The last few months have been both harrowing and heart warming for us here at Tara Sartoria. First, of course, we have been dealing with legal challenge of our trademark from global fashion retail giant ZARA/Inditex.
It’s quite a frightening situation. We are but a small company, with only one full-time office employee. ZARA is a massive corporate retailer with an entire legal outfit at their disposal. Our artisans are not employees themselves, but are independent tradeswomen who work on their own schedule and dictate their own price, which in our case a fair market price for their products.
Our traditional silk garments and accessories are handmade with artisan silk, in micro batches following traditional methods. We currently sell only online from our website. ZARA has over 2000 retail clothing stores around the world with a large variety of clothing items that are fast moving and following the latest trendy designs.
Our tradeswomen carefully make use of everything they produce. Cuttings from the making of garments are not thrown away, but are fashioned into other usable items, such as sashes or masks. Nothing is wasted.
Mass-produced fashion typically gives little thought to the thousands of pounds of scrap material that end up on the cutting floor, swept into dumpsters, then transported to landfills. Fashion industry waste is estimated to be 92 million tons per year. Every second, one garbage truck's worth of textiles is thrown away or burned in the world.
Thanks to people like you who care about sustainability, fair wages, and small business opportunities are standing up in support of small businesses like ours. Currently, the petition that we have created at the.organise.network/ is at over 13,000 signatures. This is amazing to us, as we only started the petition drive three weeks ago.
Support from you and others with whom you share this petition has made the last few weeks a heart-warming time. Instead of feeling downtrodden by the weight of ZARA/Inditex’s legal challenge, our spirits are buoyed and we feel positively grateful for the outpouring of advocacy we have received.
Our petition drive is gaining some interest from news organizations, and that should help us with our messaging. But we know that a grassroots movement is the most powerful. Individuals like you have the power to make a difference when banded together for a cause.
Please consider sharing our story and petition with anyone else you can think of who would care to join us and other small businesses for our fight for survival. Follow us on https://www.instagram.com/tarasartoria/ for our latest updates!