202030 Podcast

Welcome to the third season of the 202030 Podcast! This season premiere dives deeper into one topic from last July’s program at 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit: Denim Pop-up. The Green Deal on Circular Denim, also known as the “Dutch Denim Deal,” is a 50+ stakeholder-driven project to align on implementing sustainable, traceable denim for the Dutch market. The aim of the Denim Deal is to bring 3 million denim jeans to the Dutch market with 20% post consumer textiles. The project, planned to run from 2020 to 2023, is wrapping up and taking stock of its learnings and data, and we ask, what’s next?

We invited two experts who were a part of the Denim Deal’s initiation for a live interview, to walk us through the project’s dynamic journey. Roosmarie Ruigrok, who spoke on the panel “From Dirty Denim to Sustainability Leadership”, is the coordinator of the Denim Deal, and brings her wealth of industry experience to the conversation. She is joined by Arnoud Passenier, who is one of the initiators of the Denim Deal. Arnoud currently works in the Department Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management, and has been a long-time changemaker for sustainable development in the political sector.

In conversation with Magdalena Schaffrin, our two guests walk us through all you need to know about the Denim Deal, its context, and what it means for the future of denim in Europe.

Learn more about the Denim Deal here: https://smartfibersorting.com/denim-deal/

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

We just finished an exciting mid-season edition of 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit! On July 11, The Denim Pop-up and Community Gathering brought together our international sustainable fashion community at the Premium and SEEK trade shows, for new connections, knowledge sharing, and eye-level conversations. This episode, we’re live on the ground as we recap the day's highlights with our hosts, Max and Magdalena.

"Denim is known in the industry as an environmentally damaging material, which is treated with a lot of chemicals and has a huge water consumption. Precisely because these problems exist, affecting not only the environment but also the people who work in the value chain, the denim industry has developed cleaner solutions and brought them to market, which can now act as a good example to the entire fashion industry. We were especially happy about the exciting inputs from different perspectives and discussions on stage and especially about the lively questions from the audience."

In addition, we hear voices from the Community Gathering, starting with 202030 Summit speakers Tony Tonnaer, Roosmarie Ruigrok, Tanvir Kabir, and studio MM04’s Lavinia Muth, as well as impressions from our guests.

Our team wishes our listeners a fun summer break. We can’t wait to return in the fall to bring you more exclusive live interviews with sustainable fashion changemakers, as well as content from the Denim Pop-up program.

The Community Gathering was generously provided with beverages by

Learn more about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit: Denim Pop-up on our website: https://202030summit.com/, where you can subscribe to our newsletter

Work with studio MM04, producers of this podcast: https://studiomm04.com/

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

Driving the global trend of circular economy and sustainable practices is a wealth of talented consultants and strategists. These changemakers are the ones who are not always in the limelight, but who work with widely known brands to evolve towards future-proof systems change. Pentatonic is one such consultancy, based between Germany and the United Kingdom. Johann Bödecker, the co-founder and CEO, and product director Lauren Greenwood join Magdalena Schaffrin live in the studio to talk about their experiences in transforming fashion and product design.

Some of Pentatonic’s most noteworthy projects in implementing circular strategies includes Melt Down, a project with Burger King to turn non-recyclable plastic toys into cafeteria trays, and the Hey Fashion! campaign with the Eileen Fisher Foundations, aimed at raising awareness about the environmental impact of fashion on a large scale, in terms that everyone can understand. With an ‘intervention mindset,’ Pentatonic seeks different angles from which to put circularity into play; while their slogan is “making circularity easy for the world's leading brands,” their approach looks at multi-pronged solutions for complex problems. Johann, Lauren, and the rest of the Pentatonic team are leaders in making circularity a reality – both from the product and the communications perspective – especially in the context of the ever-evolving EU sustainability regulations.

To learn more about Pentatonic’s projects, visit https://pentatonic.com/

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

What does it really mean when a garment is marketed as sustainable? Green is the buzz-color in fashion, but until now, brands have been left to their own devices in how to communicate the impact of their products. Starting with the EU’s Green New Deal, a wave of sustainability legislation is passing, touching on everything from circularity, to product passports, to due diligence, and – our focus for this episode – green claims. Now is the time to get up to speed as we enter a new era of laws that govern how we can or cannot market sustainability.

In this episode, Magdalena Schaffrin invites long term collaborator Lavinia Muth to the studio, to break down this complex new legal framework into bite-size pieces. They discuss not only the current status of legal requirements, but how fashion industry stakeholders can work within them to amplify their positive social and environmental impact. Lavinia is a business economist, specializing in fashion and sustainability, with years of diverse experience in the industry. On behalf of studio MM04, she co-hosted the workshop “How to avoid greenwashing – now, and in the future” at the January 2023 edition of 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit with Ingo Strube of the BMUV.

