Interview with Feminist Bosses

The encounter

Last September, we had the chance to meet the super cool Feminist Bosses team. You know them ? These are young women who created their own media with the aim of highlighting women who have created their businesses alone (or almost)!

So you understand, Feminist Bosses is THE French media promoting female entrepreneurship. It is because we share the same values ​​as Shauna and Camille, the co-founders of the media, that we invited them to our private Showroom which took place during the months of June and July 2020. It was a pleasure to have them to introduce our brand as a whole, as much to present our innovative materials, our designer pieces as to tell them all the storytelling of LO NEEL. Following this meeting, they offered us a partnership and interviewed Loane, the co-founder of LO NEEL!

You can read this interview just below. It may allow you to discover aspects of LO NEEL that you didn't know about!

Presentation of Loane, co-founder of LO NEEL

My name is Loane Cognard, I am 21 years old and I am the co-founder of LO NEEL. I am currently at IESEG, a business and management school in Paris.

I created this brand in 2019 with my mother Frédérique Muller. The official launch of our brand took place on June 12, 2019, so LO NEEL is just one year old.

Presentation of the brand and the team

LO NEEL is a brand of sustainable, eco-responsible vegan clothing, which is part of the slowfashion movement. With my mother, we wanted to make a real eco-responsible alternative to “standard” fashion by offering our customers a complete wardrobe. Thus, our first collection is made up of varied pieces (trousers, dresses, shirts, jackets, accessories) that can be easily worn in everyday life.

We also wanted to offer a concrete alternative to the fabrics that are most frequently consumed in mass retail, such as cotton, cashmere, leather or even silk. To do this, we carried out real research work on materials, which allowed us to present today a plurality of innovative and 100% eco-responsible fibers such as pineapple fiber, soy fiber, recycled polyester or even forest-certified viscose.

We work mainly with young people, particularly women. Throughout the year, there are only 3 of us who work daily for the brand: my mother, who continues her creative work for the next collections, me who takes care of the business side and Marie who helps me manage communication.

For large projects such as shootings, short films, pop up stores, fashion weeks or fashion shows, we expand the team temporarily. We have muse models, Flore, Kalki and Matilda, emblematic faces of LO NEEL who come back from time to time to help us. We want to diversify the choice of models and be as representative of all female bodies as possible. It seems important to us not to contribute to the biased representations of “perfect beauty” often used by brands. Through our clothing, we want to highlight the diversity of bodies, curves and skin colors.

Why become an entrepreneur?

I have always had a lot of ambition and the desire to manage several projects at the same time. I asked myself questions about a lot of issues when I entered higher education, particularly about my future and who I was going to become as a working adult, and what I could bring to the world. The issue that concerned me the most was the environment and more particularly the pollution created by the fashion industry. My mother has worked in the fashion industry for around thirty years as a designer, so I was lucky enough to immerse myself in this environment from a very young age. Through it, I have had a lot of more or less significant experiences, from a pejorative point of view. We said to ourselves that it was necessary and imperative to have access to responsible fashion in order to preserve our Mother Earth and welcome future generations to a better world.

I had the ambition to participate in this ecological transition, this ecological revolution, and I told myself that I was not going to wait for someone else to do it for me. It's always easy to criticize, but we have to propose solutions to move forward. Being lucky enough to have a background in fashion and a designer mother, I had the idea of ​​creating LO NEEL with her, in order to offer a 100% vegan and eco-responsible alternative to the general public. The idea is to prove that change is possible and that it is only a matter of will.

How long did it take you to get started?

It took me a year to put the project together. I conceptualized the project in August 2018 by creating a mood board which was followed by a lot of reflection and questioning. I did brain storming with my mother to determine what was most appropriate, on the creation of a universe, the strategies to put in place, on how to make yourself known, how to develop the style and image of the brand etc.

Once the concept was established, my mother took care of finding factories to collaborate with, creating parts, drawings, researching innovative materials (this was the most complex because there was no many offers), commercial, financial management and accounting.

I took care of relations with showrooms, commercial relations, press relations, the search for new partners and events, and everything related to communication: brand image, organization of shootings and short films, creations. visual and obviously community management.

We advise you to buy durable clothing of certified quality. To make the right purchasing choice, pay attention to the labels that the brands you like have obtained or not. The labels make it possible to certify the transparency of the production of brands. There are labels to certify animal protection (PETA). There are also labels to certify the protection of forests and the absence of chemicals (FSC, GOTS, OEKO-TEX). It is the presence of these labels that allows complete transparency. Thanks to them you will know who made your clothes, how and under what conditions they were made.

