How One Brand Is Defying the Slow Fashion Slowdown

The last couple years haven’t been kind to slow fashion.

Brand after brand that prioritised fair pay, sustainably sourced fabrics and manufacturing in small quantities to eliminate waste has succumbed to a combination of rising costs and consumer indifference. Among the casualties in the last year alone: Ilana Kohn, Wray NYC, Alder Apparel, Ana + Zac and Esby Apparel.

Things may get worse before they get better. In surveys, fewer consumers list sustainability as a top priority when shopping. Tariffs may raise production costs and retail prices.

But for Eliza Faulkner, a slow fashion label based in Montreal, business has never been better. The designer’s ethereal, floaty frocks, sewn locally in small quantities from primarily natural fibres, can be found at Free People and on Rent the Runway, as well as their own store in Montreal’s trendy Mile End neighbourhood. Sales are projected to top $1.2 million this year, a nearly sevenfold increase since 2020, and the brand expects to turn a small profit.

What‘s her secret?

More than anything, Faulkner lets her clothes speak for themselves. Since founding her brand in 2012, she’s relied less and less on flaunting her sustainability credentials to win customers, cultivating a dedicated following who obsess over her deceptively delicate designs.

“Her clothes make you feel like the coolest girl on the street,” said Emma Kent, an Ottawa-based YouTube cycling creator and self-professed Eliza Faulkner superfan. “Her pieces have these elements that spark joy and playfulness but they also feel somehow practical.”

Faulkner and her longtime partner and chief executive Arin Gintowt have also taken a slow approach to growing their business, especially as the brand started to gain traction during the sustainability craze of the late 2010s and early 2020s. They even scaled back production at one point to avoid being overstretched financially if the market turned.

Now, though, Faulkner and Gintowt are ready to seize the moment. They’ll release a capsule collection in June with Simons, a Quebec department store chain. They are also planning the brand’s second store, in Toronto. After avoiding taking on outside investors — “we’ve been funded by adrenaline for the past seven years,” said Gintowt — they’re now looking for outside funding.

The brand has come a long way since its founding in 2012, on a ping-pong table in Faulkner’s father’s Vancouver Island living room, with her mother co-signing a $15,000 line of credit.

“You’ve got to do really, really incremental steps,” Gintowt said. “We’re essentially fighting for people’s dollars, so what you have to do as a tiny brand is produce as much as you can, then bust your ass to sell it all.”

Humble Beginnings

Faulkner, a Central Saint Martins graduate, said from the start, she wanted to design sustainable clothing that didn’t look sustainable.

“Everything was very greige,” she said of the eco-friendly togs available at the time.

Early on she began to hone her now signature aesthetic of dreamy, decadent dresses with feminine flourishes such as puffed sleeves and Peter Pan collars.

Faulkner’s designs may be frilly, but they’re distinctly unfussy. The Eliza Faulkner woman has an unconventional sense of style but also needs to feel comfortable.

“I can’t create or even think when something is too tight. I’m running around with kids, picking them up, walking everywhere,” she said. “I’m definitely my customer.”

In 2015, she moved to Montreal to be with Gintowt, and began renting a shared studio for $150 a month with three other creatives. The city’s low rents have long attracted indie filmmakers, DJs and other creatives. (It helped, too, that Quebec’s government offers grants to fashion designers, the only state programme of its kind in Canada.)

The business was a one-woman operation until 2018, when Eliza had her first child, and Gintowt took advantage of a six-month paid paternity leave from his job as an apprentice chef to begin working for the brand full-time.

“He would bring the baby to the studio, and I would make things, breastfeed and sew,” Faulkner said.

Gintowt enrolled in the economics program at Concordia University and lived off student loans so he could continue hustling for the brand. He dropped out after several semesters, but kept reading finance books and absorbing lessons from podcasts about successful start-ups. Access to the province’s affordable $8-per-day childcare helped as their son grew older.

“There’s no way I could be doing this if I was paying $2,000 a month for childcare,” Faulkner said.

Building the Business

In 2019, the brand cut prices by 20 to 30 percent across the board, hoping to attract more customers. It worked: Sales doubled that year, to $60,000.

At the time, Faulkner was pregnant and still sewing every order herself.

