Next up in our tribe series is Tara Maurice.
Our friendship started 15 years ago when I consulted on a knitwear line for Coach and Tara was my to-go person there, being in charge of ready-to-wear.
But her true passion was always the environment and as she climbed up the ranks at Coach the conflict of being part of a system that she considered broken was keeping her up at night.

She would say: The global Fashion industry emits 10% of annual greenhouse gases, pollutes 20% of the earth’s freshwater, and for of all that manufacturing 87% of all that clothing consumed is landfilled or burned within a couple of years of it’s purchase. Fashion was designed to be a broken system.

So here she was in the prime of her career, when she decided (encouraged by her husband and two kids) to leave fashion behind and to go back to school to get a Master’s Degree in Design for Social Innovation from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Now years later she can call herself a strategist, educator and re-designer, who is connecting the dots between fashion, waste and consumption.

She founded McGuffin & Co, a bespoke strategy agency working with brands to clearly identify their purpose through story and she is also an adjunct professor at LIM College teaching Sustainability and the Future of Fashion, teaching students the current fashion system’s impacts on the living world, man and nature.

I love her description of McGuffin & Co:
We solve puzzles, we thread the needle, we connect the dots, we clean up messes, we put the pegs in the right holes, we find the words, we paint a picture.

So many people talk, but Tara walks the talk!
I love her for that.