Fashioning a Better World
By Meenal Mistry
The party that Barneys New York hosted at its Madison Avenue flagship to celebrate the launch of Maiyet, the new bohemian minimalist luxury label, looked in many ways like any other fashion event. The label's co-founders, Paul van Zyl and Kristy Caylor, posed for pictures. Guests sipped prosecco and browsed new spring clothes on racks, as well as leather bags, sandals and gold jewelry displayed on rustic wooden tables. Shortly afterward, the crowd trickled upstairs for dinner at the store's restaurant, lit glowingly for the occasion. However, when van Zyl and Caylor stood together to address the seated guests, it became clear how radically the world of Maiyet diverges from that of your usual high-end label. "If there's a metaphor that encapsulates what we're about," began van Zyl, with an ever-present boyish grin, "it's that we're at Barneys and we have Leymah Gbowee here with us."
Gbowee, the Liberian activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, had never set foot in Barneys. And anyone with a passing familiarity with van Zyl's background as a human rights lawyer would realize that his presence was equally improbable—enough to prompt a question. Why is this man working in fashion?
That's a question to which van Zyl—who served alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and then logged thousands of air miles traveling around the world, confronting human rights abuses and managing post-conflict situations—has grown accustomed to hearing since founding Maiyet about a year and a half ago. "Everybody who knows me for my past and for what I've done is always completely intrigued and bemused by what I'm doing," he says, sitting in Maiyet's sunny NoHo showroom a few weeks later.
In its simplest terms, the idea behind Maiyet is to prevent strife instead of mopping it up after the fact, and it was inspired by one of van Zyl's lifelong passions—promoting a better world in ways that are more constructive and engaged than simple philanthropy. Van Zyl and Caylor have built a new business model for luxury fashion: partnering with small artisans in places like Kenya, India, Colombia and Indonesia, where fostering the local economy can mitigate ethnic conflict and human rights abuses by creating a more stable society.
If van Zyl wasn't cosmically predestined for the path he's taken, he was pointed sharply in the right direction as a boy growing up in South Africa. His parents were among the minority of white Afrikaners opposed to apartheid. "From a very early age, I have images in my head of my father throwing couch pillows at the television during the nightly news because it was just blatant lies and propaganda," he says. "There was a sense that I was going to be an activist because I was constantly told that we live in an evil society."
While at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he began to work with Bheki Mlangeni, a black lawyer fighting to commute the sentences of prisoners on death row. Once apartheid was brought down by international boycotts and protests, the thinking went, those unfairly imprisoned would be set free. Mlangeni was later murdered, and through meeting his mother, van Zyl began working with mothers whose activist children had been assassinated.
"If you want to encapsulate the tragedy of apartheid, it was these extraordinary African women who earned pitiful pay but saved up to educate their children," says van Zyl. "Those children become lawyers, and because you're black and South African, you don't become a real estate lawyer. You become a human rights lawyer. Then you campaign for these things and get assassinated." He continues: "Their child earns a decent living, is the pride and joy of their lives and then gets killed. So you lose a child but also your pension, your future. You're heartbroken."
Van Zyl helped to establish the first nationwide victims group to organize those women. He cited that experience when, as a 24-year-old, he went to Archbishop Tutu to present his strategy for the recently established Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "I went to him and said, 'I'm very young, but I've worked on this passionately for a long time, and I think I have an idea of how we can run the commission,' " recalls van Zyl. The archbishop made him the commission's executive secretary, and over the course of three years, they organized hearings across the country, ultimately taking 24,000 statements from victims and perpetrators. Two thousand people testified publicly, and it was broadcast live on national television. "There was a larger viewership for the Truth Commission hearings than for soccer matches," says van Zyl. "And South Africans are crazy for soccer."
At one of the final hearings, the commission brought in former president P.W. Botha for failing to appear when subpoenaed. ("Like going after Al Capone on a parking ticket," remarks van Zyl.) Since Botha had refused to testify, van Zyl instead recited a litany of the government's human rights abuses for the commission. Van Zyl was just 27 at the time, and probably looked almost like a bright-eyed child to the frail 82-year-old Botha. "You cannot imagine what it takes for a kid in his twenties—a white Boer in apartheid South Africa—to really step up," says Niclas Kjellström-Matseke, the half–South African, half-Swedish CEO of the Swedish Postcode Lottery, an organization that donates all of its profit to charity. "He has no reason whatsoever to do that besides feeling it's unjust. Everyone is actually against his decision." Kjellström-Matseke was the first to jump in during Maiyet's round of seed funding.
After the trial, van Zyl moved to New York to attend law school and joined a white-shoe law firm—but his activist past would intrude on his day job as a corporate lawyer. "Madeleine Albright's office would call and say, 'Can you go to Indonesia and help the new post-Suharto president?' " says van Zyl. "It became clear that I was going to spend as much time outside the law firm as inside it." He went on to help found the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a New York City–based NGO, and worked in struggling regions such as East Timor, Peru, Morocco and Kenya.
The idea for Maiyet began in 2009, through a series of conversations with Daniel Lubetzky, the Mexican-Jewish founder of Kind Healthy Snacks, who has a long history of successful social entrepreneurship. He also gets credit as a founder of Maiyet. "Daniel had been coming at it through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I had come from the South African setting," says van Zyl. "But I had also worked in 30 countries and had the strong sense that what they needed most was to have these small businesses that thrive. That was my rough intuition, which translated into a small step into fashion."