“[Gintowt] said, ‘If we want to grow this brand we need to make 100 of these dresses,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, are you serious?’” she said.

Watching his wife work to the point of exhaustion to fulfil orders, Gintowt said he realised their brand was violating one of the tenets of the “triple bottom line” of sustainable businesses. They were doing good by the planet, and on their way to profitability. But they weren’t respecting the people — or person, in their case — behind the clothes. It was around that time they began working with their first outside employees, including a freelance sewist.

Around the start of the pandemic, the brand’s popularity took off. Suddenly, the internet was gripped by the pastoral “cottagecore” fantasy and Faulkner’s flouncy, frilly milkmaid dresses helped translate that vision from TikTok to real life.

Between cottagecore and the still-hot sustainable fashion movement, sales tripled to $180,000 in 2020, allowing the couple to start paying themselves a salary of $18 an hour. Then sales nearly tripled again to $450,000 in 2021, and hit $630,000 in 2022.

Currently, the brand employs a number of small owner-operated factories in Montreal to produce their stock. Even as their production grows, they aim to use 100 percent of their fabric waste — initially making napkins and scrunchies from off cuts. Now they’re looking into creating paper from the smaller scraps.

And while the fabric they use is, as Gintowt says, “as sustainable as it can be,” unhappy with the transparency and traceability of the current fabric supply chain, Gintowt started a company, Canflax, that is attempting to rebuild the linen industry in Quebec to create the first “farm-to-closet” collection in North America.

“We were in the right place at the right time,” said Gintowt. “We didn’t have to reinvent anything. We were sustainable, local, ethical at a time when that‘s what people wanted to support.”

Beyond Basics

It‘s at this point that many emerging brands grab for the brass ring: They bring in outside investors, sign nationwide wholesale contracts and place big production orders to fulfil them.

Faulkner and Gintowt did the opposite.

With interest rates starting to rise, Gintowt was wary of ramping up production to turbocharge growth. In 2023, Eliza Faulkner actually reduced output to 5,500 units, from 6,000 the previous year.

“I think a lot of our competitors were overly optimistic,” Gintowt said. “They thought if we made these quantities last year, we can do that again.”

Many brands that took that route have since shut down, as consumer demand for sustainably made clothes has waned.

Regine Paquette and Katie Frappier, proprietors of the slow fashion-focussed Victoire Boutique in Ottawa, said they’ve seen plenty of small brands come and go. But Eliza Faulkner regularly tops the list of the store’s top selling designers month over month, year over year.

They chalk up the label’s staying power to designs that appeal to a wide swath of customers: Mesh crop tops are a hit with the twenty-somethings and the dramatic, voluminous dresses appeal to older customers.

“Customers like the quality, they like how [the clothes] make them feel, so they come back,” Frappier said.

Erica Kim, a historian who runs the popular slow fashion Instagram account @ahistoryofarchitecture, said Faulkner’s feminine designs stand out by offering an alternative to the “high-quality basics” branding that has come to define the slow fashion category.

“There’s always little hidden details only you would notice that make the garments extra special,” she said. “I have a Stewart plaid skirt with contrasting piping on the inside seams. You see that little bit of cheerful fabric and just know it‘s a well-made garment.”

Scaling Sustainably

Sales have kept growing — the brand did nearly as much business in the final three months of last year as they had in all of 2021. The Trump administration’s 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods threw a wrench into expansion plans, as Gintowt said they’re now looking outside the US for both suppliers and customers.

Now that revenue has surpassed $1 million annually, Gintowt and Faulkner are thinking about the next phase. They are able to pay themselves a base salary of 60,000 Canadian dollars a year — far from millionaires but no longer starving artists, either.

Gintowt said he hopes the brand can soon own its own studio and store space. He’s also looking for an investor to assist in production or distribution — slowly and deliberately, of course.

“I’d say we’re quietly fishing for the perfect fit,” Gintowt said. “Eliza Faulkner is not an investment vehicle, some brand to be bought and sold. We’re never going to be just focussing on the next round. We’re a serious artisanal business focussed on creating art and quality products, with real meaning and real values.”

Faulkner, as ever, remains laser focussed on her first love: design. She dreams of expanding the purview of the label, putting her own spin on handbags, shoes and lingerie.

“Creatively, I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface,” she said.