Join Lavinia once more on July 12, 2023 at Premium and SEEK, where she will host the next iteration of the studio MM04 workshop on the Green Claims Directive. Register for the workshop, as well as for 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit: Denim Pop-up and Community Gathering at https://202030summit.com/tickets.

Learn more about Lavinia Muth’s work: https://www.laviniamuth.com/

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

It’s time to talk about materials: From new fibers to digitized production processes, the intersections of innovation, sustainability, and design are evolving at breakneck speed. Current technology and chemistry are opening new doors for how we produce textiles to meet market needs while reducing impact. But where exactly are we on the journey to implementation? The opportunities are astonishingly bright – can they outshine the barriers to scaling transformative materials? This episode, we share two inspiring material initiatives, giving both the supplier and the research perspective. Revisiting the stage of 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit Edition #5, we hear from Essi Glomb of The Textile Prototyping Lab (TPL) and Matthias Fuchs of OceanSafe.

In Season 1, we heard from OceanSafe at our Edition #4 of the 202030 Summit. Now, Matthias walks us through the material innovators’ exciting latest developments and products, taking a focus on the need for biodegradable polyester. Their research and design of Cradle To Cradle-certified synthetic materials offers a positive alternative to one of the least sustainable materials on the market. And through their model of licensing our their technology to production facilities, OceanSafe had huge potential for scalability.

Next, In a live interview, our host Max Gilgenmann meets with the co-founders of the Textile Prototyping Lab, Essi Glomb and Karina Wirth. After hearing Essi’s presentation from the 202030 Summit, we take a deeper dive on the vision and work of TPL. This Berlin-Based materials lab is a unique initiative, whose model holds key lessons for how cutting edge innovation can be brought to life in practical applications. Essi and Karina noted the problem that designers are traditionally siloed from material researchers; but, by bringing design and science into a collaborative setting, new solutions and applications are born. This bridge-building is at the heart of TPL’s work, where the exchange of expertise happens on site with sample production and experimentation facilities. They point to ‘open innovation’ as the boldest – and most impactful – framework for progress.

To learn more about OceanSafe, visit: https://www.oceansafe.co/home

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

In recent years, the market for virtual fashion has boomed, raising debates about its relevance and possibilities. As fashion migrates into the digital realm, it reaches far beyond NFT’s and digital wardrobes – digital innovations and AI have the power to impact the industry from the design and traceability of physical garments, to social critique, to education and open-source tools.

Three experts join us with unique touchpoints to working on the pioneering edge of critical digital transformation. Anna Franziska Michel is the founder and CEO of Yoona.ai, a fashion tech company that offers AI-powered design solutions with the goal of reducing material impact. Beata Wilczek founded Unfolding Strategies to bring critical education and training to the sustainable digital transformation of fashion, underscoring its entanglements with social and environmental power structures. Finally, Marte Hentschel, the co-founder of VORN – The Berlin Fashion Hub, shares the results of the VORN Academy’s first cohort. In this community-sourced program, nine local designers collaborated on a phygital fashion collection and immersive experience, tackling topics of circularity, over-consumption, and the internal contradictions of sustainable fashion. Both Anna Franziska Michel and Beata Wilczek supported the VORN Academy as trainers, to help the designers hone their digital approach.

Our hosts Max and Magdalena reflect on how all three speakers circle around a core question: can digital fashion and design processes truly imagine a new status quo? Or does digitization merely replicate the dysfunctions of the global fashion system as it currently stands?

To learn more about our guests:

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

“Does the 1.5 percent keep you up at night, or does it get you up in the morning?”

What is the 1.5 percent? A pair of Detto Fatto Cradle-to-Cradle Platinum Certified jeans is 98.5% biodegradable. The remaining 1.5% is the final puzzle piece in creating a 100% biodegradable pair of jeans, including dyestuff, finishings, and even the elastic fibers in the denim. Detto Fatto, a brand by the german apparel company Bay City, is unique; they proudly stand as the world’s first Cradle-to-Cradle certified brand. This means that Detto Fatto’s entire collection has achieved this high-bar for sustainable production, and they do so through their holistic approach and dogged commitment to finding new design and material solutions. This is made possible through their close collaborations with partners and stakeholders, including the Bangladeshi manufacturer Global Apparel and the German chemical company CHT Group.

At the January 2023 edition of 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, Alice Beyer Schuch and Andreas Bothe from Detto Fatto and Dietmar Hipp from CHT Group gave a community class to share the challenges and (sometimes surprising) solutions to designing for complete circularity. CHT is a key stakeholder in this journey, as the chemical treatments used in denim production are notoriously dangerously toxic. They are a forerunner in developing clean chemistry, and a critical step in transforming the fashion industry at large.

