Meet Denica Riadini-Flesch, a former economist turned entrepreneur, who was so saddened by the struggles of traditional artisans and farmers in rural Indonesia that she created a company to help change their lives. SukkhaCitta is a farm-to-closet fashion brand that puts power back in the hands of the women who make our clothes. Its mission: to end the exploitation of women and simultaneously regenerate the planet.
Balancing purpose and profit while fighting society’s demand for fast fashion is a challenging endeavor. Inexpensive clothing produced by mass-market retailers puts a strain on small artisans everywhere. But fast fashion’s impact on the planet is even more dramatic. The industry is responsible for as much as 10 percent of global carbon emissions. Producing a single cotton T-shirt can take 2,700 liters of water. And all the textiles that are thrown away pile up in landfills, adding 92 million tons of waste each year. Once Riadini-Flesch began really looking at how clothes are made, she knew she had to do something about it. “In the craft economy, you basically make something for up to six months, and only then they try to sell it. But at that moment, women don’t have any bargaining power. She needs the cash for her family to survive. And that’s how this sector is filled with so much exploitation,” she explains.
Riadini-Flesch took a holistic approach, expanding access to both education and markets, and her business focuses on a farming calendar, not a fashion calendar. “We’re a social enterprise. What we do in the villages is being funded by our business. So in essence, with every [piece of clothing] that our customers buy, they start this cycle of regeneration in our villages. And our clothes, because we use only natural materials and natural dyes, it takes only about two to four weeks for it to completely biodegrade back to the soil,” she says.
Learning how to grow her business while maintaining her values means rethinking her definition of success. She says “Growth is not evil, as long as we know what is our ‘enough.’ And once we hit it, we maintain. We find ways to take care of everyone who’s involved. We find ways to give back more than we take. And in that sense, businesses can actually become a force for good.”
Hear Riadini-Flesch’s inspiring story and how she’s creating a social enterprise that gives women in Indonesia true opportunities rather than aid.
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Grit & Growth is a podcast produced by Stanford Seed, an institute at Stanford Graduate School of Business which partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives.
Hear these entrepreneurs’ stories of trial and triumph, and gain insights and guidance from Stanford University faculty and global business experts on how to transform today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.
Full Transcript
(00:00)
Darius Teter: Before we begin, I want to let you know that this episode is also available in Indonesian, the home of our featured guest in Stanford Seed’s newest region where our inaugural cohort launched in January. Although our interview was conducted in English and our guest of course speaks Indonesian, we are both translated into Indonesian by AI. We invite you to check out that version in your podcast feed and welcome your feedback on this experimental translation. We usually think of growth as getting bigger: more sales, more profits, more production, more everything. But what if growth could mean something different? What if a business could thrive because it invests in people, in communities, and in the planet?
(00:40)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: Nothing we’re doing is new. What is radical is this way of doing things as if there is no tomorrow. That is radical and that is what we need to change. Everything that we believe to be true up to today, it’s just a story. Growth is not evil as long as we know what is our “enough.”
(01:05)
Darius Teter: So how do you build a company that doesn’t just sell a product but actually makes the world better? Today on Grit & Growth, that’s exactly what our guest is doing.
(01:14)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: My name is Denica and I’m the founder and CEO of SukkhaCitta.
(01:17)
Darius Teter: Denica Riadini-Flesch didn’t set out to start a business. She set out to solve a problem. As an economist working in rural Indonesia, she saw firsthand how traditional artisans and farmers were left behind, struggling to make a fair wage in a system that was designed to exploit them. So she built SukkhaCitta, a farm-to-closet fashion brand that puts power back in the hands of the women who make our clothes. But running a business with purpose isn’t easy. In this short take, we ask: How do you scale without compromising your values?
(01:53)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: SukkhaCitta is a farm-to-closet fashion brand that works to end the exploitation of women while at the same time regenerating our planet. And the way we do that is that we provide access first to education and then to market to artisans and smallholder farmers in rural Indonesia.
(02:10)
Darius Teter: Denica never set out to be an entrepreneur.
(02:12)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: The interesting thing is that I never thought that I would start a business.
(02:16)
Darius Teter: As a development economist, her work was all about community development, mostly in the nonprofit world. But traveling through villages in Indonesia changed her perspective.
