Background
Bad Days the Podcast is a podcast on fashion sustainability. The essence of podcasting is the creation of audio and/or video content for an audience that wants to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want, and how they want. As the host, I explore issues that relate to sustainability within the fashion industry, as well as discuss how I can play a role in fighting this as a small business owner. Bad Days The Podcast was created as an extension of my clothing brand and also previous digital artefact Bad Days The Label. I wanted to make a podcast because I felt the need to take responsibility and advocate for change in a space that has such detrimental effects on the environment. If I want to be a part of the fashion industry, I want to do it in a way that is honest, transparent and helpful for the environment.
Project Utility
My digital artefact was created to address two problems. The first was understanding sustainability within the fashion industry and educating others on these issues. I feel that fast fashion has made us passive consumers. We see, we like, we buy. Most fast fashion pieces are cheap, poor quality, disposable, do not last very long. In Australia alone, people are dumping 15 tonnes of clothing and fabric waste every 10 minutes. Australians also buy an average of 27kg of textiles each year (including leather and homewares) and then discard 23kg into landfills, despite the fact they are mostly non-biodegradable. So the majority of it will not be resold or given to another home, just thrown away. I feel that we need to utilise social media platforms better – for awareness and education on these issues rather than advertisements.
The second was to create transparency within my own brand and to discuss how to do better as a sustainable small business. I believe that this podcast will not only help my brand with it being one of the first to be completely open and honest about their practices, it will also give my customers and followers a sense of community and support within their own sustainability journeys. Developing my project around fashion sustainability will help my users understand the fashion industry a little bit better and will help them make more conscious decisions around purchasing clothing. Additionally, it should inspire other small business owners to follow in my direction as I share my own experiences, give advice and share awareness. My audiences are self-aware, environmentally conscious individuals and business owners who want to learn more about an industry they are also passionate about.
Podcasting can also be a trickly thing to tackle. Like most other audio or video media, podcasts span the continuum from can’t get enough to deadly boring. It’s a highly subjective evaluation of course, since something you consider boring might be positively addictive for others. I was excited to take on this challenge.
I had to create succesful positioning within my brand and it’s niche by following 3 simple steps:
Understand what your consumers want
Understand what your company’s and brand capabilities are
Understand how each competitor is positioning their brand
The Branding Journal
I had a few competitors as fashion sustainability is a popular topic. However, there was a gap in the market for actual businesses who use their platform through podcasting to be as transparent as I was. Do you what materials your favourite brand uses? Do you know if they have a Code of Conduct? Do they source their final stage of production from countries with a high risk of labour abuse? These are things you should know about your favourite brands and my goal is to normalise this.
Production Method
I decided I would develop this project by posting weekly episodes discussing one topic of sustainability within the fashion industry. I wanted to take my time focusing on these issues so that the information I present was not overwhelming to the audience. I would pre-record a script (and sometimes wing-it), record my podcast, edit and post. I would then spend a few days pushing promotional content on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. As the weeks went by, changes were made to the consistent posting and amount of promotional content due to time restraints and other struggles, which you can hear about in my beta video below:
“So you’ve got this power, you’ve got this power of sort of emotional connection, right. …it wants emotional honesty. And when you supply it it’s very effective to the audience. And so… and it can come up in all sorts of different venues.”
Alex Blumburg | Power Your Podcast With Storytelling
Important learning moment 1: Time is everything
In my project pitch, I stated that I wanted to upload an episode every fortnight, however, because of the Covid situation affecting my ability to work, I was able to utilise my free time and upload weekly. It was going extremely well for the first 4 weeks. I felt motivated, ambitious and driven to provide quality episodes and was able to succeed in this week a fortnightly timeframe. However, as identified in my beta, I decided to normalise a fortnightly schedule as I started to feel the pressure in my time restraints. This is because Covid restrictions started to ease and I found myself easing back into my normal, pre-covid lifestyle. In order to align myself with our fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny workframe I knew that resorting back to a fortnightly schedule will be worth it. However, I was a little worried about how my audience would deal with this change and if it would be a positive or negative one.
I ultimately decided to take this risk after hearing feedback from my classmates. “Normalising a new posting schedule is important as it creates a new consistency with the audience”. According to Social Media Today, consistency is your best friend when it comes to social media. Being consistent in your post frequency is really important in order to grow a social media audience. Now if you bring that concept into the type of content you’re creating, you’re giving your audience a reason to come back every week. This new posting schedule also “allows for time and resources to create the best quality of podcasts.” It gave me more time to focus on the quality of the content. I ultimately had more time to prepare, write, practice and edit the podcast after filming.
Pictured above is some constructive student feedback from my BETA.
I posted weekly from Episode 1 (August 12th) through till Episode 4 (September 2nd). It is clear from my podcast stats that my lack of time-management from the strains of life affected my motivation and therefore ultimately affected my audiences actions. However, as I normalised the posting schedule to every fortnight my views actually spiked. Luckily, the change in schedule actually created a positive outcome for me and my podcast. It is clear that in the weeks that an episode is not released there is less downloads e.g. between Octover 18th and October 25th.
To fix this issue I prioritise the promotion of the podcast through social media. This can be done via visual soundbites, q&a’s and feed/story posts.
What I learnt from this is that time-management is everything. As I had other aspects of my life affect this change, I managed to be flexible and adapt. “Without this unstructuring, the creation of a new structure cannot proceed—since the bits and pieces are still tied together as meaning within unchallenge domains or concepts” (Boyd, 1976). I took a risk, and it came out successful. I could have kept with a fortnightly schedule as I prepared to in my pitch, however my passion for this project took over and I do not regret attempting a weekly schedule for it. It became an important lesson to the project.
