Interview with Rachel Faller, Social Entrepreneur

Rachel Faller splits her time between San Francisco and Cambodia, running her no-waste ethical fashion company, tonlé. She talks to us about being a Fulbright Scholar, becoming an unintentional businesswoman, and what it takes to run a business in Cambodia. Find out how your closet and the Great Pacific garbage patch are related, listen to Rachel’s best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and find out what lesson she had to learn when she first arrived in Cambodia.

Read the interview below. You can also watch her series of videos here.

Tell us about your work and what it entails.

My name is Rachel Faller, and I run a zero-waste fashion company called tonlé. I started my first company almost nine years ago in Cambodia; it has since been rebranded as its current incarnation, tonlé. I lived and worked in Cambodia for six years, and I have been based in the San Francisco Bay area since then.

In high school, and even before that, I was always interested in textiles and fashion. I was very much an artist from a young age but I always kind of knew about the problems in the fashion industry and the exploitative labor practices, particularly of women, and also the environmental problems. So, I couldn't see myself going into fashion. I went to college to study art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. There, I started in a painting major, and I gradually shifted towards a fibre degree, which is focused on fine arts and textiles, and I really found my place there in that department. But, I still struggled with this conundrum of the exploitation that is involved in the textile and fashion industry, and my passion for creating beautiful textiles. So, I went down more of a fine art pathway, where I was doing collaborative sculpture and community work. That was sort of a melding of my social justice passions and interest in textiles.

I was able to go to Cambodia for the first time in 2007 with a family friend who wanted to start a business there, and she asked me to go there and help her research fair trade textiles. That was the first time that I really encountered this fair trade movement that was trying to incorporate a more sustainable and kind way of doing production with traditional artists and procedures and practices. And I knew a little bit about fair trade, more as it related to coffee and food, but not as much as it related to fashion and textiles. That trip really inspired me. It was in my junior year of college, and after that, I actually applied for a Fulbright grant to go back to Cambodia and do research about artisan production and handmade items, and also the concept of fair trade and how it was contributing to the economic rebuilding of Cambodia following a long period of war and economic turmoil.

You mentioned that tonlé is a “zero-waste” fashion company. Can you tell us more about that?

At tonlé, we practice a zero-waste model where we basically take remnant materials from garment factories that have been tossed aside for various reasons. Some of them are offcuts. Some of them are overstock, from the factories over-ordering fabric. Some of them are whole bolts of fabric that just were slightly the wrong color, so they didn't use it.

There's a huge amount of waste in the garment industry, and a lot of it is usable. It's just that maybe they can't use it for this order, or for this time; when the brands are ordering very specific things, it's sort of like, what do you do with that remaining fabric? A lot of it ends up in remnant markets in Cambodia. Or, if it's intellectual property, or "IP fabric"—like, imagine, like a Gucci print, or a trademark plaid, or something like that—that will often be shredded, or burned, or dumped, because they don't want people to get their hands on it.

So, there's a lot of wasted fabric. There's a lot of stuff that's going to landfills, or that's going to oceans. People talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and they imagine that it's this island of trash floating in the middle of the ocean, but actually, the majority of that patch is swirling fibres of plastic that is have come off all of our polyester garments when they're washed, and those plastic microfibers are clogging up a huge portion of our oceans. And, fish drink that. It's terrible on so many levels.

Waste in the garment industry is a big problem and a lot of this waste, as I mentioned, is perfectly usable. It just can't be used for the specific purpose that it was ordered for. So, we get this waste from the factories, and from middlemen who collect it from the factories. We purchase it from them at a discounted rate, and we produce new products from it—and we use every single scrap in the production process.

We cut our larger garments first, like T-shirts and T-shirt dresses, and then the small strips from that get shredded down and re-woven into new fabric. Those fabrics are very tedious to make. They're really textural, beautiful hand-woven fabrics. We're making scarves and kind of caftans and cardigans out of them that are quite loose, and those have been very popular. Then we also do some hand-knit products that are knit from these small scraps. And then the tiniest scraps that are left over are shredded down even further and made into paper. So we can actually have a completely zero-waste process using every single scrap.