(02:26)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: Before, when I was looking at clothes, it was just something that you buy in stores, and, sadly, I thought that clothes, which is something that magically appear in stores, you buy it, you wear it, you toss it out when you no longer want it. And when I was in the villages, everything changed.
(02:45)
Darius Teter: What Denica is describing is called fast fashion, inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass market retailers in response to the latest trends. Fast fashion’s convenience comes with a heavy cost rarely borne by consumers. The industry is responsible for as much as 10 percent of global carbon emissions. That’s more than all international flights and shipping combined producing a single cotton T-shirt. Well, that can take 2,700 liters of water, enough for one person to drink for nearly three years. And when those clothes are thrown away, as 85 percent of all textiles are, they don’t just disappear. They pile up in landfills, adding 92 million tons of waste each year. And it doesn’t just stop there. Every wash of synthetic fabrics releases thousands of microplastics into our waterways, polluting oceans and harming marine life and, ultimately, all life. It’s a cycle of extraction, waste, and pollution. But most of us don’t think about any of this when we get dressed in the morning, and Denica didn’t either until everything changed.
(03:48)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: For the first time in my life, I saw how clothes are being made. This thing that we wear every day without putting much thought into it, it actually connects each and every one of us to so many invisible women who are working from homes who are literally still keeping up this tradition that has been passed down over generations to them from their mothers and grandmothers before them. It was such a beautiful tradition, but at the same time, my heart was broken because I saw that even though they worked so hard, they were barely making ends meet. It made me realize that behind something so simple, we are literally connected to millions of women all over the world. And unfortunately that story today is not a beautiful one.
(04:40)
Darius Teter: Most of us have bought clothes online, but did you ever wonder: Where did those clothes come from? Probably not. Like most of us, Denica really never thought much about where her clothes came from. But once she started to pull on that thread, the answers were pretty disturbing.
(04:54)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: In the craft economy, you basically make something for up to six months and only then they try to sell it. But at that moment, they don’t have any bargaining power. She needs the cash for her family to survive, and that’s how this sector is also so filled with so much exploitation.
(05:13)
Darius Teter: The more she learned, the more she realized that the problem wasn’t just wages. It was actually the entire system, from the raw materials to make fabric to the dyes used on them to the labor involved.
(05:23)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: There’s this asymmetrical balance of power where artisans who actually do most of the power, they have the least power, the least say in how much they should be getting. And that’s also because partly in the craft sector, basically this knowledge is being passed down over generations. There is no formal education about that. So I started realizing if we truly want to make a difference, we need to bridge that gap. We need to provide them with, first of all, access to education. We started building schools in our villages that can bridge that gap, that can once again make sure that this lineage of craft is no longer broken by making the older generation of craftswomen becoming the master artisans, where young women can now come and really become the apprentices and they learn not only the craft, but actually also the history, but at the same time also how do you do it in a way that is also not destroying the planet.
(06:21)
So the thing about running a farm-to-closet fashion brand with this kind of model is that literally we’re not following the fashion calendar. We’re following the farming calendar, so we run our business as a cycle too. It’s no longer this linear model of take-make-waste, but it’s finding ways how we can honor the cycle and be in harmony of it. That’s the beautiful thing, because we are a social enterprise. What we do in the villages is being funded by our business. So in essence, with every clothes set our customers buy, they start the cycle of regeneration in our villages. And our clothes, because we use only natural materials and natural dyes, it takes only about two to four weeks for it to completely biodegrade back to the soil.
(07:09)
Darius Teter: It’s a simple but powerful cycle. SukkhaCitta works directly with artisans and farmers, providing fair wages and education while reviving traditional craft. Every piece is made with natural materials and dyed using plants instead of chemicals and designed to return to the earth, not pollute it. The result? A business that doesn’t just sustain livelihoods but restores ecosystems, and one that stands in stark contrast to the fast fashion that relies on sweatshop labor and results in massive landfills of toxic waste. Along the way, Denica realized something crucial: these women didn’t need aid, they needed opportunity.
(07:48)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: We can’t just give access to education. We need to make sure that we can also give access to market in a way that can sustain the impact. When you give women work instead of aid, you help them retain the one thing that would normally be taken away through aid, and that’s their pride.
(08:11)
Darius Teter: Solving the problem of fair wages wasn’t enough. The deeper she looked, the more she saw the hidden costs, especially in the way clothes were made. Economists call these externalities.
