For 37 years, Eileen Fisher has faithfully followed a vision: to create simple, timeless clothes for women that make it easy to get dressed. Soft-spoken, polite, and a self-described introvert, the 70-year-old Fisher is the unlikely CEO of an approximately $500 million fashion company that bears her name. The operation is owned by 42 percent of its largely female staff, and is praised for its longtime environmentalism and progressive business model. Headquartered in Irvington, New York, the brand embodies Fisher’s view of what a contemporary clothing business should be, and acts as her way of giving back to the world.
Though Fisher prioritized natural materials in her designs from the beginning, she didn’t fully understand how making clothes affects the planet until a 2012 trip to China, where she visited the company’s factories and saw the severity of the water crisis firsthand. Upon returning home, she created an internal “Sustainable Design Team,” composed of representatives from key departments, including supply-chain management and production, with the goal of minimizing their work’s environmental impact.
Today, the brand uses organic cotton and linen almost exclusively, and between 2015 and 2018, it offset all of its carbon emissions when transporting garments between its factories and distribution center. Seventy-nine percent of its wool is responsibly sourced or recycled. The company’s initiative that buys and sells vintage Eileen Fisher pieces, called Renew, has collected more than a million and a half garments, and Waste No More, an in-house studio that uses a felting machine to transform leftover fabric into home decor, accessories, and art, nods toward Fisher’s goal of creating a circular production system. She’s constantly looking for ways to reduce the brand’s environmental footprint. “The whole industry has a very long way to go,” Fisher says of fashion’s contribution to global economic and climate crises. But solving the problem, she adds, is a “huge opportunity.”
On this episode, Fisher describes her efforts to build a clothing business that serves women and the environment, talking with Andrew about collaboration as a preferred modus operandi, solving the fashion industry’s pollution problem, and the remarkable effects of staying true to one’s vision, and to oneself.