Bruno Pieters
Former Designer, Honest By.
The Belgian designer was formerly art director at Hugo by Hugo Boss before launching a label based on total business transparency.
Bruno Pieters made the conscious decision to completely reorient his label, Honest by, around a new model that put transparency and traceability at the very core of his ethically-sourced, organic luxury fashion brand.
Pieters told BoF, “If you don’t do it now, you’ll have to adapt when complete transparency becomes mandatory. I think it’s wiser to be a leader who’s ahead of the rest rather than being behind because, you know, it will become mandatory one day. People who have doubts about this are the same sort of people who once believed women wouldn’t have the right to vote and gay people wouldn’t have to right to marry. Buying a mystery will be an absurd concept soon. There’s no luxury in a riddle.”
Pieters' customers could trace the manufacturer and composition of the garment, fabrics and lining as well as that of the zippers, buttons, thread and even the safety pin holding the hang tag to the item’s care label. Whenever he could persuade textile suppliers to reveal details about origins and sources, he would create a painstaking "pedigree" that traces the fabric through the supply chain of raw materials, yarn spinners, weavers, printers and dyers. Pieters would also publish an itemised breakdown of the garment’s cost, including his wholesale and retail mark-up percentages, a radical business model that he hopes will catch on.
The brand closed down in January 2019, seven years after it launched. Before founding Honest by in 2012, Pieters was art director of Hugo by Hugo Boss .
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