Ethical, affordable streetwear. 100% cotton on basics — next-to-skin. 80/20 cotton-poly blend on outerwear. 30% of every purchase publicly redirected to verified NGOs.
Vote with your wallet. Drop 001 ships Q1 2027.
Where Your £1 Goes
Here is exactly how a pound you spend with ZAAN breaks down. Drop-level economics, published before launch, verified after every drop by our Head of Accountability.
Coming Soon
Nine drops planned in Year 1. Products released in tiers — accessories first, basics next, outerwear in Q1 2027.
Where does your money go?
Every purchase you make funds something. Most brands won't tell you what. Here is what the biggest ones are doing with yours.
"Wear your values. Vote with your wallet. Buy better — without trying harder."
ZAAN Mission Statement · 2026
Every Order
Every ZAAN order comes with something you didn't pay for — and something the brand didn't have to give you.
A pocket-sized card showing exactly how much your order donated. QR code links to the live giving dashboard. Your proof that something real happened.
A small hard-woven ZAAN patch. Iron or sew onto anything. The brand travels with you without asking for anything in return.
A small matchbox carrying the ZAAN wordmark and a line from the mission. A considered object that does the brand's work quietly.
A hardcover editorial object. Investigative journalism on the fashion industry's darkest practices. Every fact verified. No brand named.
The Giving Model
30% of every penny ZAAN makes goes here. Publicly tracked. Independently verified. Community directed.
How It Works
Every product purchase. Every time. No threshold, no conditions.
30% of net profit routes directly to the ZAAN Foundation — legally committed, not discretionary.
Every visitor gets one vote. Every purchase multiplies your voting power. The community directs where money goes.
Alex — our Head of Accountability and investigative journalist — publishes a verified impact report within 30 days of every drop closing.
Drop 001 — Live Vote Preview
Live voting opens at launch · These are illustrative allocations
Our Partners
Every pound routes through UK-registered, independently audited NGOs with documented on-the-ground delivery.
Providing healthcare to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and refugee camps since 1984. UK-registered. Fully audited.
Providing free medical treatment and humanitarian relief to sick and injured children regardless of nationality.
Emergency food, medical and humanitarian relief to civilians in Sudan's ongoing civil crisis. The largest displacement crisis in the world.
One slot reserved for a local charity voted for by the community each quarter. Auto-detected by your location.
ZAAN Editorial
A preview of what every ZAAN order over £150 will include from Drop 002. Investigative journalism. Luxury print format. Every fact verified. No brand named.
A global sportswear brand charges £12 for a t-shirt. What does that £12 actually buy — and who pays the difference?
In the garment factories of South and Southeast Asia, the workers who make the clothes worn by hundreds of millions of people earn wages courts have described as legally insufficient to survive on.
"They stitched messages into the lining of the clothes, asking customers to help. The brands issued statements."
In 2017, factory workers in Istanbul producing garments for some of the world's most recognisable high-street labels began hiding handwritten notes inside the clothes they were making. The notes were addressed to customers. They said the workers had not been paid. The factory — ████████████ — was supplying multiple global brands including ████████████. The workers were owed months of wages. The brands issued statements. The statements did not mention the notes.
The Bangladesh minimum wage for garment workers is $74 a month. The living wage, as calculated by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, is $302. The difference — $228 a month, $2,736 a year — is the gap between a life and a wage. One major sportswear brand's CEO received compensation in 2023 that was 24,000 times more than the annual pay of a factory worker in Sri Lanka making that brand's clothing. This is not an allegation. It is the company's own proxy filing.
The word "sustainable" has no legal definition in fashion. It can mean whatever a brand needs it to mean in the moment its marketing team writes the label. "Eco-friendly," "conscious," "responsible," "green" — none of these terms are regulated in any meaningful way across most jurisdictions. A brand can call a t-shirt made of 5% recycled polyester "sustainable" and face no legal consequence.
"60% of sustainability claims by European fashion giants are unsubstantiated and misleading." — UN Environment Programme
In 2024, UK regulators concluded investigations into three major online fashion retailers over misleading green claims. All three gave legally binding commitments to change how they presented their sustainability credentials. None admitted wrongdoing.
One large brand — ████████████ — operated a "conscious" fashion line for over a decade. A 2022 investigation found its scoring system showed products as more eco-friendly than they actually were. In some cases, the system rated garments as better for the environment while the brand's own labour practices in the supply chain deteriorated.
