, one of the filters for us was like, well, why can’t we challenge that and why can’t we make things here in Australia?

Now Australia has set this target to cut fashion waste by half by 2030. Where do we sit on the global fashion waste front?

So Australia is second only to the US in terms of consumption of clothing –

And this is on a per capita basis?

On a per capita basis, yeah. So, we consume an incredible amount, and we waste, or get rid of an incredible amount as well. Quite simply, one in three pieces of clothing made go to landfill each year. So, like, if you don’t need it, don’t buy it. We have to get back to a point where people respect and love their clothes in a way that they tend not to anymore, right? Because the fast fashion industry and the always new and the just the incessant speed of – increasing speed of like cycles and trends and micro trends and all this kind of stuff. It’s great for that part of the industry that’s involved in selling that stuff, but it pretty much is horrible for everybody else. You know, consumers and obviously planet.

Let’s break that down because we’ve mentioned the fast fashion industry a couple of times already. But what is fast fashion? What makes fashion fast? And how are you trying to turn that on its head?

The short story is over the last sort of 20 to 30 years, we’re buying far more clothes than we ever did, historically. They’ve never been cheaper historically than they are today, but we’re wearing them for less time and less frequently, right? So, most people wear a fraction of their wardrobe. And that’s because over that time period, the industry has gotten incredibly good at producing things at a price that just didn’t work that way in the past, you know, and you had to be pretty much like a Hollywood star or something to have the kind of turnover of wardrobe that pretty much anyone, at least in Australia, can afford these days, right?

Fast fashion has created a type of consumption which I believe is fundamentally at odds with solving climate change. So, you know, I can do everything I possibly can on the supply side, but at the same time we have to change behavior, consumer behavior, and that’s fundamentally different and very, very difficult because the allure of being able to go and buy something, not have it blowout your weekly budget, feel fantastic, perhaps for a night and then sort of like get rid of it. It’s really hard to convince people that that’s not something that they should want or be able to achieve. What we tend to find with our customers at Citizen Wolf, though by contrast, is that because they’ve been involved in the creation of that garment – and it’s as simple as choosing the fabric and choosing the colour, you know, taking a pocket off or putting it on. Obviously, it’s then custom fit to their body as well, but because they’ve had some involvement in creating that product, what we find is that they tend to have a different emotional connection with that piece of clothing than with something that they’ve just bought off the rack.

Because they’re more invested in it.

Yeah, and they had to wait for it, too. So that’s something that’s really interesting. I think it’s a barrier for our business, but it’s also I think it’s possibly the fulcrum for this behavior change. So, they’ve had to wait for it, they’ve had some kind of investment in the creation of that garment. And so, yeah, they love it basically more than most other things in their wardrobe. And because it fits perfectly, they wear it more often as well.

So, our mission at Citizen Wolf is to re-engineer the way clothes are made at scale to save our planet. So, our purpose at Citizen Wolf is to un-F the fashion industry and we cannot solve climate change as a species without changing the fashion industry because, you know, see, above all those stats from the World Bank, it’s just such an enormous part of global output that we can’t ignore it and hope to be able to, you know, tip the needle on climate change. So, we have to change the industry, which means we have to change the system because it’s just unconscionable, really, that one in three pieces of clothing made every year goes to landfill unsold, that’s just insane, it’s not okay and has to change. And the only way it will change is by asking people what they want and then making it and not trying to guess what somebody might want in three months’ time.

And you’re wearing one of your products, a T-shirt.

I am.

Can you describe what you’re wearing for those listening in and what makes it different to other clothes?

So this, it’s a long sleeve black T-shirt made out of merino wool. So, when we started the business, we were very – we had a very clear decision that we would not use any polyester. We didn’t want to contribute to the problems that [are] created by the extraction of fossil fuels. So all of our fabrics are natural and this merino wool is grown just south-west of Canberra actually. It’s all Aussie, it’s unbelievably beautiful, it’s superfine 17.5 microns so it’s really different to what people think. You know, if you haven’t experienced merino wool, it’s really different to the kind of scratchy, itchy jumpers that you might have, you know, being handed down from grandma or whatever. It’s not that at all. It’s incredibly supple on the skin.

Unfortunately, it gets sent from there to China to get processed because we’ve lost that capacity in the Australian system to turn wool, raw wool into yarn. We reimport it as yarn and then it gets knitted in Melbourne at one of the last remaining knitting factories in Australia, because that again that whole – like we had an onshore supply chain up until all of the tariffs were removed in the 90s and then virtually all production went offshore and now I believe something like only 6 per cent I’m going to say, that could be wrong, but it’s not far off, of the clothes purchased in Australia are actually made here. So, we re-import the yarn, knit it in Melbourne because we fundamentally believe that we must retain what industrial capacity, what supply chain capacity we do have still. So, we pay, we gladly pay much more to do it that way than if we were going to just import the fabric. And then it’s cut on our laser cutter in Marrickville in our factory, based on my Magic Fit details.

