It was a coup in fashion’s fight against climate change: New York environmental and social justice non-profit Slow Factory scored a $2.5 million investment from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) to open a first-of-its-kind climate school in the spring of 2023. But Slow Factory and NYCEDC quietly parted ways in December, Vogue Business has learned, adding fuel to questions about Slow Factory’s plans as well as its impact.
It was announced in February 2022 that Slow Factory had been selected as the first anchor tenant of NYCEDC’s Made in New York Campus at Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, a pioneering new development that will house a garment manufacturing hub and a film and media production facility when it opens this year. Slow Factory planned to establish a “multidisciplinary institute” on site, where it would deliver educational programming and workforce training, a product studio and a research and development lab, all under one roof.
The climate school — which was to be called the Slow Factory Institute — would have been a breakthrough moment for the organisation. Founded in 2012 by married couple Céline Semaan and Colin Vernon as an activist accessories brand, Slow Factory registered as a non-profit in 2018. Since then, it has amassed 473,000 followers on Instagram, rising to prominence by neatly packaging complex, radical ideas into shareable social media posts. Meanwhile, it has gained traction offline through high-profile partnerships, including sustainability summits with the United Nations and MIT Media Lab; a science design incubator with Swarovski; and a series of free online lectures sponsored by partners, including Vestiaire Collective and Adidas. Semaan said Slow Factory felt like “the ugly duckling of the fashion industry” before; the Slow Factory Institute would have been the bricks-and-mortar consolidation of its ambitious mission.
“In December, NYCEDC and Slow Factory mutually agreed to part ways, ending a lease agreement for Slow Factory to occupy space at Bush Terminal effective immediately,” a spokesperson for NYCEDC tells Vogue Business. “We wish Slow Factory the best of luck as they continue on their mission.”
In a statement posted to Instagram — shortly after Vogue Business approached Slow Factory about the change of plans for the school — Slow Factory said: “Slow Factory and NYCEDC have together agreed to discontinue their initiative and will look forward to future collaborations. Slow Factory Institute will soon announce the new location, and we are excited to share this update. There are no changes to the initiative otherwise, and we will keep you all [Slow Factory followers] informed of progress.” Neither party shared additional details about why the partnership ended.
But behind the scenes, a storm has been brewing. Vogue Business first began exploring a story about Slow Factory’s 10th anniversary and the upcoming opening of its school in August 2022. Soon after, a group of former contractors and collaborators came forward with concerns about the organisation and its plans to open the school. This group claims Slow Factory overpromises on what it does or can deliver. They say it is an “open secret” that Slow Factory has a “toxic” culture that undermines its objectives, particularly uplifting and empowering people from the global majority.
The 13 former contractors and collaborators — who worked with Slow Factory between 2019 and 2022, according to proof of employment shared with Vogue Business — came forward as a group self-labelled as the “Anonymous Collective” in order to publicise their alleged experiences with the non-profit. (They claim this is after making several attempts to assuage their concerns with Semaan in private; Semaan did not comment on this when asked by Vogue Business.) The group shared a joint statement detailing their claims, and Vogue Business conducted individual interviews with 12 of the 13. During the process of corroborating these accounts, 12 other former contractors, institutional partners, industry peers and Slow Factory board members spoke to Vogue Business independently of this group in individual interviews, during which they reported similar experiences. These sources asked to remain anonymous, citing a fear of retaliation. A further eight sources Vogue Business spoke to provided positive testimonies.
The principal allegation among those with concerns is that the non-profit has overstated its impact, especially on social media — and particularly around job creation and programming. “We are deeply concerned about Slow Factory’s potential to cause harm at the institutional level by diverting attention, funding and public support away from organisations that actually do the work Slow Factory claims to do,” say the members of Anonymous Collective. They also question whether Slow Factory has the “thematic expertise or staff” to run a project like the climate school, having left a trail of disillusioned contractors and collaborators in its wake.
Vogue Business sent Slow Factory a list of questions on 2 February to address the allegations and clarify claims about the organisation, its work and its efficacy. On 3 February, Slow Factory published some of the questions and its responses to its website, which were later taken down. It accused Vogue Business of “white scrutiny” and “looking to gain notoriety by discrediting immigrants and communities of colour if they gain any sort of acknowledgement for their hard work and impact”. Semaan did not respond to Vogue Business when asked to elaborate on her responses and provide additional information.
