Where do your high-street clothes really come from?
Tamara Abraham looks at the Mango machine, the epitome of fast fashion
’m at the Mango store on Oxford Street, a frenetic hive of activity where women of all ages are browsing the collection, arms laden with coats, blazers and knits. I’ve just picked up the last size 10 of a £49.99 pink satin slip dress that I know I’ll wear on repeat. Bingo, I think. Who knows if and when it’ll be restocked?
As it happens, a restock is never far off at Mango: its sophisticated logistics operation ensures that the 130 million affordable, trend-led items it produces each year are dispatched efficiently to its 2,100 stores in 110 countries across the globe. Fast fashion is built on spur-of-the-moment lunchtime buys such as mine, with shoppers constantly seeking wardrobe newness, and clothes that replicate what they’ve seen on catwalks and celebrities. But what does it take to meet that demand?
As I hand over my credit card and walk out of the shop with my new dress, the purchase is triggering a chain of processes that will see the Oxford Street branch supplied with exactly the number of replacement satin slips it needs, in all the sold-out sizes.
Most of these processes take place in Lliçà d’amunt, a small town about 30 minutes outside of Barcelona. The sleek grey building that houses the brand’s global logistics hub is surrounded by farmland, but the operations within it are like something from the future.
It’s hard to convey the scale of this hub without seeing it in person. Beyond the soundproofed reception area – which looks like a luxury hotel, with modern art on the walls and chic-looking staff clad in black jeans and blue corduroy blazers from the latest Mango collection – is a cavernous facility spanning 190,000 square metres, the equivalent of more than 30 football pitches. It processes 75,000 garments an hour, and 600,000 a day, distributing
900 different orders at a time.
On one side of the main walkway is the “highway” for incoming hanging garments, which arrive from 1,200 specialist factories across the globe. There are hundreds of thousands of them, all arranged by size and colour in plastic covers (I’ll get on to the sustainability issue later) in a unit 16 tiers high and so long that it disappears into the distance. The other side is given over to folded garments, which are stored in boxes in an equally vast unit.
When I buy my dress, Mango’s computer system informs the logistics hub that a restock is required, which a robot then plucks from the hanging garment highway and dispatches on to the mechanical rails that criss-cross the space. Walking through is like crossing a series of busy dual carriageways.
Garments bound for the same store are then packed – one of the few jobs done by actual humans to ensure nothing is damaged – then each box is placed on a conveyor belt, where it is labelled and whisked into the back of a waiting truck. The total turnaround from purchase to restock is about two days, a seriously rapid timeframe, even for a society used to getting everything now, now, now.
It’s also a little overwhelming. This hub represents the real scale of the global fast-fashion obsession and its environmental footprint. Though the clothes are trend-led, Mango’s products are designed to be worn and re-worn. “We are a fashion company, we sell trends, and this is present in our collections,” says Beatriz Bayo, head of corporate social responsibility at Mango.
That’s not to say that the company isn’t concerned about sustainability. “We are aware of the impact that our sector has,” says Bayo. Mango signed the Fashion Pact, a commitment to take steps mitigating the industry’s environmental impact, at the G7 summit in Biarritz last October.
For Mango, those steps include hundreds of small changes across the logistics centre, which now recycles 3,000 tons of waste each year. It currently reuses 40 per cent of its cardboard boxes, projected to reach 80 per cent in the next year, and the team is currently testing alternatives for the plastic covers on the hanging garments. “If we had the right solution, we’d switch to it tomorrow,” an executive told me during the tour.
It has pledged to use more natural fibres, instead of synthetic ones that can take hundreds of years to decompose in landfill, and it’s working with Greenpeace on eliminating all hazardous chemicals from the supply chain. Mango is far from perfect, but it has to be acknowledged that there remains a huge demand for fast fashion and where there’s demand, brands will always be quick to supply. Mango is taking leaps to address fast fashion’s environmental impact while still catering to what we, as consumers, have made clear that we want.
For the industry as a whole to adapt, though, we need to look closer to home – at our own shopping habits.
We need to stop buying new things we don’t really need, to cherish what we already own, and to look to vintage and second-hand stores for our shopping fixes instead. When it comes to fast fashion, we are the drivers of change.