A Mission to Inspire
While most clothing brands are driven by profit, Shiny By Nature is driven by a mission to inspire. Rather than maximizing our profit, we set out as a company to make a difference in the world by creating fun, colorful, size-inclusive, and high-quality clothing items at relatively affordable prices.
Today’s fashion culture is less than perfect in numerous ways. Just a few decades ago, buying a piece of clothing used to be a serious decision. Oftentimes, people would go to the tailor and get their measurements carefully taken, before a new piece of clothing was made.
Fashion was much less affordable. Most people only owned a small collection of clothes throughout their lives. But those few pieces were often dearly treasured, and what you wear could often become part of your identity.
As a result, fashion was slow. Fashion trends were identified in terms of decades, not seasons or months. And because the clothing items were made with such care and attention to details, fashion, in a sense, was quite timeless.
Over the past few decades, the rapid rise of the fast fashion industry has fostered a completely different kind of fashion culture, and drastically shifted society's perception of what fashion should be.
On one hand, new innovations in production techniques, as well as society's increasing urge to keep up with the newest trends, have enabled a lot of never-before-seen designs. On the other hand, the affordability and lower quality of fast fashion have turned clothing items into something replaceable and disposable.
Aside from the negative environmental impacts of fast fashion, there may be an even greater loss, which is the intimate and meaningful relationship between what we wear and who we are. When virtually every piece of clothing in our closets is replaceable and disposable, we no longer put much meaning into what we wear. The clothing items that we own are no longer friends, but merely strangers. In return, they are no longer capable of telling our stories.
When this kind of disconnection spreads to all aspects of our lives, our culture becomes utterly empty. When the whole emphasis of society is on what we own, instead of the meaning we put into what we own, we are utterly lost, no matter how "prosperous" we seem to be.
There's an urgent need to turn things around, which is why we started Shiny By Nature. We don't want to just sit on the sideline and complain about the problems we see. We want to bring forward a solution and turn our ideas into reality.
The only way to defeat fast fashion is to create truly amazing clothing items of the highest possible quality at relatively affordable prices. We cannot compete with fast fashion on prices, but we can strive to offer the most value for the price that customers pay.
We are far from perfect, but we are committed to our mission. We want each of our customers to be a witness of our progress.
We will not quit until we succeed.
- Alex & Tianshi, Co-founders of Shiny By Nature