In the published response, Slow Factory strongly refutes the claims that it overstates its impact, saying that “building community and shifting the narrative online is sacred to us, but so is building projects, programs, and initiatives that create lasting, tangible, systemic change offline as well.”
“Slow Factory’s impact speaks for itself — in the quality of our free education, the testimonials of our worldwide community of students, instructors, and partners, grantees and participants in our systemic design programs, people and organisations we’ve supported and funded, or the relief funds we’ve raised for partner organisations in Lebanon and elsewhere to make a tangible impact,” the statement reads. “‘Open secrets’ — aka gossip — is usually repeated loudest by those with no direct knowledge of a situation. These accusations say more about the people who are gossiping than it says about us.”
Lofty goals
Over the past few years, Slow Factory has been building a name in the sustainability space. Alongside Adidas and Vestiaire Collective, it has collaborated with brands, including former CFDA award winners Mara Hoffman, Public School and Phillip Lim on a UN-backed pilot project connecting designers with scientists. Slow Factory’s flagship Study Hall conferences have hosted speakers from Priya Ahluwalia and Claire Bergkamp to actress Yara Shahidi and Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson.
Announcing the Slow Factory Institute in 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said it would bring tens of millions of dollars in direct economic output. Deputy mayor for economic and workforce development Maria Torres-Springer praised Slow Factory’s plans to create a model of “sustainable garment production and supportive workforce development practices”.
Slow Factory’s vision for the school includes a rare books library, theatre and community space. In September, Semaan said the goal was to open schools around the world and implement a membership structure where participants could pay a monthly or annual fee to support the school.
The school’s main intended function was to deliver waste-to-resource training programmes, turning thousands of pounds of discarded clothes, returned goods, and textile waste from brand partners into new items. This project — Garment to Garment — would see Slow Factory processing 250,000 garments per year from 2023, Semaan said in September. In autumn 2022, the Heart of Neiman Marcus Foundation donated $50,000 to Slow Factory to support this initiative and spotlighted the non-profit and its plant-based leather alternative, Slow Hide, in a sponsored activation at the Humane Society of the US gala in New York in November. In its Instagram post on 3 February, Slow Factory said, “all donations towards the Institute will carry through to our new location.” Neiman Marcus Group declined to comment further.
Optics versus impact
Slow Factory presents its partners and followers with a utopian promise: a new moral framework for the fashion industry based on decolonisation, community and justice. It promises to hold corrupt businesses accountable, right the wrongs of a tangled global supply chain, and educate the next generation to do things differently. Semaan — who is the public face of Slow Factory — describes it as “an innovative concept and a living organism”.
It has amassed many supporters. “What [Semaan] is doing feels very participatory and inclusive,” says Skylar Lawrence, senior director of philanthropy at refugee support organisation Anera, which raised funds with Slow Factory by selling scarves in 2014 and 2016. “Their values truly underpin the daily conversations and interactions,” says David Breslauer, co-founder and chief technology officer at Bolt Threads, which produces mycelium “leather” for Stella McCartney and Ganni, and has supported Slow Factory events since 2020, culminating in a residency titled “Applied Utopia” at London’s Central Saint Martins in October 2022. “I have nothing but respect and admiration for the Slow Factory team,” adds Gary Cook, global climate campaigns director at Stand.Earth, which worked with Slow Factory on a 2021 campaign to stop fashion-related deforestation in the Amazon.
But several of the individuals who spoke to Vogue Business — many of whom worked with the organisation on the inside — question whether Slow Factory’s impact lives up to the image it is projecting.
They point to its 10-year impact report, published last summer, where Slow Factory states that it has provided career counselling, internships and apprenticeships, community care, childcare, youth programmes, mental health support, access to arts and culture, and collective healing. Former contractors say they are not aware of evidence of such programmes being delivered during the time they worked at the organisation. The non-profit doesn’t specify who received these benefits or how they were delivered in the report.