What's hardest about this process? I think what a lot of people don't realize, is that you can— anyone can—design something made out of scraps. That's not the hard part. The hard part is actually developing a whole business process around making the things out of scraps. Inevitably, you know, at the end of every season, we'll have some leftover waste, and we have to roll that into the next collection. We'll end up with types of scraps that we didn't know we had. Then we have to design products around that. At the same time, we need to be able to sell all the things that we make out of scraps. So, no question, you can design something out of scraps—but can you charge this price for this garment? And, can you sell enough of them to balance out things that you're making out of larger pieces? Finding those products that actually work on the market is essential because producing like that is very expensive. It's very time-consuming. Even in Cambodia, we're paying a good wage, and so our products come out much more expensive than the factories, because not only are we paying higher wages, but we're also giving better benefits, we're giving more time off, we have better working hours, and we don't use an assembly line process in the same way. So, it's not quite as efficient, but it's much more meaningful and engaging for our workers. All of that makes our production more expensive, and on top of that, it's handmade and time-consuming. We have to be able to make the products marketable at the price points that we need to sell them.

Balancing that whole business process is the most challenging part. But, in the end, I think we do get more creative, interesting products because we are limiting ourselves to certain materials. And, as a creator, I think those limitations actually produce more creativity and more beauty. So, over several collections, we've been evolving what we do and every time, I feel like between me and my team, we make it better and more interesting. So, that's been it's been a fun process to work with.

So you got a Fulbright Fellowship to study fair trade textiles in Cambodia. How did that turn into owning your own business?

I was able to go back to Cambodia in 2008, on this Fulbright Fellowship, and I worked with a number of artists and groups there. Basically, I would work with them as a consultant and help them with creating new designs, but I also was learning from them and trying to understand how their business model worked, and also learning and practicing traditional crafts.

So it was an incredible learning opportunity. During that time, I met with a group of women who were all patients at a local hospital, and the social workers at the hospital were trying to help support these women and find them jobs. They wanted to help start a business to employ these women, and so I was helping to do that, and I intended to hand over the management of that business to the women within a year. But, that became very unrealistic. And, in reality, they ended up telling me, you know, what we really want is a stable job. We don't necessarily want to run our own business, and can you just stay in Cambodia and help us run it? And I said, Okay, I think I can do that.

So, one year turned into six years, and the business grew gradually to what it is today. And that's kind of how I got into running a fashion business when I had no intention of being in the fashion industry! But, you know, in the end, what I realized was that the fashion industry is never going away. We are always going to be buying clothing. And, at the moment, the way that the fashion industry is going is spiraling into a very deadly cycle. And so if we want to change that, we can't just protest it. We have to get inside of it and change it from the inside out, and that's by making marketable, beautiful products that people want to buy, that are competitive, but also produced in a manner that is kinder to the people and the planet. I realized I had a strong passion for that, and it's been amazing to be able to work on something that is really in line with my values and also, you know, hopefully, contributes positively to that cycle.

Can you tell us more about the process of applying for and receiving a Fulbright Fellowship?

There are several different types of Fulbright grants, but the one that I applied for is a research grant where you can pick a particular topic to study or research in another country. It has to be a specific project and a specific country that you apply for. It's for US citizens who are going to go abroad and promote cultural exchange and understanding, and it's a fantastic program. It's amazing that the government funds this—and, hopefully, will continue to fund this—because it is about promoting cultural exchange and mutual understanding. And ideally, you know, the citizens who go abroad, they come back and they take what they've learned and they help, you know, use it to do something in the US that's going to be positive.

A lot of people use it for graduate fellowship research, but you can apply for this anytime after you graduate from college, or when you're about to graduate from college: you need to have a bachelor's degree, but other than that, there's no minimum requirement.