So Magic Fit is a piece of technology that we built that needs only your height, weight, age and for women we ask bra as well. So, only those three or four pieces of biometric information from which we create a mathematical model of your body, which is about 94 per cent accurate, and then we create the clothing based on that estimate. And the way that we are able to do that is on a laser cutter. So, if you’ve ever seen a traditional garment factory, there’s layers and layers and layers like hundreds of layers of fabric kind of in a huge stack. And then they lay the marker on top, which is the standard pattern pieces, and then they use a huge jigsaw to cut it out. We don’t do that. So, every single thing that we make, we cut one layer of fabric at a time, and every single panel that comes off the laser cutter is completely custom to whichever customer ordered that shirt, and then it gets sewn in the factory in Marrickville. And that’s how it arrived here.

How do people in the wider fashion industry respond to Citizen Wolf now that you’ve proven the concept?

Yeah. We have, you know, we’ve sold over 50,000 Magic Fit T-shirts in the last few years. And I think that all of those people that we originally spoke to are surprised to say the least, but they don’t yet see us really as a challenge to their business or to the industry more widely, which is just fine for us because it’s sort of like we don’t attend fashion weeks. We don’t really even think of ourselves as a fashion company in most ways, you know –

You’re more fashion tech.

Yeah, we’re a tech company and a supply side innovation and our long-term goal is not only to continue building the Citizen Wolf brand because we’ve started it, we’ve got traction, and there’s huge headroom in that because we can make anything at the end of the day eventually, right? And it’s just slowly and surely adding more and more product to the Citizen Wolf offering. And we’ll continue to do that. And our plan is to expand beyond Australia because I believe that what we’ve built is valuable outside of Australia. The same motivations in the same customer that buys from us here exists elsewhere in the world so why shouldn’t we service those people?

But really our true purpose in our long-term strategies is to license the technology such that the rest of the industry and whoever is willing can effectively have a turnkey solution for made to order because fashion is a hyper fragmented industry in the sense that no one player globally controls more than about 2 per cent of the industry. So, it’s like the antithesis of software, right? Which is – one company tends to dominate that particular sector and everybody else is scrapping at the end. Fashion is not. It’s like there are so many companies and such a long tail. So no one brand can truly affect change at the system level. It’s going to require a coalition of many, many brands working in a new way to achieve change. And so that’s why our strategy is to eventually license the technology to allow anybody who wants to operate in this way, the ability to do so without having to go through the years of R and D that we did to get to this point.

You mentioned that you want to scale your business, and I saw that you just closed a funding round and raised $1 million, congratulations.

Thank you.

But you’re also trying to encourage re-use and longer use of products. How do you square the two?

Yeah, it’s a good it’s a good question. So pretty much from day one, we’ve had free repairs for life. And we are not in any way the innovators on that, much bigger brands that I admire in lots of ways, for example, Patagonia or Nudie have done that for years and in many ways it’s a terrible business decision because it stops people buying more stuff and it also costs us to repair things, but it’s unequivocally the right thing to do for the planet. And it’s the right thing to do for the customer, too.

And it does build brand loyalty as well.

Yeah, it does. Of course it does. That it’s not only a downside for the business, right? It’s just a cost. But we start by making things to last as well. So we try to help ourselves in that respect, unlike the fast fashion industry, which doesn’t care and as long as it survives one or maybe two wash cycles, that’s really all that matters. We don’t measure the life cycle or the lifespan of our garments in in wash cycles, but years.

And you mentioned circularity earlier in our conversation. Can you talk to us about that?

Yeah. So that’s kind of the next evolution, really, of the idea. So, from day one, we’ve been zero waste. If you don’t know the panels that make our clothes, they’re not square, they have curves and all the rest of it. Fabric is square so, you know, there’s always offcut waste. It’s almost impossible to create clothing without waste at the factory level. So, from day one, we’ve been zero waste and we just sort of – as we’ve scaled the business, we’ve had different approaches to dealing with that waste stream. So, we started working with a jewellery designer who took our scraps and sort of cut them into long things and braided it and did stuff like that. And that was great at the start. But obviously we were producing way too much waste for her to deal with.

So, then we had another solution, which was we patchwork that up like an old quilt sort of thing. And we created a few products that we called the zero-waste collection, like tote bags and scarves and stuff like that. But again, we kept producing, we kept scaling the business and there was too much to deal with. And so, the latest version or iteration of dealing with that waste stream is a recycled fabric which has just launched. And I’m really proud of it because it’s been it’s been in the works for a long time, but it’s also been out in our North Star in many ways, because what that means is that the offcuts scrap gets turned into 50 per cent recycled fabric and it’s spun around the core of organic cotton for strength, because as you rag natural fibers, unlike petroleum, where you can basically renew it into virtually the same thing, as you rag natural fibers, the fibers get shorter and shorter, which means they break more easily.