In its response, Slow Factory says that the organisation has “counselled dozens of people in their career paths in climate justice, and will be implementing a more formal structure around this” as it grows, but did not provide evidence when asked. In terms of community care, Slow Factory says this is “one of our core reasons for existing and baked into all our programs”.
When the pandemic rendered physical conferences impossible in 2020, Slow Factory turned to online education. Its free online lecture series Open Edu — delivered by Black, brown and Indigenous thought leaders — became the crown jewel of its work. Previous sponsors include Adidas (2020 to 2022) and Vestiaire Collective (August 2021). “Through Open Edu, Slow Factory has democratised education. It’s their strongest added value,” says Delphine Baz, global partnerships manager at Vestiaire Collective. The Slow Factory Institute is intended to provide Open Edu with a bricks-and-mortar home.
The non-profit references the subject matter of some of its Open Edu programming in its impact report, stating that it had “created impact” in areas covered by its Open Edu classes, which include pollution reduction, climate adaptation, anti-racist system design and land stewardship. Several former contractors say Slow Factory made similar claims in pitch decks sent to potential donors, too. Yet Slow Factory does not share specifics on how it measures or qualifies that impact, and Anonymous Collective questions the non-profit’s tangible impact in these areas beyond facilitating the lectures, which were mostly created by experts outside the organisation. “We curated the instructors because we liked what they worked on, but they did the heavy lifting. We’ve never worked in pollution other than finding someone to speak about it for an hour,” says one former contractor.
“Slow Factory’s funding of research and work in a particular area has a tangible impact in that area,” says Slow Factory. “Anything that appears in any Slow Factory communication is either clearly supported by facts or clearly part of a future plan to be supported.”
There are also questions around its stated participation numbers. In its impact report, the organisation reported that “over 28,000 students from 46 countries participate” in Open Edu. Anonymous Collective alleges that this represents the total number of Open Edu newsletter sign-ups, not attendees. In its online statement, Slow Factory clarified that the Open Edu classes each draw between 400 and 2,500 live attendees. It says “participation is robust and active” but did not comment on its methodology for counting the 28,000 people.
The 10-year impact report — a 32-page document detailing its contributions to sustainable fashion, which includes the six-year period before it registered as a non-profit — also states that Slow Factory has created 200 new jobs per year, without describing the nature of those jobs or where they were placed. Slow Factory did not respond to questions about this job creation nor the methodology used to compile its impact report.
Anonymous Collective claims Slow Factory appointed four new board members and dismissed five — including three of the newly appointed — within one six-month period, and 10 further contractors resigned or terminated their relationships with Slow Factory between July 2021 and August 2022. At least eight others were allegedly let go during that period, for reasons they were told, including “poor fit” and “lack of funding”. In the year-long period with 18 departures, Slow Factory had just seven workers at its peak, they claim. As of September, Semaan said the organisation had 10 employees full-time, including her, and an extra three people working on Slow Factory Labs (including her husband). She did not respond to questions about the organisation’s current headcount.
A “toxic” culture
Slow Factory has captured the collective imagination of people disillusioned with the existing fashion system and guided them towards a potential alternative. Its co-founders describe the organisation as “the Bauhaus of climate justice”, a place of “collective liberation”, working to “dismantle systems of oppression”. From the outside, it is an attractive place to work for those seeking to make change in the fashion industry. Slow Factory presents itself as an organisation made up of “people from the global majority”. Most of the people Vogue Business spoke to who worked with Slow Factory are Black or people of colour.
Testimonies from the former contractors and collaborators paint a picture of excitement and optimism about working with Slow Factory curdling into disillusionment and disappointment upon working more closely with the non-profit. Members of Anonymous Collective report a “revolving door” of staff where “everyone found their own red flags”.
Those who spoke to Vogue Business were mostly employed as short-term contractors; in many cases, they say, because Slow Factory was not hiring full-time employees. Some worked there for years. They describe a work environment that was chaotic, tense and hostile under Semaan’s leadership, and, according to the collective, workers would be “punished” for dissent and offering what they saw as constructive feedback. Others interviewed say that there was no room for “evaluation or critique”. Several say they “have never resigned so quickly from a job”. Some former contractors allege that they were openly “bullied” by Semaan in front of their colleagues, and they were subject to “gaslighting” and “manipulation”.