The application process took about a year. You need to have letters of recommendation from people in the country that you want to work in. That's a big challenge because you need to first identify the organizations that you want to work with, do your research, and then you need to get them to write a letter of support for your project. To make those connections, and get those letters, can be a little challenging, depending on the country that you're working in and the organizations you want to work with. You need to convince them that your proposal is strong and that they should support what you're doing—and part of it, too, is that it needs to be mutually beneficial for them. So, in some way, you need to be thinking about, what you are going to give back to that organization, or what is this research going to do for that organization. A lot of times, those organizations are academic organizations— universities or other research groups—but they can also be nonprofit organizations, businesses, or even individuals. There may be another researcher based in the country that you want to work with.

It is centered around research. So, when I did my project, it was focused on working with these artisan groups and trying to understand how fair trade was impacting the country. I mean, I use the term fair trade in a little bit of a loose way, because a lot of the artisans I worked with were identifying as fair trade organizations, but didn't necessarily have fair trade certification. So, I was looking at this concept of trying to produce in a fair manner, whether it was scalable, and how the business models worked. I came in at more of it from an artist's perspective, but what became more interesting to me was the business perspective and what was working and not working in that industry.

It was an amazing way to be able to go abroad and be fully funded to work on a project of your choice. It's highly competitive: in the year that I went, there were only four people who were accepted to go to Cambodia from the entire US. Different countries have different quotas for how many people they will accept; some of the more popular countries could have 50 people. But, it's a small percentage of people that get accepted—maybe 5%, or something like that—of the total people that apply.

I think it's very much worth applying for. It is a long application process, but once you do get awarded the grant, they're pretty flexible with what you can do with it.

This may be a hard question to answer, but what is an average week like running tonlé?

I wear a lot of different hats! And, when I'm in Cambodia versus when in the US, I'm doing very different things.

I still spend about a third of my time in Cambodia. That's usually spread over three or four trips a year. And when I'm in Cambodia, I'm mostly focusing on the production side of the business. We have our own production facilities, and we directly employ all the artisans who work with us. So, we have about 50 full-time people on our team in Cambodia, including the managers, our COO and the storekeepers of our shops in Cambodia. On top of that, we also work with independent weavers who produce woven pieces for us, and they're contracted to do that. There are about 25 independent weavers that work on our products as well.

When I'm in Cambodia working on the production side, I'm helping to oversee the new designs, doing any quality control, checking on the new products, and doing fit testing—meaning we put the designs on the models and see how they fit and how they look on different sizes. I'm often doing technical training; so, if we want to introduce a new process, I'm the one who comes and says, okay, this is how we do it, and this is how we make the thing. A lot of times the design process is very hands-on. Even creating a new design takes a lot of on-the-ground work and training the artisans on how to make the new designs or the new processes. So that's a lot of what I do.

I also do a lot of one-on-one meetings with people on my team to check in with them, and see how things are going. I do planning, strategy, and even a bit of finance, I end up signing lots of documents and doing a lot of operational stuff. I have a fantastic COO who's based in Cambodia, and she generally oversees all the operations of the company in Cambodia. She doesn't come from a fashion background; she comes from more of an operations and a development background. She studied development and worked for another international NGO that worked in women's health, so she comes from a very different background in that way. So, when I go, I'm largely helping to focus on some of those technical fashion skills.

When I'm in the US, my jobs are more related to sales and marketing—which I also have to do while I'm in Cambodia at the same time. But, I do all of the communications with wholesale buyers. I work on the website. I sometimes do photo shoots. I do the graphic design.

I also design new products. When I am away from Cambodia, our design process is that I'll create the drawings and specs and send them over to our team, and they'll produce them and try to do the pattern-making. Then, there's usually a lot of back and forth—so, sometimes, it's easier to just go there and do the designs in person. But, I'll do drawings for that, although the creative stuff is probably a smaller portion of what I do. There is a lot of management—relationship management—and a little bit of marketing, although I have someone helping me with social media right now, so she does take on a lot of that. So those are those are some of the things that I do!