So, a 100 per cent recycled cotton in particular is doable, but it’s just not as durable. And so anyway, we wrap it around a 50 per cent core of organic cotton for strength and then the 50 per cent of the recycled fabric. And so now what that means is that I can sell you a T-shirt today, you can wear it for as long as you want to or care to. If it breaks, I’ll fix it. Hopefully you keep wearing it for a few years. When you’re done with it, I’m more than happy to take it back. I’ll combine it with that off cut waste stream from the laser cutter. It gets turned into new fabric from which I can create your next T-shirt. So that true circularity is something that the industry must move towards. And it’s something, as I said, I’m very proud of.

Circularity, though, is difficult in the sense that most of the conversation of circularity, at least in Australia, hasn’t gone there. It’s sadly limited to elongating use and re-commerce, things like that, which is great because if you’re done with a garment, the worst option is to landfill it. Far better to have somebody else buy that thing or use that thing and give it a second life. But ultimately, if that garment isn’t going to be turned into more clothes, it’s not really circular. You’re elongating the linear cycle, right? It’s not circular at all.

What’s the ideal relationship we should have with the objects in our lives at this particular moment in time where we’re facing a climate crisis? And is it fair to ask consumers to be the conscious consumers? But also, do we need to have more policy led outcomes for the fashion industry as well? Do we need to enact policies for the fashion industry, or should it all be on the consumers? Is it a mix of both?

I think that’s an excellent question. I do not think it’s all on the consumer. I think in many ways that’s easy for business to say that it’s you know, if people didn’t want it, we wouldn’t make it. To a degree that is true, so – that’s not to say that consumers are absolved of all responsibility either, right? And if you look at the stats with the younger generation and nobody is more worried about climate change, but also the rise of ultra, ultra-fast fashion brands in the recent past, like Shein out of China and just how many of that same cohort are still shopping? Yeah, they go opp-shopping too, but then they still consume ultra-fast fashion at the same time in ever increasing volumes. So, there’s a disconnect often between what people say they believe in and what they say they’re going to do and then what they actually do when they when they get to the checkout. And we need to figure out a way to make that change.

But I fundamentally believe that we do need regulation in the industry and in much the same way that climate change isn’t going to stop until, for example, the government stops subsidising the fossil fuel industry to the tune of billions and billions of dollars every year. It’s not on consumers – in the same way, it’s like, yes, we can all drive less and that’s going to emit less carbon and that’s great and we should all try to do that, take more public transport, all the rest of it. All that’s really good and really important and at scale those decisions do change things, but without the government driving that agenda – and that was sadly, we’ve lost a decade here in Australia, as everybody knows, through complete inaction at the Federal Government level.

I think government has an incredibly important role to play. We can see the same thing sort of beginning in the EV in the car industry. You know, Australia is really behind the eight ball there. But with the correct government regulations, they’re starting to promote those purchase decisions. And I think, look, fashion’s pretty far down the line, I’d say, in terms of the government’s responsibilities, sadly, because it’s such a big industry as we’ve talked about. But I do think there’s, you know, out of the EU, we’re starting to see legislation being talked about, if not enacted around carbon. And so there is going to be pressure on the industry coming down, I think, in the near future –

From the top down level?

Yeah, from the top down, at the same time, I believe that more people are going to act on those signals of wanting to purchase in a climate friendly way, right? So, there’s also pressure coming from the customers and from the ground up. And I live in hope that the twin pressures convince the industry to start to look at the sacred cow, which is overproduction and the system more generally, such that we start to move the fashion industry to made to order. Because really that is the only sustainable way to make things. Citizen Wolf basically fuses made to order and made to measure. So, tailoring with made to order. And we did that very consciously because whilst all of the environmental benefits accrue to made to order – so you can have standard sized brakes made to order and they’re just great for the for the planet, right? But standard size brakes fail the customer.

And so, when it’s custom fit to your body, when the customer’s getting a better product and the planet’s getting a better outcome, there’s this kind of beautiful marriage of selflessness on the planet side and selfishness on the consumer side, we use tailoring as a Trojan horse to deliver all of the environmental benefits of made to order, because you’ve got to wait for stuff. And the waiting that’s inherent in our product is fundamentally at odds with the fashion industry or the majority of the fashion industry, which is super quick. Super quick. You know, The Iconic could – I could order right now, and it’ll be here before I leave the museum. You know what I mean? Like, we’re fighting against that in so many ways, but our arsenal is custom fit as a way to make people accept that waiting is not a bad thing. And if we make to last and if we want your clothes to last years and years and years, not just wash cycles, then what’s a couple of days on the front end, you know, waiting for that thing to be made?

Thanks so much, Zoltan. I think that was a really fitting way to end the conversation with more positive vision for the future of the fashion industry. Could you please all join me in thanking Zoltan? Please put your hands together. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording like this one. You can go to 100climateconversations.com and just search for 100 Climate Conversations in your pod catcher of choice.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.