Reformation's Yael Aflalo Says "The Future Of Fashion Is Fast"

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As department stores continue to crumble, Reformation founder and CEO Yael Aflalo has some valuable advice: “The future of fashion is fast.” Of course, the 39-year-old entrepreneur follows this mantra first hand as she ships 52 deliveries a year of her insouciant printed dresses and cut-to-there bodysuits that are nearly always sold out and are worn by the likes of Sienna Miller and Emily Ratajkowski. “A typical fashion brand ships four times a year, there’s just no benefit to designing clothes 18 months in advance,” she says. “You only get to learn [about your customer] four times a year then, that’s not much learning.”

Aside from being educated by her woman (and subsequently giving her what she actually wants), Aflalo credits the immediacy of our culture — the rise of Instagram and Snapchat and same-day Amazon Prime deliveries — for our insatiable desire for new, new, new. “Everything is fast now,” she continues. “Nobody wants to wait for something. I order my thing, I can get it within an hour, that’s how it is.”

Sustainability Is Cool

Aflalo prides Reformation on its sustainable initiatives as much as being “customer obsessed.” Following Elon Musk’s First Principal Thinking, she says, “Fast-fashion does not mean that it’s worse for the environment. The only examples that we have of fast-fashion are cheap companies that make clothing out of very bad materials, so we equate fast-fashion with bad for the environment or low quality, that people buy more of them and throw them away, creating this disposable culture.”

For that reason, Reformation’s pieces are not throw away clothes. Since launching in 2009, Aflalo has sourced covetable sustainable, vintage, and deadstock fabrics for her collections, and designed, manufactured, packed, and shipped her offerings from her Los Angeles-based headquarters, and her awareness for the environment has only increased, e.g., since this past Earth Day, she even started introducing tours of her new downtown LA factory so customers can actually see where the magic happens. She credits her ingenious RefScale, an internal tool meant to calculate waste footprints, on what keeps her team continuously accountable — last quarter the brand made clothes that created 53% less waste and used 77% less water than her competitors.