Is Cider Fast Fashion?
An extremely new company, Cider was founded in 2020. Its website page says Cider was started by four friends who wanted a brand “that celebrates happiness in the mundane.” Its current CMO is cofounder Yu Oppel, and its Chief Fashion Officer is Fenco Lin.
Cider is very much a company born in the age of the Internet, as its entire website is based around catering to Internet trends. The very first tab on the navigation bar is called “Pick a Mood,” so that customers can buy clothes for when they’re feeling “K-pop,” “free,” “dreamy,” “elegant,” “sexy,” and more.
It has had several successful advertising campaigns on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram with viral hashtags dedicated to Cider shopping hauls. This company has done a great job targeting young influencers and capitalizing on their followers.
In just a few years of operation, Cider has gained millions of followers on Instagram and is a hugely popular store.
Is Cider Fast Fashion?
Cider is a fast fashion company by most metrics. It is a direct-to-consumer business based on
offering the latest trends that fit as many buyers as possible at fairly affordable prices. Cider sells dresses, tops, pants, swimwear, and even accessories. It offers size-inclusive options up to 4XL and takes inspiration from streetwear from many different cities across the globe.
Listed inspirations include Paris, Seoul, New York, and Shanghai. To keep up with all these different trends, Cider drops many new styles every week. This strategy is apparent in its product category, allowing users to shop based on their mood.
Customers can shop based on the emotion they are trying to communicate or the aesthetic they want to replicate. This element is the perfect example of how massive Cider’s catalog is because of its immensely fast production rate.
Does Cider Claim to Be Sustainable?
While it is a fast fashion company, it has tried to rebrand itself to a “smart fashion” label. Cider claims to use a special algorithm that takes customer data to decide which garments will sell, which ideally is supposed to reduce waste and let the company operate sustainably.
On its website, Cider has an entire page dedicated to sustainability. It declares that “sustainable fashion should be accessible, not exclusive.” They claim to want to create affordable pieces with sustainability in mind.
They believe they can accomplish sustainability by using recycled materials, curating a responsible supply chain, and using a model that only produces clothes on demand so nothing goes unsold or unwanted.
Cider claims it requires all suppliers and factories to adhere to a zero-tolerance policy so that the following topics are not left unaddressed. These topics include equality, respect, dignity, health, safety, environment, raw materials and processing, modern slavery, child labor, wages, and freedom of association.
They provide a list of their suppliers and the accompanying ethical certification. However, several sites have taken a deep dive into Cider’s claims to fact-check them, and many argue that Cider is not sustainable.
One source concludes that Cider maintains the aesthetic of sustainability without the actions to back it. The term for this problem of companies using environmental buzzwords over sustainable action is “green-washing.”
What’s the History of Cider?
As mentioned earlier, Cider was founded by four friends. The known founders are Michael Wang, Fenco Lin, and Yu Oppel. The company has eight investors, including names such as Greenoak and Horowitz.
It has millions of dollars in funding and hundreds of employees from 14 countries. In just a few years, it has become a popular brand worldwide.
Where are Cider Stores Located?
It is an e-commerce-only label, so it has no physical stores.
Where are Cider Factories Located?
Cider has a headquarters in Los Angeles, California, but its clothes are produced in a chain of partner factories in Guangzhou, China. Its products are shipped internationally from warehouses in China, the United States, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Orders come from whichever warehouse is closest to the consumer’s address after the initial order is placed.
Is Cider Ethical?
As discussed before, Cider is a fast fashion company with sustainability issues. Cider has tried to address ethical issues by providing a list of its suppliers and the supplier’s associated certifications.
However, it only lists the certification name and does not provide a record of the auditing process. Most sustainable review websites rank Cider’s working conditions as very poor because they say there is insufficient transparency.
Does Cider Consider Animal Welfare?
Cider has a complex animal welfare policy. It bans animal-derived textiles like fur, leather, angora, down, and exotic animal skin and hair. However, it does use wool without providing information on its origin and if it was ethically sourced.
How Sustainable is Cider?
Like all fast-fashion brands, Cider struggles to be truly sustainable. It attempts to fix this problem with its algorithm, but many websites have pointed out the flaws in this model and question if it reduces as much waste as it says.
One critic expressed that Cider is essentially the same as fast fashion brands like Shein and Romwe, which produce lower-quality clothes at low prices because of unethical practices and a disregard for sustainability.
Furthermore, Cider does not discuss its carbon and greenhouse gas emission contribution and has no plan to reduce this problem in its supply chain. It does outline a clean water process, where it claims to work with suppliers to ensure chemical substances released follow environmental standards.
They use membrane technology to treat wastewater, which is supposed to be more effective than traditional processes. Aside from a small blurb, there are no further reports of this process on the website.
Overall, while Cider’s website is designed around the idea that it is a business committed to sustainability and ethical production, it is hard to verify many of these claims.
It is undeniable that Cider is a wildly successful fast fashion company, but it’s hard to tell how long the online retailer will last as Internet trends morph and change.