Slow Factory’s response attributes such claims to one short-term contractor “who failed to deliver quality work and ultimately failed at their mandate after we gave them repeated extensions and extra funds, options to restructure the project and support”. It also says it was subject to the “great resignation” — whereby lots of people moved jobs after the pandemic — but supported employees’ decisions to leave. “For those hired on a project basis, sometimes their services were not renewed once the project ended and their specific expertise was no longer needed.”
The climate school was intended to create green jobs and encourage people into sustainable fashion. But the former contractors say Slow Factory’s workplace culture — and Semaan’s leadership approach — negatively impacted their mental health, limited productivity, and left them disillusioned about sustainability work, undermining the broader industry’s efforts. One says the experience “shattered” their confidence, another describes their time at Slow Factory as “the unhealthiest I’ve ever been”, and another says, “I didn’t know who I was when I left. They took everything from me.”
“There’s a disconnect between the public face and what’s going on behind closed doors,” says one former contractor. “Despite all of the rhetoric about anti-colonialism, taking time and healing, it was a relentless culture of overwork, hierarchy and paranoia about loyalty.”
“Not every environment is for everyone. We have more flexibility, more ‘bring your whole self to work’, more intentionality than can be found in almost any organisation,” Slow Factory says in its response to questions about the work environment.
There are allegations in both directions of threatened legal action, online harassment and offline reputational damage over perceived slights. Several of the people who spoke to Vogue Business allege that ideas and research they shared in the spirit of collaboration were co-opted as Slow Factory’s own, and the lines of ownership over ideas and intellectual property were often blurred. Among these testimonies are eight Black women who describe a pattern of “competitive aggression” from Semaan, which former workers corroborate. Slow Factory acknowledges that it paid for a strategy to combat “online harassment and libel” but denies engaging in any form of harassment or libel itself.
“We take concerns of this nature seriously, and we welcome critiques, but horizontal hostility is one thing we don’t tolerate, especially when it attempts to eclipse all the Black members of our board, team and the contributions of the countless other Black folks that we work with,” Slow Factory says. “We are deeply committed to Black liberation and will continue to support and amplify the work of Black writers, artists, and scholars.”
In each instance, the two sides have starkly different perceptions of events, but the competitive mindset they reveal — attempting to “own” the ideas behind global movements — is what is most concerning, says one former Slow Factory contractor. “If you’re coming in with a capitalist competitor mindset, you fundamentally don’t understand the work.”
Challenging the status quo
Slow Factory is registered as a 501(c)3 non-profit, but there are several lesser-known strings to its bow. This includes the for-profit businesses Slow Factory Lab — a material innovation arm, which produces Slow Hide — and Slow Factory Studios, a Web3 and production company. According to Slow Factory, the non-profit “actively fundraise[s] to provide free accessible education through brand partnerships, donations from the public, and donations from foundations”.
The impact report says Slow Factory has raised and distributed almost $13 million for causes and projects, including “funding immediate action in human rights”, “accessibility and disability justice” and “free open education”. Slow Factory did not respond to requests for more information on when this funding was raised, from what sources, and what exactly it was used for.
To raise money, Slow Factory must play within the system it sets out to challenge, which can prove problematic, experts say. Slow Factory denies “playing” in fashion but says there are “challenges” when “trying not to operate within the status quo”. “We exist in a colonial capitalist society, and so our policies are extremely strict, maintaining that our funding is diversified between the public, foundations, businesses and brands. We do not accept funding from companies with ulterior motives or agendas,” Slow Factory says.
Several people credit the organisation — and Semaan — with raising popular awareness of longstanding issues such as climate justice and decolonisation, and this, in turn, has propelled it to the attention of big fashion brands, with money to spend on ESG partnerships. But the alleged focus on the image projected via social media caused frustration internally, according to some former workers.
