Find out about (BA) Fashion Business and Promotion student Tara McReynold's Instagreen project.
What’s your final year project?
"Instagreen” looks to make changes to Instagram to make it more ethically and sustainably focused in order to offer a fairer platform for smaller brands to have the opportunity to promote themselves to Instagram users. The platform will begin to shift its values from being driven by fast fashion to offering customers the opportunity to shop greener will full transparency, honesty and ethos at the forefront of the platform's future goals.
What do you want to achieve?
- Educate users on environmental impact of fast fashion through use of influential figures.
- Increase transparency to make corporations more responsible for their carbon footprint impact and to reduce greenwashing.
- Promote smaller sustainable and ethical businesses and influencers to encourage consumers to shop less mass market, making it a fairer platform.
- Build a strong community between brands, influencers and consumers to promote sustainability and ethical treatment.
- To add features to the platform that make it easier for consumers to shop green and to make sustainable suitable for the mass market.
What’s the unique selling point?
The first mass market social media platform that has a dedicated entity to support and encourage both businesses, influencers and consumers to create a greener focused fashion industry.
This includes, allowing brands and influencers to be green verified, with those with the highest levels of ethics and sustainability receiving a green tick. Other changes included Transparency Links, similar to Price Links on images, they will give detailed information on the manufacturing, increasing transparency and ease of shopping green online. Also added a ‘Green’ area to the Explore Page on the platform, making shopping green accessible and giving smaller ethical and sustainable brands greater reach to Instagram’s users.
What inspired you?
The inspiration stemmed from environmental activists such as Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, identifying how the success of their campaigns was due to effective use of social media to gain support and spread awareness, educating the public of the environmental crisis that faces today’s society.
What did your research find?
The research found that the over 70% of the public believed influencers and Instagram were partly to blame for the rise in fast fashion, due to the hugely influential power it has over Generation Z and Millennials. Therefore, the project decided to use the power of social media to promote a better, greener future for the fashion industry.
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