Having grown up with a bird’s eye view on an era of fast fashion, Veronica Chou is on a mission to promote sustainability for all
Veronica Chou needed a break. It was 2014. She was fast approaching her 30s and had already achieved enormous success in fashion, the same industry conquered by her father, Silas Chou, and his father before him. Since founding her company in 2008, she had brought at least a dozen mainstream brands, like Ed Hardy, London Fog and Candie’s, to China during the blossoming of the nation’s middle class that drove enormous demand for western brands across the country.
“We opened up 1,000 stores, not so much in Beijing and Shanghai, but in the second-, third- and fourth-tier cities,” Chou says, recalling a breakneck pace of working that, in her family, seems to be hereditary. “But the experience there really was eye-opening: every time I stepped out of the plane and walked into a sand cloud. For anyone who’s lived in Asia, we remember everyone was talking about the air pollution back then. After a long day of work, I’d go home and wash my face and hands and they were all black.”
Chou decided to go on a seven-day trek in Nepal to clear her mind, and her lungs. She meditated and spent her days practising yoga, and one night she woke up and experienced a moment when she knew that whatever she did next would revolve around sustainability. In March 2015, she sold her stake in the company, Iconix China, to its American joint venture partner for US$56 million.
“I had this epiphany that whatever I do has to have a bit more of a purpose,” she says.
See also: Veronica Chou Launches Sustainable Fashion Brand Everybody & Everyone
Family Influence
Until then, Chou had largely followed in the footsteps of her father, the Hong Kong tycoon whose investments in the American sportswear labels Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors transformed what was already a substantial manufacturing business into a global powerhouse of fashion. His influence was so prominent that Chou was named honorary chairman of the 2015 Met Gala, celebrating the exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, and his portfolio grew to include stakes in numerous brands like Karl Lagerfeld and Pepe Jeans.
Now 36, Veronica, having worked in various roles at her father’s companies since she was a teenager, has witnessed the transformation not only of the family business, but also of an industry. She recalls the impact of having visited her grandfather’s knitting and denim factories as a child, asking why they were so smelly and dusty, and what happened to the runoff of vibrant coloured waters from the dyes. Today, she sees a future that is very different, and instead of promoting the sort of fast fashion and mass consumerism that made her family very rich, she wants people to approach shopping more responsibly.
A little over a year ago, Chou launched her own brand of clothing, called Everybody & Everyone, that’s both eco-friendly and size inclusive, the latter important to her because she also recalls facing her own body image issues growing up at a time when most designers prized “models who were literally size zero, and mostly blonde”. While sustainability and diversity have since become critical elements of any socially responsible brand, Chou’s new-guard business model seems especially prescient of shifting attitudes towards clothing in general since the outset of the pandemic, and also among young people, who are far more critical of brands that behave in ways they see as unethical.
See also: Potato Head Founder Ronald Akili Launches Sustainable Clothing Line