What is Permet?

Permet is building the first transparent, open-source, community-owned toolkit for the fashion creator economy.

We want to return power + ownership to creators and producers - and eliminate negative human rights and environmental externalities from the fashion supply chain.

How does Permet fit Gitcoin Grants criteria?

• Permet is building a regenerative garment production system that breaks the "create to sell" garment production cycle - which currently drives the garment industry and creates massive waste in the process.
• We are developing models for traceable garment production — which make metadata on the resources and labor behind garment collections accessible and transparent.
• We are also creating new incentive models and technological rails that allow for the creation of value outside of the actual physical production of clothes (and the resulting waste that comes from that process.
• Currently working on an OSS regenerative merch production tool that leverages trustless, onchain data + smart contracts — an environment and ethical-labor friendly alternative to current destructive merch production systems.
• Soft-launched a research publication open-sourcing the process behind building Permet’s OSS tooling + physical supply chain — focused on educating young creatives on the use cases of blockchain technology. Can be viewed at permet.co/research.
• Launched Visual Maintenance System e-zine advocating for and building community around sustainable fashion — has been adopted by prominent artists like figure31, shl0ms, and terra0.
• Permet is also working on the first open-source community-based supply chain. We have created an MVP supply chain in Toronto, CA and are producing the first garment sample prototypes with this supply chain.

What progress has been made since alpha round?

• Permet (fka HibiscusDAO) has been part of past Gitcoin Climate + DEI + OSS rounds.
• Our goal is to onboard new demographics into the blockchain ecosystem by creating new use cases on the application layer — especially for people of color and other traditionally overlooked demographics (who are the next generation of creatives and the next billion ETH users).
• Since the last grant round that Permet participated in (alpha round) — distributed just under $25K to supply chain / participants, proving out a prototype model for alternative incentives in garment production.
• We’ve also built an MVP supply chain of micro-factories and at-home producers in Toronto and have started producing samples of our first garments produced with this open-source supply chain.
• We also created a research publication to open-source the core ideas/philosophy behind the work we are doing — with the goal of creating a community of the next generation of garment producers — and a garden of complementary initiatives and products that work in tandem / synthesis to Permet.
• In the continuing spirit Virgil Abloh’s “Free Game” — we are open sourcing the principles and ideas behind leveraging blockchain technology as a way to give the people in the garment production supply chain (who actually need it) access to the life-changing use cases blockchains and OSS can enable.
• Launched Visual Maintenance System e-zine advocating for and building community around sustainable fashion — has been adopted by prominent artists like figure31, shl0ms, and terra0.
• We firmly believe that once the youth “hustlers” (or “shooters” — as we call them) realize the potential use cases of blockchain — adoption is inevitable. This ongoing initiative be viewed at permet.co/research.
• Permet onboarded a new team member (who happens to be a black woman) — the team continues to be 100% POC + black-led.

WHY?

Current Landscape of Apparel = Exploitation

The apparel and luxury market is growing exponentially: reaching $1.9 trillion globally in 2019 - and expected to surpass $3 trillion in the next decade.

But the industry's success is rooted in exploitation. Its business model is based around maximizing profit - by minimizing value returned to stakeholders.

Traditional Fashion = Humanitarian Exploitation

Slave, child, and sweatshop labor are all common in the supply chain of traditional brands.

These human rights violations are well-documented but suppressed via marketing and PR.

Traditional Fashion = Creative Exploitation

Talented young designers generate massive value for brands - often with little to no compensation.

A successful, popular design will earn a brand millions, yet the designer behind it will see none of these earnings. Instead, their designs become the IP of the brand.

Traditional Fashion = Environmental Exploitation

Fashion brands intentionally leverage planned obsolescence and instill an increasingly consumerist mindset based on overconsumption to feed their continued need for profit.

When overconsumption is encouraged, true sustainability is impossible to achieve.

We’re a black-led team and here’s what we’re working on:

Enabling Profit Redistribution + Transparent Supply Chain + Community Ownership = Human Rights Impact

Permet recently created the first ever on-chain profit redistribution contract for garment production - redistributing profits from FWB merch sales to supply chain participants.