What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to running a business in another country, or cross-culturally?

I would say that one of the most challenging aspects of running any business, no matter what industry you're in, is finding the right people—whether that be your staff, your employees, your partners, your mentors, your investors. And I've had lots of challenges working with, and finding, any of those people. In the past, I have struggled with people coming to me, and I just take the help that they're giving, which might not necessarily be the best kind of help that I could get if I went out and found more appropriate help, whether that be from a mentor, a partner or a staff member.

I think there are two big challenges with staffing. Hiring locally in Cambodia has one whole set of challenges. I want to say that right now we have a phenomenal team. We only have one expat who works on our team in Cambodia, and the rest of our team is Cambodian. We have four young women who are all in their early 20s, who are phenomenal managers, and they work so hard, they're very creative, they're very forward-thinking, and I'm very lucky to have them—but they were hard to find!

We have also gone through a lot of experiences with people who have not been the right fit. In Cambodia, the education system is pretty much broken. So, when you look at someone's CV and you see that they've graduated from this place or that place, it's likely that they paid their way through school, that they cheated their way through school, and that's just how the system works. And so, when I look at a CV of someone, I have no basis for knowing if it's true or not, or whether they have the skills they say they have.

What I found with hiring people in Cambodia is, that the people that work with us that have been really great have often been people who haven't had a lot of education or a lot of training, but they're just hard-working, highly motivated individuals, and they're willing to learn the skills that they need to to do any job. I think that's somewhat true across the board when you're hiring people. I mean, it's more extreme in Cambodia, but it's all about finding the right people who are a culture fit for your company, who get what you're trying to do, who care about your mission, and who are willing to learn and tackle problems. I think if you're willing to learn and care about the mission of the company, then you can learn any of the skills that you need to do the jobs that we're doing in our workshop in Cambodia. So, for me, when I do an interview, it's a lot about personality and culture, fit and willingness to think critically, to solve problems on your own, to take initiative. If you can do those things, then I think those are the people that make great employees, regardless of what their educational background is. But, it has been challenging to find people like that, and sometimes you don't always know from a first impression. And I think doing interviews, you know, I speak Khmer. So sometimes I do interview people in Khmer but even though I can speak it well, I don't get all the intricacies. Likewise, if I'm interviewing in English, the person being interviewed is having the same issue, where they might not communicate all the nuances of what they're trying to say. You know, they can get the gist of their point of cross but maybe not the nuance. And so, there is that challenge.

What about when you’re hiring expats to work in Cambodia? What are you looking for?

There's another challenge, which is when we hire someone from abroad and we try to bring them out to Cambodia, I think people are often unaware of how challenging it's going to be for them. And, what they think might be challenging is not necessarily what turns out to be the most challenging. It's the things that they don't think about that can hit them the hardest. We've had people who have not lived abroad before, who have come to work with us, and it's been very hard, hard for them. And we've had other people who have taken on the challenges really well and, you know, really adapted and matured.

I'm often very hesitant to hire someone who hasn't had experience being abroad before. Particularly, you know, if someone tells me they've only been to Europe, that's not going to give me confidence that they are going to be prepared for some of the cultural challenges that they will face—and the challenges within themselves. I'm not talking about, "Oh, well, you can't drink the water", or, you know, that sort of thing. There are certain cultural things that you will not even be prepared to deal with, and you need to sort of be ready for not knowing what you don't know. I mean, I experienced a lot of those challenges myself, when I first came to Cambodia. So, those are some of the things.

The other thing is, with expats, if we have them come to Cambodia, they're probably not going to stay forever. We prefer to hire local people as much as possible, because, first of all, it builds the local economy, and I don't want to just bring in foreigners to do jobs that Cambodian people could do. But sometimes we do have to hire foreigners if we can't find a Cambodian, who can do that job.