That step would require a partner with roots in the fashion industry. Together Lubetzky and van Zyl conducted a global search to find Caylor, a seasoned fashion executive whose experience included working on (Product) RED during her time at Gap Inc., volunteering her time to local artisans in Guatemala, and more straightforward consulting on strategy for brands such as Band of Outsiders. With a round of philanthropic seed funding in their pockets, van Zyl and Caylor set out on an intense six-month journey around the world, finding artisans and hashing out what Maiyet would be. "We wanted to put product first," says van Zyl. "But is it high end or low? Is it RED 2.0? I was open to all of those things."
The answer was an unquestionably luxurious brand that covers a range of products, from clothes to accessories, much of it manufactured in places where a lack of economic opportunity has bred conflict. In Kenya, Maiyet employs different ethnic groups in workshops in Nairobi to make fish-pendant necklaces. In the state of Gujarat in India, Muslims and Hindus work side by side to make delicately embroidered panels, which will then be sent to New York City or Italy to be sewn into simple but chic silk blouses and dresses. Caylor and her design team work closely with the artisans to create products that appeal to highly discerning customers back in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and as a result expose their goods to a market to which they'd otherwise have no access.
Apart from making sure his artisans are skilled enough to produce an Art Nouveau–esque 18-karat-gold cuff that might sell at Barneys for $2,400, van Zyl wants to build a sustainable infrastructure by supplying them with updated machinery and improving their working conditions. Of course, noble goals do not a luxury business make. What sets Maiyet apart is creations beautiful enough to hold their own on a runway in Paris, where the label has shown its collection for the past two seasons, and at Barneys on a floor that also houses Stella McCartney, Marni and Proenza Schouler. Maiyet's debut collection sold so well that the store placed reorders for ready-to-wear and jewelry. Sales that brisk don't happen on message alone.
Sustainable, ethical and fair-trade initiatives have popped up repeatedly in the fashion industry over the past decade, but few have gained traction. "No matter what they tell you in a survey, people don't buy products because of their social mission," says Lubetzky. "Certainly, they won't buy them again and again." The most visible example is Edun, a label started in 2005 by Bono and his wife, Ali Hewson, and now partly owned by LVMH. Its focus is on developing trade with Africa and supporting cotton farming in Uganda. But despite its considerable advantages of celebrity, capital and connections, Edun struggled in its early days both with the logistics of producing clothes in Africa and delivering them on time, as well as providing merchandise that excited retailers. The majority of the collection is now produced in China.
Which makes Maiyet's success after just one season all the more impressive. Van Zyl likes to tell the story of how he welcomed Barneys CEO Mark Lee and chief women's merchant Daniella Vitale into Maiyet's studio last August. As he prepared to deliver a stirring speech about Maiyet's mission, the two executives nearly pushed him out of the way to get their hands on the racks of clothing behind him. "We were skeptical, but they put product first," says Vitale. "The aesthetic is very much what's going on today—very clean, beautiful materials, minimal hardware. They did an incredible job of all these categories—leather goods, jewelry, ready-to-wear." Barneys placed an order for the first collection before Maiyet's debut show last September, and asked to carry it exclusively for spring. For fall, sales have branched out to Luisa Via Roma in Florence; Montaigne Market in Paris; Boon the Shop in Seoul; Barneys in Tokyo; and Boutique N in Kuwait City.
The beauty of well-structured social entrepreneurship is that financial success is a win-win—van Zyl doesn't see any disconnect in promoting peace by selling luxury products at a high price. "If you want to make Kenyan workers more money for the hour that they work, you have to be a very successful brand," he says. "If you're a social entrepreneur, and if you have a vision about what you have to do, the greatest risk is if you don't execute it properly." Certainly his investors, a group ranging from philanthropists such as Abby Disney to hedge funds, are pleased. One is a socially conscious venture capital firm called Double Bottom Line, whose partners are passionate—one sits on Maiyet's board—but still expect at least a five-time return on investment.
What might be most remarkable about van Zyl is that though he's both witnessed and heard firsthand testimony of the worst atrocities governments have inflicted on their own people, he still has an infectious sense of optimism—one that boosts his mission at Maiyet. He draws a parallel between solving issues with artisans and his human rights work. "They're not the kind of fixes that you impose from the outside," he explains. "They're the fixes where you get up alongside people, you respect them, and you hear what they need. With that, I'm totally in my element."
Archbishop Tutu, recounting their time together on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attests to this: "We were a very diverse group—fractious and hypersensitive to slights, real or imagined. Paul had the right temperament to deal with such a bunch."
That charm is coupled with a grand ambition. Van Zyl and Caylor's plans include a foray into menswear and e-commerce. "We want to be a globally recognized brand that has a valuation significantly north of $100 million," says van Zyl. "And we want to demonstrate that you can do extraordinarily well and inspire people and give them beautiful products—and, simultaneously, do good in the world. That's not for small, quirky philanthropic brands to do. It's mainstream, super-successful companies that are perfectly capable of embedding it in what they do, not as a giveaway."
wsj.com
