Hey there! In April, we asked readers like you to share your feedback with us, and it was overwhelmingly positive: 94% of respondents said they would be at least “somewhat disappointed” if anxiety.eco no longer existed; 30% would be “very disappointed.” 

Which is why we are, indeed, very disappointed ourselves to share that we are putting anxiety.eco on an indefinite hiatus. (Don’t worry — we both continue working in our fractional roles at Good On You.) This week’s briefing is about what’s happening as we conclude this iteration of the project.

The simple reason we’re winding down is that, as a boot-strapped independent project, we’ve run out of runway. A lot of folks don’t know that every issue costs us money to send. The small cohort of Founding and Lifetime Members who generously supported us have helped us make it to the six-month mark, but we’re unable to cover our costs for the next six months, let alone pay ourselves. 

Below, we’ll share some lessons we’ve learned. We also think it’s only right to offer Founding Members prorated refunds, which we will pay out of our own pockets.

We’re also setting up a temporary tip jar if you’ve found our work insightful and would like to help cover our wind-down costs.

We’ll be back next week with one final feature. 

Thank you for reading and supporting.

JD and Amy

What’s happening

At the end of May, this worker-owned media outlet will go on an indefinite hiatus.

As we wind down anxiety.eco, we’re feeling sad it is shorter-lived than we’d hoped. But we also remain really proud of the original reporting we’ve published on a weekly basis. And in our final briefing, we’re explaining why we’ve made this decision now.

We launched this independent publication with a big question: Could we create a sustainable venue for the kinds of reporting that fashion media has largely side-lined in recent years? We failed this time, but it remains an important question.

As we’ve said from the start, most problems in the fashion industry have straightforward solutions. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to implement, but too often, the media has looked the other way to keep advertisers happy, or has done the greenwashing on behalf of brands that would rather talk about anything other than the root of the problem: their business model. Today, big brands largely exist to amass wealth for billionaire owners and shareholders while garment workers toil for poverty wages. It’s unsustainable, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended. By failing to recognise this, “sustainability” coverage too often perpetuates the status quo.

It’s why we set out to be a reader-funded publication — something that enables journalists to report the truth without fear of censorship from advertisers or owners. The hard thing about this model is convincing enough readers that accountability journalism is worth funding. That’s easier in some industries than others. 

In fashion accountability, as our survey suggested, the reader-funded model is tough: 300 incredible readers replied to our survey in April confirming that they valued what we published. (This correlates with other really strong audience signals such as list growth and open rates, which have been promising since day one.) Survey respondents encouraged us to keep going and shared brilliant ideas for where we could go deeper. 

But the survey also confirmed that there’s a real “willingness to pay” gap for this kind of work, even among the readers who do see value in it. In a reader-funded model, it is our job to close that gap, and we couldn’t do it fast enough — at least not with the resources we have available to us.

The generous support of our Founding Members has been the only reason we’ve made it this far. With more time or more money, we might’ve been able to sustain our work for another 12 months — possibly breaking even by then, even paying ourselves a minimum wage.

Ultimately, we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved with your support, and of the firm friendship we’ve cultivated during this project. We have hope in the brilliant readers who we’ve been lucky enough to get to know along the way.   

What people are saying

When we started this, plenty of people told us consumers don’t care about fashion’s harms, that they wouldn’t pay attention. But 300 of you filled out our survey, and tens of thousands of you opened and read every single issue we sent each week. You all told us an encouraging counternarrative.

Reading through your responses was one of the more genuinely hopeful and moving parts of the past six months. You used words like honest, real, courageous, rigorous and transparent. You told us we were the only place doing this; that you didn't know who else to read after Remake closed and Fashion Revolution shuttered its UK headquarters; that we saved you from “sludging through misinformation” on your own time. A Founding Member wrote that she keeps supporting because “I genuinely care about these issues and need to seek out the truth behind the marketing.” 

Overall, the sentiment we heard the most from readers was the importance of trust. You repeated this word unprompted. You also described that we helped you feel less alone in the process. “It makes me feel like I’m not crazy to care about stuff. Other people think it's important to care about people and the planet. I’m not alone.” That response from one reader reflects what a lot of you wrote in your own words.

Of course, you didn’t love everything. We’re really grateful to the readers who told us why, including the survey respondent who shared their thoughts on our actual names: “Amy Miles — I ask myself, is it airlines? JD somehow sounds like a shoe brand.” If we were able to stick around, we’d be working to take on your feedback, although changing our names isn’t currently on the roadmap.

What to keep an eye on

The hardest thing about fashion accountability journalism isn’t the reporting or the audience. You’ve shown us the audience is here. What’s tricky is figuring out the financial structure that can sustain the work that needs to happen.

We won’t sugarcoat it: Accountability organisations in this space have closed, freelance journalists are leaving the beat, and the venues for this work are fewer than they were a year ago. 

We didn’t crack the model. But someone else might. And the independent journalists and organisations on this beat deserve all the readers they can get. If a publication holding the same line lands in your inbox, we hope you’ll support it the way you supported us. 

Now a few practical notes including ​one way to help, and then we’ll ​proceed with winding down.

🔵 Founding and Lifetime Members: how to request a refund. It feels right to us that we offer a prorated refund to our Founding and Lifetime Members who took a gamble on supporting a startup publication.

If you’d like to request one, please email us at [email protected] from the address linked to your membership. We’re paying these out of our own pockets, so we appreciate your patience while we work through them. For those who don’t request refunds, we sincerely appreciate your continued support.

🔵 We will be opening our freelance books. If you’d like to work with us, we’ll have select availability for journalism and reporting projects, editorial consulting and content strategy. You can still reach us at [email protected] and [email protected]. 

🔵 You can still engage with our work at Good On You: Check brand ratings in the directory, and get educational and shopping inspiration on the journal, which are publishing as usual.

🔵 Drop some change in the tip jar to help cover our closing costs. Closing a publication well costs money, too, we’re learning: refunds, platform and software fees, archiving what we’ve built so it stays readable for anyone who wants to revisit it (something we’re figuring out how best to do).