You mentioned the challenge of knowing what you don’t know. Can you expand on that, and your experience in Cambodia?

One of the first things that was hard for me was knowing, as a foreigner, when it is the right time to put your opinions about what's right and wrong to the forefront and when it's not—and when it's something that needs to be dealt with by Cambodian people.

An example of that... I think for me, one of the big struggles of being in Cambodia was watching the treatment of women and the abuse of women's rights in Cambodia. You know, hearing the stories that some of my staff would tell, for example, that so many of them have been raped by their husbands. In Cambodia, if you're raped by your husband, it is not considered rape by most people—and that is just accepted as the norm. You could tell that they saw this as an abuse, but they wouldn't say that. And there were other things, for example, where women would go into prostitution because they felt they had no other choice, but they were abused as prostitutes, as sex workers, and they had no protection for their rights because people looked on that as, "Okay, well, if you're a sex worker, you're either forced into it or you're a bad person because you chose it, and if you chose it, then we're not going to help you and we're not going to protect you"—without acknowledging that people will often choose that path because they have no other viable options.

So there were all these things that I felt compelled to do something about because of my nature of, you know, "I want to help. I want to fix it." But at the same time, some things come from a cultural level. I think that it is not my right to come in and say, "You should do this, or you should do that, or you should change this." It is something that people have to do on their own. I think a lot of foreigners, I don't know that much about, and they try to push their opinions on people—and it comes across as a form of neocolonialism.

And there is a lot of that with the aid industry, with the NGOs in Cambodia that are trying to help but in fact, they do more harm than good over time, because they're just creating a rescue mentality and kind of a white saviour complex. Ultimately, that's not good for anyone in the long run.

So, the trick is knowing how to let people come up with their own solutions and figure things out, but also giving them the safety and the ability to be able to do that. I think that the balance that I found is that, you know, our workplace is a place where people can come together, where they can be safe, they have good working conditions, they can talk to people who have been through similar situations, and they provide such an amazing support network for each other. I've seen that when a woman has economic freedom, and when she has a support network, it's amazing how she'll be able to pull herself out of bad situations when she knows that "I'm not the only one that's going through this, and this is not okay, because I'm not alone." You know it's happening to other people, and it's not right. And when you have the money and you have the freedom to be able to also make that choice and get out of that situation, you do—and I have seen people get out of abusive situations that they were not able to before because of the job that they have with us. And that's, you know, it's not me saying "You should do this, or you should do that"; they know what to do, and they know what's right for them, and they need the tools to be able to do it, and they need the door to be open for them. So, you know, that's amazing.

But there have been times in Cambodia when I wanted to involve myself in situations that I couldn't involve myself in, and I had to draw that line. It's so hard when you're watching something in front of you and not being able to do anything about it. But, you know, I think in America, we make very neat little boxes to separate ourselves from seeing problems, and we don't see the problems because they're not happening in front of us or in our neighborhood, necessarily. It's easy to ignore them because we don't see them, and we have this idea that if we see something, we should do something about it. In Cambodia, you have these things completely in your face all the time, and you realize, you can't save everyone. I can't do something for everyone. And that makes you feel a bit hard on one hand, but on the other hand, you have to be okay with yourself, with what you can do and what you can't do, and what you should do and what you shouldn't do.

Are there certain traits or abilities that will help someone who’s interested in being an international entrepreneur?

I think that in terms of traits that are beneficial to being an international entrepreneur... this isn't really a trait, but I think the first and most important thing is to surround yourself with the right people. I mean, we kind of touched on this a little bit when we talked about staff, but you need a support network, and you need to understand what your skills are and what your skills are not.

A lot of times, I feel that in this community of entrepreneurship—specifically social entrepreneurship—a lot of people are trying to reinvent the wheel. Everybody's like, well, I should go and start this business to make cook stoves, or whatever... and maybe a lot of people have already done this, and you don't necessarily need to go out and start the next new thing, especially if you don't know what is really needed for that community first.