The fashion industry produces enough water pollution annually to meet the needs of five million people. It emits as much carbon as the entire European Union combined. And it is, simultaneously, one of the most heavily marketed "green" industries in the world. The gap between the message and the reality is not incidental. It is structural.
The fashion industry spent a near-record $28 million lobbying US policymakers in a single year. In Europe, it is fighting regulations that would hold it legally accountable for the workers in its supply chain. The people spending that money are the same people whose marketing tells you they care about the planet.
Lobbying is legal. It is, in most democracies, a constitutionally protected form of political speech. What is worth examining is what the fashion industry lobbies for — and what it lobbies against.
According to data compiled by OpenSecrets, the fashion industry nearly doubled its US lobbying spend over the past decade. The spike was triggered not by a trade dispute or a tariff — but by an emerging wave of sustainability regulations. Bills that would require brands to disclose their carbon emissions. Bills that would hold companies legally liable for wage violations in their supply chains. The industry's response was to spend more money to slow them down.
"The industry is facing a suite of regulations aimed at curbing its environmental impact, its use of hazardous chemicals, and its links to labour abuses. In response, it is stepping up its efforts to influence sustainability-focused policy."
— Business of Fashion, 2023
One major sportswear brand — ████████████ — has conducted more reported lobbying containing the words "Trans-Pacific Partnership" than any other company since 2006. The Partnership, had it passed, would have eliminated tariffs on textiles from Vietnam to the US — a regulation worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually to a company whose manufacturing is concentrated in Southeast Asia. The lobbying was successful.
The brands that spend millions lobbying against worker protection legislation are the same brands whose marketing shows workers in sunlit factories, smiling. The gap between the message and the mechanism is not a contradiction. It is a business strategy.
Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. This is not an accident. It is a business model.
The fashion industry is the second-largest consumer of water on Earth. It produces 20% of all global industrial wastewater. It emits 10% of annual global carbon. And it is growing.
"The industry dries up water resources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year."
Consumers today purchase 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago. They keep each garment half as long. A third of the clothing produced globally is burned or trashed before it is ever sold. This is overproduction as standard operating procedure. The planet absorbs the cost.
Just four of the 250 largest fashion brands have disclosed emissions reduction targets that meet the level of ambition called for by the UN. Fifty-seven percent of brands show no clear progress on their climate targets at all.
In the 1960s, the Sugar Research Foundation — a trade group representing the US sugar industry — paid researchers at Harvard to conduct a review of the existing scientific literature on diet and heart disease. The researchers, later identified through declassified internal documents, cherry-picked the data. They minimised the evidence linking sugar to coronary artery disease and maximised the evidence against saturated fat. The review was published in a major medical journal. It shaped US dietary guidelines for decades.
This was not rogue behaviour. It was strategy. Documents obtained by researchers at the University of California showed the Sugar Research Foundation had identified the threat that emerging health science posed to sugar consumption and had decided, systematically, to redirect the science.
"It was by far the strongest relationship I have observed between conflicts of interest and science." — Dean Schillinger MD, UCSF
Of 26 studies published between 2001 and 2016 that found no link between sugary drinks and obesity, all 26 were funded by the sugary drinks industry or conducted by people with financial ties to the industry. Of 34 independent studies, 33 found a link.
The median employee at one global fast food chain — identified as a part-time worker in Poland — earned $17,492 in 2024. The CEO of that company earned $18.2 million. That is a pay ratio of 1,014 to one.
The conventional wisdom in brand strategy held for decades that consumer boycotts don't work. Beginning in late 2023, that wisdom stopped being true.
A global fast food chain reported that its sales growth in the Middle East, China and India during the final quarter of 2023 reached 0.7 percent — far below the 5.5 percent analysts had expected. The CEO, on an earnings call, cited boycotts by consumers in Muslim-majority markets. The cause was clear: the chain's Israeli franchisee had announced on social media that it had donated thousands of free meals to military forces.
A global coffee chain lost more than $11 billion in market value during the three weeks following November 2023 — its longest streak of stock decline since its initial public offering in 1992. The trigger was not a product failure. It was a tweet. The company's own workers' union had posted "Solidarity with Palestine" on a social media account. The company's response was to file a lawsuit against the union. The lawsuit became the story.
"The actions of a franchisee cannot be isolated from the company's worldwide operations."
— Human rights researcher, cited by Reuters
The Middle East franchise of one coffee chain cut 2,000 jobs in March 2024 — directly attributable to the decline in customer traffic caused by the boycott. These were baristas and shift workers in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE. Workers who had nothing to do with the legal decisions made in Seattle were made redundant because of them.