There is a pattern emerging among social media savvy non-profits whereby the leaders act more like influencers, developing a “cult of personality” that undermines the drive for decentralised power, says Minh-Ha Pham, an associate professor at Pratt Institute and author of Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property. This can divert attention from the actual problems non-profits exist to address and warp public perceptions of what constitutes meaningful impact. “Popularity can so easily stand in for expertise. This isn’t making workers’ lives better in the Global South, it isn’t making the environment safer, it’s just creating new internet celebrities.” Former contractors say this was an ongoing source of tension within Slow Factory. In response, the organisation says it’s not familiar with any non-profits that fit this pattern.
In some cases, non-profits have learnt to focus on social media over on-the-ground impact because that is what the brands funding them value, causing a fundamental rift between best practice and financial survival, says Pham. “The same kind of tactics brands use to greenwash their brands — misdirection, vagueness — a lot of these organisations are also guilty of.”
Slow Factory says it disagrees with this notion and that it has “consistently refused funding from companies or organisations where we don’t see enough alignment of values and incentives, and have repeatedly, through our work and public positions, had sponsors pull out”. The statement continues: “We are a powerful voice online because Slow Factory is a group of people from the global majority telling our own stories — stories which have historically been, and still are, purposefully discredited, erased, and scrutinised.” Though Semaan has, in the past, been open about the pitfalls: “Funding is super challenging because the system is used to working with influencers,” she said in September before the school partnership was terminated. “Brands want to do something we can talk about on our big platform, but we negotiate all of that out.”
Navigating brands, ethics and funding is not straightforward, says Kim Jenkins, founder of the Fashion and Race database and educational consultancy Artis Solomon, who has produced a brand-sponsored podcast and consulted for major luxury brands. “In this system, how else do you get money?” she says.
Orsola de Castro, who co-founded the non-profit Fashion Revolution but recently stepped back after 10 years to pursue other interests, says that the metrics of success for advocacy organisations are skewed. “Even though many of these organisations are small and young, they are pressured to over-perform,” she explains. “The way performance is measured — often through likes on Instagram or views on TikTok — goes against what they are trying to achieve.”
Others say that using social media to spread the message of sustainability is a valid and necessary part of progress. “Slow Factory has helped bring organisations together and spread awareness, which I have found to be one of the lowest-hanging fruits for impact,” says Breslauer of Bolt Threads. “It's about engagement and inspiration, which is hard to quantify at this stage.”
What is the future of Slow Factory?
This is not the first time that an organisation positioning itself as a leader of social change has come up against allegations to the contrary: US brand Everlane and women’s private members' club The Wing (which has since closed) have both faced claims against their culture and values. The way non-profits interact with fashion brands has also come under scrutiny in recent months: in 2022, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s (SAC) Higg Index faced a crackdown by the Norwegian government after it was alleged that brands were using the tool to overinflate their positive environmental impact in marketing campaigns. The index was the most widely used tool by fashion companies to measure environmental and social impacts; its consumer-facing aspect is currently on hold as SAC conducts an independent review of the methodology and reassesses its use.
Experts say, in general, these issues are rife across the non-profit and sustainability sectors and — some say — an inevitably messy part of the fight for systems change. And as non-profits face pressures, donations are down in the US when inflation is taken into account, according to the National Council of Nonprofits. “When you don’t have adequate resources to deliver your impact, staff get stretched further, which increases turnover, burnout and tension. It’s a challenge there is no easy answer for,” says its COO Rick Cohen.
“In any organisation, there will likely be different perspectives on how to move forward, especially with complicated issues like environmental and social justice. But those disagreements can actually be really productive,” says Pham. “These organisations need to move forward with third-party auditing of their financial structure and funding, a real worker cooperative model of operations, and actual evidence of impact. If the revolution looks like the old system, they don’t actually want change, they just want to be a bigger part of the system.”
The question is how non-profits like Slow Factory can move forward with their mission while addressing the complex relationship with the brands they work with; the systemic pressures that leave non-profits and industry agitators vulnerable to power abuse; and the challenge inherent when individuals push for change in the same system they have grown used to operating in.
Asked what comes next for Slow Factory, the organisation responded: “Sign up to our newsletter to find out!”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Clarification: The SAC has paused the consumer-facing aspect of its transparency programme, which used Higg Index data. The Higg MSI and other Higg Index tools are still active. (13/02/2023)
This story was updated to remove the link to Slow Factory's published responses, after these were removed from its website. (22/02/2023)
