Ngozi Okaro, Executive Director of New York-based non-profit Custom Collaborative, is an advocate for environmental and social justice in the fashion industry. Through her work with Custom Collaborative – an organization that trains, mentors, and advocates for and with no/low-income and immigrant women working in fashion – Okaro and her team work to bridge the gap between fair wages for fashion-industry workers, quality clothes for consumers, and the environment.
This NYFW, Okaro was spotlighted in a billboard campaign as an honoree for the inaugural Conscious Fashion Campaign. An initiative of the Fashion Impact Fund in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Partnerships and the PVBLIC Foundation, the campaign spotlights 10 women entrepreneurs in the fashion industry, showcasing their work in billboards and digital campaigns to drive social and environmental impact.
We caught up with Okaro to learn more about what’s up next for her and Custom Collaborative.
Congratulations on being a Conscious Fashion Campaign honoree! What does the campaign mean to you and your work?
The campaign is a huge amplifier of our work. Not only did people see Custom Collaborative affiliated with other women-led organizations, but the campaign also connected our local work within the broader context of the SDGs. Ultimately, if more people, companies, and funds join us as a result of the campaign – I think that they will – then we can support more women in their career aspirations. I am so grateful that the Conscious Fashion Campaign, in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Partnerships and PVBLIC Foundation invested in women.
What led you to found Custom Collaborative?
I worked with a dressmaker, Mariama, who operated out of her home. She made amazing original clothes that fit my body well, but was charging prices that I thought were too low for her to make the type of profit that she deserved based on her skills and experience.
My dear friend challenged me to make my idea come to life. I don’t know if she intended her statement as a challenge at the time, but I thought that if I had an idea of how to increase individual incomes of immigrant and other women facing barriers to employment, then I had to try.
I hear there are plans for a 2022 installment of the Custom Collaborative Apprenticeship Program with Mara Hoffman. Can you tell us more about the program?
Yes! Thanks to Slow Factory, Swarovski, and the UN Office for Partnerships, we designed a technical design apprenticeship program in early 2020. Our three apprentices learned virtually from Diondra Julian, who was then Manager of Technical Design & Patternmaking at Mara Hoffman.
Because the pilot was so successful, we decided to test a full program. We were fortunate to receive a grant from Fondation CHANEL that provided start-up capital to launch the program. This spring, we’ll place women in a nine-month apprenticeship with local fashion businesses – this is really a dream come true.
BIPOC communities have been practicing and leading the sustainability movement for generations, before sustainability was a term widely used. Part of your work is introducing the word “sustainability” to the Black and brown women in the Custom Collaborative programs. Can you speak more about this?
At Custom Collaborative, we introduce the word and teach sustainability concepts. We want our participants to know the important topics in the industry, and understand how they can contribute. Also, by explaining the concepts, they can understand that some of the things that we’re “discovering” in the U.S., are things that their communities and cultures already do. One woman said to me, “These are the things that we do in Angola, but we just don’t call it that word, sustainable”.
Many peoples’ orientation is already toward stewarding resources; they just need an invitation into the conversation. In fact, I think that the conversation should center Black and brown people, because they suffer the most harm from situations where sustainability (environmental + human rights) is ignored.
Can you speak more about your work with Higg?
We’re co-creating a corporate sustainability fellowship program, which will be a direct path to bring more Black and brown people into sustainability roles. Custom Collaborative will help companies ready themselves for new perspectives and people, and Higg will support fellows by teaching them lessons that Higg shares with current sustainability professionals: to design more sustainable products, to use environmentally preferred materials, to manage sustainability across a supply chain, and to manage sustainability at a company level.
What is your vision for the future of Custom Collaborative?
My overall vision for Custom Collaborative is that we can continue to innovate and educate individuals and organizations about how to create an inclusive and equitable fashion industry.
