Eleven Eleven’s made-to-order bandhani dresses, available on Prelude: First, it provides cashflow to emerging designers, so your purchase effectively goes toward the labor and materials needed to create your piece. Advance orders also help them produce only what is needed, rather than rely on a retailer’s estimation of what might sell in six months.
That leads to her third point: that Prelude can create a direct line between the designer and customer, with no middle man . “As a designer, you’ve poured your heart and soul into a collection and spent a lot of time on it, but if you’re shipping it to a third party [like a department store], they’re selling it to a person you haven’t met,” Tonti says. “We were starting to feel frustrated with not knowing who that person was. It made sense to imagine a future where that’s different.
In addition to the 12 labels Prelude launched with, Tonti is in conversations with other new designers who are interested in testing the pre-order model. “It’s very rare to talk to a young designer now who isn’t thinking about sustainability,” she says. “How integrated it is in their work is a different story, and everyone has their own take on it—maybe they don’t use animal products, but they use synthetics. There’s a constant to-ing and fro-ing.