We also advise you to move away from fastfashion practices which encourage overconsumption by producing hundreds of collections per year. You don't need that many clothes. Sort through your wardrobe and ask yourself which pieces are really essential to you. Make the effort to look at the labels and components of the parts you are about to purchase. Refocus and ask yourself what is most important today in our society. With each purchase you make, ask yourself what impact it will have, or could have had, on our planet. Get into the habit of reselling or donating clothes that you no longer wear to give them a second life. Get in the habit of buying clothes from ethical, eco-responsible and 100% transparent brands. Also get into the habit of buying second-hand pieces! Keep in mind that buying and consuming means acting for good or bad for the planet.

Finally, in your daily life, remember to constantly sort your waste and reduce its production. Install a compost at home to reduce organic waste. There are several types of composts, vermicomposts, natural composts in a garden or large departmental compost bins. Remember that the things we buy don't just have one life.

Why a green brand?

Adopting an eco-responsible lifestyle is the only option to continue living on this Earth. It's simple, if no one adopts a more ethical and responsible way of life, it will be the end of human life on Earth. The fashion industry is the second most polluting sector, it seemed essential to me to create a green brand. Fashion destroys both the planet and lives: human and animal. You have to be aware of all this when you buy fast-fashion clothes, from Zara, H&M etc.

Tell us all about your production?

We work in collaboration with Indian artisans who have unique know-how in embroidery. All the embroideries that we offer through our pieces are made with the hand-machine technique. We personally know the man who manages the factory and are thus assured of the quality of the working conditions of our employees: their salary is higher than Indian standards, we have set up a canteen and bus system for the accompany them to their workplace.

Due to the fact that production is in India, we wanted to reduce as much as possible the carbon footprint generated by our production, which is why each material we use is produced less than 50km from the assembly plant for our parts, which is located in Delhi. Only pineapple fiber is not produced in India.

We have obtained numerous certifications ensuring the transparency and ethics of the materials we use and our method of production. The PETA label certifies that no tests are carried out on animals and that no animals have been killed to create a material. We have also obtained the Organic Cotton label and BCI, Best Cotton Initiative, the Forest Certified Viscose label, which certifies that the wood from which the material was produced was already dead before it was harvested. For more information, visit our website 😉

Is a transition towards sustainability for brands (h&m) possible for all in your opinion, or is it easier to go green from the start?

We would have to rethink the very principle of this type of store: for example, we operate in capsule form: very small collections with a reduced number of offerings. Brands like H&M practice fastfashion and produce dozens or even hundreds of collections per year. It's not at all the same state of mind as slow fashion: consuming less but better, and thinking about all the players behind the clothing chain: how many participated in its design, etc.

For me, these kinds of brands are greenwashing. For example, they design an organic cotton t-shirt and erect it as a green standard. H&M remains one of the biggest polluters in the world. Obviously, it will always be beneficial if they begin a transition, but we must once again completely rethink the concept and stop doing business on the backs of human lives and on the backs of our Mother Earth.

What steps did you follow to declare yourself?

I did the classic administrative procedures, that is to say filling out papers while choosing what type of business I wanted to set up. So at the beginning we were an individual company and recently we became an SAS, which means that people can buy shares in the company. If you want to create your company, go on the internet, type “I want to start my company” and everything is indicated, it’s quite practical!

How to launch a green brand? ...

Like all brands, you have to be determined and convey a strong message. It's important to be well surrounded and to have people who believe in you every day. You also have to have a strong mind and believe in the project completely otherwise it is very difficult to continue. A brand generally takes 3 years before being profitable so the beginnings are often very difficult, especially on a psychological level. It is perhaps more difficult for a green brand given that we use alternative fibers, little known, of better quality, more expensive and therefore less accessible.

A mistake that you made and that you advise against to our readers?

Investing in ghost events: it's not a myth. My advice is to really check the address and other participants for example beforehand. We had done it but obviously not enough and it is very easy to be fooled.

A little word for our readers?

Join us, enter the LO NEEL community because we dress the world of tomorrow. Change the world with us, carry our voice and our commitments.

Act for change. Act with style. Be LO NEEL.

We hope you learned more about LO NEEL from this interview! If you want to discover other female entrepreneurs, do not hesitate to consult the Feminist Bosses website. Here is the link: https://feministbosses.com/