Permet is looking to build on this by onboarding sewers, pattern makers, printers & other workers from the garment industry who are "stuck" working for a factory with no access to profit redistribution - giving them ownership over the value they create.

Building cryptographic profit sharing into our tooling enables the creator economy for apparel production by retaining and redistributing the value created in making and wearing apparel.

Crypto technologies help share ownership with stakeholders:

• Community owned ateliers vs. factories and manufacturers.
• Fork-able concepts and tools can be validated and iterated on by community creators.
• Designs registered as on-chain vectors - enabling proper credit and compensation.
• Future royalties of products can be distributed back to creators and the community.
• Locally accessible physical design and fashion resources.

Building a Transparent Supply Chain

Creating open source, end-to-end apparel production supply chain + tech infrastructure that allows creators to easily create new garments on existing bases - via on chain portfolios that can forked, remixed, and recombined.

Creating “Proof of Ethical Production” + Oracles

Eventually, we want to create a system of producing clothes that uses consensus-driven blockchain technology to verify products are being made ethically.

Fighting Fast Fashion = Environmental Impact

As a part of our stack - we are working on the first solution for holding fast-fashion polluters accountable.

Now we want to enable supply chain provenance and environmental transparency in the garment production process: create and test the first functional model for an open-source apparel supply chain to show how the garments were produced and the corresponding environmental impacts.

Supply Chain Accountability

What does this look like in practice?

Now that we’ve experimented with profit redistribution - we want to run experiments to figure out how to capture garment production metadata on chain.

And after that - putting these new data capture + manufacturing processes into practice by experimenting with a garment collection that incorporates provenance and accountability around environmental impacts of the collection.

We hope that our efforts will set precedent and can serve as a model for future apparel projects. The current landscape of crypto fashion is “merch” that encourages wasteful consumption, enablement of existing exploitative power structures, and no regard for the environmental impacts.

Permet seeks to change that by providing an alternative approach that enables sustainability which already reduces waste or gives accountability around environmental impacts of garment production.

Open-Sourcing a Model for Ethical Clothing Production

This experiment will inform the development of environmental oracles that will allow any apparel project to open-source their environmental impact and adopt new environmental standards - all done via leveraging supply chain metadata arising through the garment production process.

This supply chain experiment will be done with local supply chain participants in Toronto, Canada - with the hope of subsequently expanding out into other countries.

Permet is creating and open sourcing the first model for a decentralized, transparent supply chain in fashion.

How = Utilizing L2s for Real-World Crypto Use Cases

Blockchain technology is often criticized by naysayers as not having real-world uses.

Permet’s goal of creating an open-source, community-owned supply chain is one of the strongest examples of an IRL use case for crypto.

In order to create a truly sustainable, community-owned supply chain for clothing, Permet needs to focus heavily on grassroots community work - onboarding sewers, pattern makers, textile producers, and other supply chain participants.

In many cases - these supply chain participants are members of underrepresented groups: people of color without much exposure to technology - who would be vulnerable to exploitation by traditional fashion industry structures and institutions.

These participants in the garment supply chain have never heard of blockchain before.

Onboarding them onto Ethereum mainnet - and having them pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars in gas fees - is simply not feasible for this demographic.

Instead we will work directly with these local supply chain participants to onboard them into crypto via L2s - which can provide an accessible, feasible entry point to these new ecosystem participants.

We hope to use L2 infrastructure as foundational substrates to build real world utility and onboard new non-crypto native users.

We will open-source this process to create onboarding resources and serve as a model to other projects who are building real world use cases on L2s - to help accelerate driving real-world adoption.

What’s next on the roadmap?

We’ve hit our short term goal to use liquid 0xSplits to experiment with redistribution contracts for primary sales for garment workers since the last Gitcoin grants round.

We seek to build on this success by creating garments made using a transparent supply chain by open sourcing garment production metadata - proving out our model for supply chain accountability.

Through this process - we will onboard underrepresented communities onto Ethereum L2.

As mentioned above - we’re working towards a system of producing clothes that uses consensus-driven blockchain technology to verify products are being made ethically, without negative human rights and environmental externalities.

With an improved model we can build better to do more, produce less, and return value to creators and users.

For a deeper dive into our ecosystem, we invite you to read the first edition of our whitepaper linked on our website: permet.co