Alan Mak
Meet @alancmak, Founder and CEO of Version Tomorrow. Having spent 20+ years in the fashion industry making goods for other luxury brands as well as his own brands, Alan understands the impacts of the fashion industry on our planet. About 5 years ago, he decided that it was important to utilize our knowhow to innovate on new materials and new methods of production. “Our responsibility was greater than just innovating and keeping it to ourselves; we had to use our voice to tell the world about it and open up these innovations to allow other brands and creators to hop on board in order to create massive impact at scale.” As a result, Version Tomorrow was created.
IRK:Tell is your “Why”
Version Tomorrow sits at the intersection of luxury and sustainability. Version Tomorrow is a lower impact luxury apparel production platform where we’ve designed and created our own unique materials and lower impact supply chain. We are brand agnostic and allow brands and creators of all kinds to take advantage of our 20+ years of luxury apparel manufacturing expertise and over 3+ years of materials and supply chain innovation to create the highest quality sustainable apparel without any compromise and without any of the heavy lifting and R&D that would normally be required to do this. The goal is to level the playing field for small to medium sized brands and creators to make luxury sustainable apparel without any compromises to quality; as individual small to medium sized brands, our impact is limited, but if we operate as collectives, we can achieve massive scale and hence massive impact.
IRK: What are you most passionate about with respect to taking care of people and planet?
I’m most passionate about promoting the ideas of conscious consumption. I’m fully cognizant that as humans, we love nice things and consumption. But that doesn’t mean that we can continue to consume at the pace that we are currently at. In recognizing this, it’s my thought that we can still consume, but we must be more mindful of what we are consuming, how we are consuming and at what pace. What this means is that we can still have nice things, but we need to start slowing down our consumption and changing our habits from buying throw away pieces to those that have higher quality, that last and that you will continue to covet as time passes. We need to consume better, slower and more ethically.
IRK: What are some conscious actions you implement in your daily life?
In my everyday life, I strive to be minimal and have my consumption be as considered as possible. This means walking or taking public transportation whenever possible, eliminating or reducing the use of single use plastics, conserving water and building communities and coalitions to help one another achieve these goals. Within the fashion industry, we’ve operated in silos for too long. My vision is for us to create communities where we can share our knowhow rather than gatekeeping and not sharing so that we can truly create impact at scale.
IRK: What’s your hope for the future of the planet?
My hope is that people will become educated enough to identify and make the necessary changes to their consumption and habits to alter and reverse the harm that has been done to our planet.
IRK:What Sustainable Development Goal do you align with the most?
Our main SDG that Version Tomorrow is aligned with is #12 Responsible Consumption and Production. However, we align closely with Goal 6, Clean Water and Sanitation and Goal 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth.