Important learning moment 2: Camera shy
From the feedback from the BCM302 seminar in week 7 and the response from my followers, they insisted that I utilise video footage to promote my podcast. I took an extra week off uploading an episode (and normalise the fortnightly schedule) to sort out how I would be able to create video footage, whether that to be with my camera or my phone. Neither would be able to connect to my microphone which was my first issue. My second issue was that I usually record in my car in my parking garage. The reason I do this is because my voice is not bouncing off the walls like it would in my apartment. It is also more quiet as I live in an apartment complex on the first floor in a busy neighbourhood with construction that my microphone easily picks up.
Unfortunately I had to come to the conclusion that filming at this stage of my digital artefact would not align with the F.I.S.T method as it was much more time consuming and not as simple as I would have hoped. So instead, I utilised the “Visual Soundbite” mode on my podcast account to create audio snippets to promote my work on my stories, my Instagram posts and on twitter.
In my beta video I said that I felt defeated. After taking another week to think about my options, I decided that feeling defeated wasn’t one.
The first issue to combat was connecting my camera to my microphone. This is was not going to be possible, but there needed to be another way. I am a perfectionist and believe that if something is not perfect then it isn’t worth sharing to the world. I decided that this was not a good way of thinking. I had to choose between good camera quality and good sound. As the main focus of this project is the podcast itself, I decided that good sound was my priority. If I were to create video content again, I would use zoom as it is free, easily accessible and could be a new potential for including other small businesses and sustainable fashion activists into the conversation.
My second issue was to combat the anxiety I felt surrounding being filmed. One of the issues I had with the camera in my face was my immediate shyness towards being filmed which made it hard to focus on what I was talking about. Especially as a solo creator, I knew that all eyes would be on me and I felt almost awkward about it. As I said, I’m a perfectionist.
With all of this in mind, I decided to reach out to one of my best friends and small business owner Monique, who is the owner of Brows By Mon. We spoke briefly at the beginning of this project about collaborating in an episode but I had not thought it was the right time, until now. It was like the stars aligned perfectly. My final episode (Episode 8) is my favourite episode to date. We used Zoom so I could screen record the conversation. I was able to use my microphone and she used her Air Pods. Although the sound isn’t as perfect as usual and the camera quality is average, I think that this has been my most successful episode so far. It is the fasted downloaded episode with 33 downloads in the last 36 hours (uploaded 28/10). It has been shared through both our social media platforms. I plan to have the video version up by early next week, but in the meantime have created little 1 minute video snippets that I have uploaded to Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. On top of this, I will still be able to create the audio Visual Soundbites as I did for previous episodes to have some audio sneakpeaks of the episode.
On top of this already successful episode, I had a friend from high school reach out to me and offer to create some music for the introduction of the episodes. It was so nice, and now I have an amazing introductory song that the audiences will soon be familiar with as I insert it into every episode.
What I learnt from this is that time, patient and trial-and-error is absolutely everything. If you work hard enough for something, you will succeed even if it is not in the way you imagined.
Important learning moment 3: Feedback is vital
Feedback was so important for my project to gain the success that it did. It pushed me to create more even when I felt defeated. Despite failing early and failing often, I had so much support around me and was so appreciative of this.
Although the majority of the feedback was positive, I always strived to take into consideration the constructive criticism as I knew that this information would help me rather than harm. For example, in episode 5 I spoke about greenwashing and other marketing tactics that fast fashion brands use to grab the attention of the younger eco-conscious generation. I recieved this private message (below) and realised that she was right. In order to avoid any defamation lawsuit (thinking worst case scenario here) I have made a note to not use words such as “allegedly,” “apparently,” and “in my opinion.” Based on the tips to avoiding defamation by Inforrn.org, I had vowed to be aware of what I am saying, control the meaning, only say what I can prove, use the language of opinion and make sure that opinion is based on true facts. This was an important learning moment for me and brought me back to BCM113.
On the 28th of September I introduced an exciting new development to the project. Originally, my podcast was only available on Spotify and the RSS feed. However, I wanted to expand and therefore uploaded my episodes to the Apple Podcast streaming service. This may not have been a necessary development as according to my Instagram poll, 83% of listeners choose Spotify. Despite this, I still believed that it was important an important choice. Switchboard, a public third-party streaming service says that streaming to multiple platforms is important because it helps you extend your reach. Using a third party service (I use Buzzsprout) makes it easy as this allows you to send one live feed and transmit it to any number of platforms you choose – simultaneously! It is also automatic once you have subscribed.
According to my statistics via Buzzsprout, Spotify reigned as the top app used to download by podcast, sitting at 101 downloads.
Despite Apple Podcasts sitting at 5th place, I still received positive feedback for my iteration, and take this as a positive development rather than a useless one. One more thing that I like about Apple Podcasts is that I can see when someone has given my podcast a rating, which is not possible through Spotify.
The Future of Bad Days The Podcast
I have fallen in love with this project, and am so appreciative of the positive feedback from my friends, my classmates and my followers. I am able to add this project to my portfolio for any future career opportunities in the social media and content creation field. I now have a huge amount of background knowledge that will help me in my sustainability journey as a small business owner. I have successfuly created a transparent brand and I know that I have inspired other small businesses and fashion enthusiasts to think differently and buy differently. I hope to continue this project for a long time and hope you can continue to follow me!
BAD DAYS THE PODCAST
Rachel Weisz 