In warehouses timed to the second, a rate — set by an algorithm — determines whether a worker has a job. No human sets the rate. No human can lower it.
The world's largest online retailer employs hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers. In 2024, its fulfillment centres reported serious injuries at a rate more than double the warehouse industry average. A US Senate investigation found the company had manipulated its own safety data to conceal the true scale of harm.
"Amazon's continued and daily endangerment of the nation's second largest private-sector workforce must end." — US Senate HELP Committee, December 2024
A December 2024 Senate investigation found that a major online retailer had not only failed to address the unsafe conditions in its warehouses — it had actively manipulated the data it reported to safety regulators. Workers suffering from injuries were not referred to outside medical care, a practice that kept the injuries off official records.
Workers in warehouses managed by algorithmic rate systems described being unable to take bathroom breaks without falling behind and losing their jobs. The algorithm does not take sick days. It does not know what a human body can sustain. It knows only the rate.
The phone in your pocket contains cobalt. The laptop you work on contains cobalt. The electric vehicle heralded as the solution to the climate crisis contains cobalt. More than 70% of the world's cobalt comes from one country — the Democratic Republic of Congo — and a significant proportion of it is extracted by artisanal miners, including children as young as six, working in tunnels dug by hand, earning two dollars a day, without protective equipment, in mines that periodically collapse.
This has been known for a decade. Amnesty International published its first detailed investigation into cobalt mining in the DRC in 2016. It traced the mineral from artisanal mining sites through a Chinese processing company to the supply chains of Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google parent Alphabet, and Tesla.
"There is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from Congo." — Siddharth Kara, testimony to US Congress 2023
In March 2024, a US appeals court ruled in favour of five major technology companies — finding that their commercial relationship with cobalt suppliers did not constitute legal participation in the exploitation of child labour. The children who had brought the case were told they had no legal remedy against the companies that profited from the mineral those children extracted.
Vote with your wallet. Every device, every purchase, every pound — you have a choice where it goes. ZAAN is one place that publishes the answer.
The supply chain story in fashion is well-documented. The worker rights story is gaining ground. What is almost never told is the third story — how consumer spending, several steps removed from any obvious connection, ends up funding state violence.
It does not require intent. Most people buying a pair of trainers, a coffee, or a fast food meal are not thinking about geopolitics. They are buying breakfast. But consumer capitalism is a machine that converts purchasing decisions into capital allocation decisions, and those decisions travel further than the transaction that started them.
A global brand — call it ████████████ — operates a franchised model in a region. The franchise is locally owned and operated. Corporate policy, the brand argues, does not govern the political decisions of franchisees. When the franchisee makes a donation to military forces — confirmed, documented, announced publicly on social media — the parent company issues a statement saying it does not take political positions. The donation had already been made. The meals had already been delivered.
"The question is not whether the brand intended to fund violence. The question is whether the brand took any steps to ensure it didn't."
— Alex, ZAAN Head of Accountability
High street banks are behind almost every industry in the world through their loans, insurance and other financing. A 2019 report by Facing Finance identified ten European banks with combined investments of €24.2 billion in arms companies involved in conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya. The largest volumes of exports went to Saudi Arabia and the UAE — countries defined as unfree by human rights organisations.
The five largest UK high street banks all received marks against them in independent ethical assessments for their investments in arms companies. This is not a fringe concern. It is the mainstream financial system. The money you deposit funds the weapons. The weapons do the work. The work creates the crises. The crises create the need for the NGOs. The NGOs ask for donations. The same banks process the donations.
In 2024, global military spending hit $2.7 trillion — the highest in recorded history. The companies that manufacture the weapons posted record revenues. This is where the money goes.
The same year that consumer boycotts cost fast food and coffee chains billions in market value, the companies that make the weapons used in the conflicts that triggered those boycotts posted their most profitable year on record.
"There was a marked rise in arms revenues in 2023, and this is likely to continue in 2024." — SIPRI researcher, December 2024
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute tracks the revenues of the world's 100 largest arms-producing companies. In their 2024 report, they noted that many companies had launched recruitment drives, optimistic about future sales. The wars driving that optimism had created conditions in which demand for ammunition, air defence systems, and surveillance technology was outpacing the industry's capacity to produce it. This was described as a growth opportunity.
ZAAN does not pretend that a clothing brand changes this. We do not claim our hoodies will end wars. What we claim is simpler and more verifiable: 30% of every purchase goes directly to the people caught in the middle of those conflicts. The money trail from your purchase to the people it reaches is public. It always will be.