Week 1

Hello everyone! This week I officially started working on my senior project. At the beginning of the week, my on-site advisor, Kelly, asked me to pick out 6 reels from accounts that were similar to Rue Saint Paul’s and what I thought did well and why they did well. In addition, I also brainstormed 6 different ideas to start this week. On Wednesday I met with Kelly at Rue Saint Paul to start my social media internship. She started by introducing me to her brand and explained the philosophy behind Rue Saint Paul. They have 10 main values: transparent supply chain, responsible use of resources, zero waste, ethical employment, longer lifetimes, sustainable materials, natural and organic ingredients, combat climate change, animal cruelty free, philanthropy. She explained how she always encourages consumers to first look to their own closet and see if they can find what they need there, if not the next step would be to try to thrift what you need, and the last resource would be to buy new and if you have to buy new, it should be from a brand that uses ethical practices. Her company promotes that lifestyle by providing rental and pre-loved options to minimize the amount of clothing circulating in and out of people’s closets. Her company makes sure the brands they sell align with the core values of the store.

This week at Rue Saint Paul I started recording two videos. One was an unboxing of new pre-loved items that they just received and the other was a day in the life video showing some of the behind the scenes of the store and tasks that Kelly and the assistant manager do around the store. It was definitely more difficult than I expected as it takes a lot of time to edit the video, add audio and captions, and lighting can get tricky especially when it’s gloomy outside. Something that was more difficult than anticipated was finding audios because it’s a business account and they cannot use audios that could be copyrighted. Audios play a large role in getting engagement on posts, so this week I want to spend more time researching how to overcome that barrier. Additionally, I will spend time researching ways to get more engagement from viewers whether it is using certain hashtags, or being active before/after posting. 

Outside of my placement I read two of my course texts; “ What is Sustainable Fashion?” from the Journal of Fashion and Marketing,  and “Fashion and the Circular Economy-deep dive” from the Ellen McArthur Foundation. I gained better insight as to how to define sustainable fashion and I learned about how everyone has a different definition of sustainability. The reason why it is so hard for fashion to be sustainable is because fashion is referring to things going in and out of style which does not correlate with sustainable practices. It would take a lot of effort for the industry as a whole to shift towards slow fashion because business models would have to change, so it is important to bring attention to small businesses such as Rue Saint Paul that are promoting sustainable consumption in their local communities. 

In the upcoming weeks, I look forward to brainstorming more video ideas for Rue Saint Paul’s instagram, and plan, record, and edit those videos with the guidance of my on-site advisor. In this upcoming week I will also start planning my survey for understanding how people in New York shop for their clothing so I can gather my own data on sustainable clothing consumption in New York.