Dio Kurazawa: “When I started talking about responsible fashion, people were like, ‘What is sustainability?’”

The fashion industry can be a difficult nut to crack, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. In our monthly series How I Got Here, we hear from Scandinavia's most exciting young creatives on how they made it – and the advice they would offer their younger selves.

“A friend of mine asked me once, why do you work so much in Scandinavia? And it was one of those moments that just showered over me… because they welcomed me. It was a culture that embraced me, took sustainability seriously, and wanted me,” explains Dio Kurazawa, trend forecaster, Ganni sustainability board member and founding partner of The Bear Scouts, an organisation working with fashion brands and suppliers to realise innovative sustainable solutions.

As a multi-disciplinary creative, it seems as if Kurazawa’s transparency and straightforwardness are innate to his personality. He is someone that exudes passion for changing an unsustainable industry and has a relatively simple mission when it comes to industry disruption and saving the planet, that is, he says, to: “ensure all products that are created are done so in a responsible way.”

It sounds simple, but Kurazawa’s path to this realisation wasn’t always so straightforward. Though in many ways, it seems like it was almost pre-destined that he would find himself immersed in the fashion world from the very get-go. “As a kid, I basically lived in magazines. My life was GQ and all the subscriptions I could get my hands on. And I would simply just daydream about being a part of that world,” he says. After a stint as a model, Kurazawa became involved in the family business, manufacturing clothes at their Thailand factory which his family had run for nearly 100 years.

In the early days, he started off by aiding various brands at the factory with everything from fabric sourcing, sampling and garment finishing. “I personally always loved finishing garments, especially working with embroidery and playing with dyes,” he says. His passion for fostering more sustainable routes in fashion and clothing design was born within the walls of the family factory too. “I was a bit turned off by foreigners coming to the factory and always demanding, demanding, demanding things. And not realising, or really truly caring, about the work that goes into it,” Kurazawa says.

Eventually, he began working with fast fashion, traveling the world – everywhere from Bangladesh, Turkey, Mexico, and China – and developing new products. This was a time, he admits, when he was “quite literally creating terrible products for the world to consume.” It wasn’t until 2012, when working for Levis as a product developer creating wash formulas in their San Francisco Eureka Lab when he had something of a eureka moment himself, and his career took a slightly different course. “The epiphany was the belief or the realisation that I could keep offering responsible solutions and could have a better adoption rate if I worked with a small number of factories who were keen to improve their responsible practices, even while I was not onsite,” he recalls. “I knew that there were so many better ways to do what I loved.”

But instead of wasting time pointing the finger at all the people and brands doing it wrong, Kurazawa focused on offering a fresh perspective and shared mission to the brands on both sides of the swinging pendulum. Even within the vicious cycle of appeasing the “blueprint makers” (the brand owners), as Kurazawa calls them – there is a growing necessity for learning from our mistakes and positive disruption.

“When I started The Bear Scouts almost ten years ago, I started by taking all those great factories I knew about, bringing them on as clients, and servicing them to create equality in the supply chain – in true partnership,” he explains. “Instead of investing in transactional relationships, we are investing in supporting such growth.”

Having already worked with the likes of Browns, (di)vision, RocNation and, of course, as one of Ganni's sustainable board members, Kurazawa is keen to pay it forward too. “We often also share our business model and platform to help young entrepreneurs get started. We work in textiles, footwear, eyewear, cosmetics, home goods and car interiors… we don’t endorse competition and we do what we can to provide assistance to those starting their journey,” he says.

But as highly future-proof as trend forecasting and careers in the more sustainable side of fashion might be, they are also quite difficult to grasp. How do you exactly get to the point where you have enough knowledge to guide others? The main thing to remember, says Kurazawa, is not to be put off easily, hold true to your bigger belief system, in both yourself and your motivations. “You have to continue to ride the wave of people telling you you're not good enough or it's the wrong time. I can guarantee you everyone who's made anything good from themselves has been told this. When I started talking about responsible fashion, people were like, ‘But what is sustainability?’”

And sometimes, you need to just go back to basics, and focus on some core, key guiding principles to see you on your way: “Walk in kindness, hold focus, stay on your path and stop believing things that don't serve you.”