From Fast Fashion to Fast Furniture?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic became big news, a topic that frequently popped up in mainstream media is the damage that fast fashion does to the environment. The enormous cost of producing, transporting, and handling the disposals of clothing and shoes that go out of fashion supposedly in a year or two has been rightly pointed out as a culprit for increase in trash in the rich world and excess exploitation of both natural and human resources in poor ones. While the garment industry brought development to a few countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia, for most of the developing world, the negatives outweighed the positives.

COVID-19 suddenly took the spotlight away from fast fashion. People who are stuck at home from lockdowns, fear, or just working no longer felt the need to buy new fancy clothes often. Pajamas and sweatpants are not meant to follow a fashion cycle and are durable enough to last more than the average fast fashion item. As COVID closes down international borders, the global supply chain fast fashion depends upon to get items to markets fast is no longer so reliable and smooth. At least until people and goods are able to regularly move about again, the business model of fast fashion is breaking down.

But as fast fashion falls out of fashion during COVID, a new kind of fast products may replace it. As people spend more time at home, they are eager to make it more than just a place to sleep like many treated it before. More furniture is needed to make apartments and houses into stylish offices, recreational dens, and family hangouts that people can bear spending the vast majority of their time in. And with no way to travel and see new places, people have both the desire and the extra money to frequently redecorate their homes based on where they want to be at that moment in time.

In what can be termed "fast furniture," people ma now be buying chairs and tables like they did with clothes and shoes before. Just as apparel can be disposed at the end of the fashion cycle, even though they remain perfectly visible, furniture can be disposed when the user wants a change of scenery at home. Just as fast fashion are enabled by global supply chains that reduced cost, small pieces of furniture are also seeing prices decline as cheaper raw materials and mass manufacturing make it no longer a luxury to throw out perfectly good home furnishings and replace them with new ones.

The ease with which furniture can be bought now may speed up the process of it becoming "fast." Gone are the days when people have to go to showrooms and see exactly how the furniture look like. Now online showrooms do just as well in helping customers get a sense of what they want to buy. And with plenty of ecommerce options available, people can just sit at home and wait for bulky items to arrive at their doors. If enough money is spent, they do not even need to laboriously assemble and install the different pieces. The labor cost of fast furniture is fast disappearing.

Of course, should people be so inclined, they can still trek to the physical showrooms. And there, the options have become more diverse. Plenty of boutique stores exist to cater to people looking for specific styles. But giant international chains like IKEA and their local counterparts have used the economy of scale to shove ever-more products into their showrooms at ever-lower prices. Business models have also shifted from maze-like showrooms in the suburbs that take hours to walk through, to more convenience store-like mini-showrooms nestled into neighborhoods where people live.

Unfortunately, the environmental damage from fast furniture may be even more severe than fast fashion. Wood are made from high-quality mature trees, and plastics from petroleum. Neither can be considered renewable, especially if people are frequently throwing them out and buying replacements. The cost of disposing fast furniture will be even more than fast fashion, as the bulkiness of furniture cause them to take up more space, break down slower, and not efficient enough to be valuable secondhand products that can be shipped and sold in poorer parts of the world like clothes could be.

It may be a matter of time before furniture makers and retailers face the same public scrutiny and criticism their fast fashion counterparts have faced for years. But just as fast fashion continued to thrive despite all the negative coverage, it is difficult to see how fast furniture can be suppressed just with words of the public. As people remain stuck at home during COVID, home makeovers are becoming popularized as a way to escape the reality of regular-going-out normality still being far far away in the future. Yet, as people are psychologically appeased by changes in the look of their living and bedrooms, the repercussions to the environment will be large.