As always, we are guided with the insights of our hosts, Max Gilgenmann and Magdalena Schaffrin of studio MM04. Max and Magdalena are also founding members of Fashion Revolution Germany, which is proud to announce a new collaboration with Detto Fatto, the One Hour T-Shirt campaign. More information here: https://www.dettofatto.com/de/one-hour-shirt

To learn more about the actions around the 10-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse: https://www.fashionrevolution.org/rana-plaza-10-years-on-a-decade-of-progress/

You can explore the work of Detto Fatto and CHT Group on their websites:

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

We all have complex identities; your background, skin color, ability, wealth, education, gender, sexuality, and more interact to create your unique lived experience. This intermixing of different parts of our identities is what Kimberly Crenshaw first named ‘intersectionality’ in 1991, and the term grew to be a leading principle of Black Feminist Theory that has shaped global discourse on privilege, power, and social justice.

In this panel discussion on Berlin’s new wave of intersectional feminist leadership, we are joined by five people who are shaping the conversation on a local level, and advocating for a new status quo. Cora Hamilton and Max Weiland are the co-founders of uns, Germany’s first and only all-LGBTQIA+ talent agency. Sevil Uguz is the co-founder and CEO of Platte.Berlin, a store and community hub for Berlin fashion, where Axel Hahn leads Diversity Management & Representation. Fatima Njoya, a writer for Glamour, leads this interview between the two boundary-pushing Berlin initiatives, offering her insights on what intersectionality means in a local fashion context. Platte and uns also share their January 2023 collaborative project, DiverseIT, in which local designers paired with members of the queer community in a powerful example of fashion storytelling.

To learn more about our speakers, visit their website and follow them on social media:

Kimberle Crenshaw’s seminal text on intersectionality: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

Do brands really know the journey and impact of their products? A notorious pain point of the fashion industry is transparency, traceability, and clear, honest data reporting across apparel supply chains. With the rise of software tools and digitized systems, solutions to opaque production are finally growing to scale. This episode, we explore these topics through 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit’s panel on Transparency in Value Chains, moderated by Geraldine de Bastion. Martina Schiuma, the Head of Sustainability at The ID Factory, Tai Ford, former Chief Marketing Officer at retraced, and August Bard Bringéus, the co-founder of ASKET, share their expertise in leading a new era of transparency. The ID Factory and retraced address their pioneering digital solutions to value chain management and reporting. Meanwhile, ASKET offers a brand’s perspective on how to change the culture and standards of transparency, both within the company and to the customer.

August Bard Bringéus also joins podcast co-host Max Gilgenmann for a one-on-one interview, going deeper on the brand’s journey towards setting a new peer standard for fully transparent, sustainable fashion. ASKET’s multi-seasonal collections take a holistic view on regenerative change, following three main pillars: purposeful design, transparency for educated consumer choices, and full lifecycle responsibility, from fiber to garment end-of-life.

Learn more about our guests here:

For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.

It’s no secret that modern fashion is built on systems of exploitation, extraction, and anonymity. And so, in the transformation toward positive impact fashion, a keystone is changing the nature of relationships: between stakeholders, between brands and customers, and even our relationships with the things we own. In this episode, three segments from 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit explore different approaches to how regenerative practices are built upon these meaningful relationships, forging a new culture of accountability and collaboration.

First, Marion Röttges shares the work of Remei, an organic cotton B2B company, and their ‘all-holder value’ approach to supply chains. At Remei, farmers and brand management work on an eye-level, fortified by tools for radical transparency and traceability. Next, Hasna Kourda explains how Save Your Wardrobe, the digital wardrobe management app which she co-founded in 2017, is changing how people relate to what they own. Rooted in practices of repair, care, and material longevity that she grew up with in Tunisia, Hasna envisions a new ecosystem of tailors and skilled crafts people. Finally, Max Gilgenmann interviews Selyna Peiris (Selyn Textiles) together with Annika Wohlert (B Lab Germany). Selyn Textiles represents Sri Lankan hand-loom craftspeople with a supply chain fortified by direct relationships and block-chain traceability, and Annika pairs this work with B Lab’s goals of setting new heights for the standards of brand citizenship. They remind us that as society recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, we have the active choice to replace old, broken systems with regenerative networks.

To get inspired by this week’s featured speakers, you can go deeper into their work:

Our hosts, Max Gilgenmann and Magdalena Schaffrin of studio MM04, continue to guide us with their insights on the recordings from 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit Edition #5: Active Alliances for Positive Fashion. For more information about 202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit, including updates about our next edition, visit https://202030summit.com/, and follow us on social media @202030summit.

202030 – The Berlin Fashion Summit is organized by studio MM04, in cooperation with the Beneficial Design Institute.