(08:21)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: Color is the first thing that draws you to clothes, but at the same time today, none of us know how it’s being made. We have no idea where the wastewater is going into. So being there in the villages and seeing these women using carcinogenic chemicals in their kitchen and dumping it directly into rivers where the children play in, it was also a wake-up call for me. And the interesting thing is actually like synthetic chemical dye is actually made from fossil fuels. This was something that came out of the Industrial Revolution, where they started to replace indigenous knowledge with chemicals, unfortunately, in the search of productivity and economic growth. I start connecting the dots, actually, I start realizing that there’s this hidden cost that this linear model comes at the expense of someone else. It’s being fueled by the exploitation of labor and making our planet actually bear the true cost of our production and consumption. For me, the biggest challenge of running this is really the fact that we are doing something that is completely against the status quo, which is this race to the bottom. How do we produce the cheapest things and sell the most stuff, right?
(09:40)
Darius Teter: Challenging the status quo is one thing, but growing a business while holding onto your values, that’s even harder. The answer may be that perpetual growth isn’t actually the right goal.
(09:50)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: How do I grow while maintaining all the standards, and how do I transform myself as a leader in a way that I can build a prosperous company that would outlive me? For me, my “enough” is 10,000 lives, actually. So right now we are finding ways to 10 X this company so that I can directly impact 10,000 lives through my business, while regenerating 1 million hectares of degraded land. When we were kids, we were small, and then we grow, we grow into this adult, and then we stopped growing. We found this equilibrium in which, yeah, this is us as an adult, and when we have excess growth, we call it cancer, and I feel like the same can actually be applied in businesses. Growth is not evil, as long as we know what is our enough, and once we hit it, we maintain. We find ways to take care of everyone who’s involved. We find ways to give back more than we take. And in that sense, businesses can actually become a force for good. But we don’t run our businesses like that. We run for infinite growth without realizing that someone else, somewhere else, is paying the true cost.
(11:16)
Darius Teter: Today, Denica isn’t just running a company. She’s proving that business can be a force for good and that there’s a different way forward
(11:23)
Denica Riadini-Flesch: From the women who are planting the cotton to the ones who harvest the cotton to then spin it into threads, who then weave it into fabric, who then tailor it into clothes, these are like a collaboration of villages of 12 families who make it possible for you to wear that shirt. And when you know that, you don’t see it the same way. Suddenly, this thing that you used to just take from your closet and put on and don’t give much thought about, it becomes an object of connection. It becomes something that makes you realize that your choices actually matter. And now the question becomes: What kind of impact do you want to have? And imagine if we can do that with other businesses. Imagine a world where everything you’re buying is redistributive by design, lifting up women and communities while at the same time regenerating soil, empowering women, and restoring soil health. It is literally like the best climate solution we can have. And what if we can find a way to connect that with a thriving business model so that this just goes on and on even without me? That’s the dream.
(12:43)
Darius Teter: Denica is setting out to prove that business growth doesn’t have to mean more exploitation, more extraction, more waste. It can mean connection, it can mean regeneration. It can mean knowing you’re enough because the choices we make, what we buy, how we build, what we prioritize, they shape the world around us. I’d like to thank Denica for sharing her story and for challenging the way we think about business growth and sustainability. Her work with SukkhaCitta is a reminder that real change doesn’t come from waiting. It comes from building something different, something better. If you want to learn more about her work, you can find SukkhaCitta online and see firsthand how she’s proving that business can be a force for good. While I have your attention, if you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow in whatever way that is for you, I encourage you to apply for the Seed Transformation Program. Stanford Seed will be accepting applications for this 10-month, part-time program, which includes a combination of face-to-face teaching, networking, and virtual learning. You’ll have the opportunity to participate in a cohort of like-minded entrepreneurs from across your region. Founders and CEOs of companies based in sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, and South Asia with annual revenue of at least $300,000 are eligible to apply. For those interested, please apply at stanfordseed.co/grit. Applications are due by May 1. I’m Darius Teter, and this has been a Grit & Growth short take.
(14:18)
Erika Amoako-Agyei and VeAnne Virgin researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator, and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Nathan Tower and sound design and mixing by Ben Crannell at Lower Street Media.
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