So—first of all, I would say, identify what your strengths are, what your talents are, what you're lacking, and really what you're going to need to accomplish this goal. I think also learning from people in that community first, before you go and decide to do a project. I think it's very important to spend a lot of time learning and listening to what people actually want, or people actually need, and what's already being done—and make sure that you're not duplicating those efforts. I think a lot of entrepreneurs will tell you this, especially after working in a country that is not your home country, that a lot of times when you come in there thinking is the right thing, or what you think people need is not really what they need. I've personally gone through this process many times, where things I thought were good for some reason turned out to, you know, have these inadvertent negative effects. And there are times when I wish I had just stepped back and listened first, then maybe I would have figured out sooner that something wasn't working.

When you're starting a business there is so much that you don't know you don't know. So get advisors on board from an early stage who have been through similar things. I didn't do that as much as I should have, and I think I ended up spending a lot of time just trialing and erroring things that you know, probably I could have just asked someone and they would have said no, that doesn't work, you have to do XYZ. So, whether it's through good advisors or a team of staff, if you have the funding to employ people that are better than you at certain things. For example, accounting: I should not be doing my own accounting. There are people who are way better at accounting than me, so I should hire someone to do that. You know, very simple stuff like that.

So, yeah, surround yourself with the right people. Listen to those people, and listen to the people that you're trying to benefit, and the people that are in the community that you're working with. I'd say those are two important things.

Any last advice for aspiring social entrepreneurs?

There are some really amazing organizations out there that you can contribute your talents to. If you want to be an entrepreneur, before you start anything on your own, do go out and do some learning and live in different countries and work with these organizations before you try to set up and start your own thing.

If you do really want to start your own business, as I mentioned before, spend a lot of time researching, spend a lot of time learning, ask a lot of questions, go meet with other organizations and learn first, because you can avoid a lot of mistakes that a lot of other people have made and do something beneficial for the world. But there are so many well-intentioned people that don't do this and in the end they end up either just wasting their time and wasting other people's time and money, or, in fact, sometimes doing harm.

So, definitely, please go and research and learn—and that could be in the form of working with an organization, or volunteering. I suggest going for longer periods of time, more than a two-week period, because if you do a short-term volunteer trip, I don't think you're going to get the depth of learning that you would get from a three-month or more internship period, if you can do it. There are lots of great companies and organizations to work with, and I think that's the best piece of advice I can give you.

You mentioned finding related organizations. Do you have advice as far as how to approach those people or make those connections?

If you are reaching out to people like, for example, someone like me or another entrepreneur that you admire, that you want to work with, that you want to learn something from, just be conscious of the fact that they are extremely busy and probably extremely strapped for time and also, they probably have a million people asking them questions all the time. They're they're running a business. So just be really contentious of that.

When people approach me, if they want to ask me something, I always really appreciate it when they do two things.

One is to make the ask really concrete. So if there's something that I can do for you in ten minutes that is really going to help you, great, I'm happy to do that. But, if you message me and say, I just want to pick your brain, and can we go and, you know, talk—and you haven't looked at my website, and you haven't read the information that's already out there, I'm probably going to be a lot less likely to respond to you. But if you've already done your research, and you have really specific asks for me, I'm so happy to help. Just tell me really concretely what you want.

And, the second thing is, if there's something that you can offer that person in exchange, I think that's also a really nice way to acknowledge that they're helping you, that they're giving your their time and saying, hey, you know, I have this really quick ask from you... and, oh, by the way, I have this person that I'm in contact with that I think would be a really great contact for you, would you like me to make an introduction... something along those lines, so that you're kind of acknowledging that this is a give and take. And you know, I'm always happy to help. I'm always happy to answer questions. But it makes it really easy for me when there's a really clear and concrete way that I can help you.