“People said I was crazy. But I’ll prove it can be done.”

On a mission to make the fashion sector more quality-oriented and sustainable, Niki De Schryver didn’t choose the easiest pitch for investors and potential customers with her start-up COSH! ​‘But I’m not afraid of failure. I work extremely hard on every project I take on.

Article published in De Tijd 28/02/2026, written by Wim De Preter.

“Please don’t portray me as a well-behaved housewife,” Niki de Schryver requests during the interview, just after sharing how she organised craft afternoons for neighbourhood children at the age of six. While this anecdote could be read as an indication of her entrepreneurial spirit from an early age, she is concerned about the stereotypes people tend to associate with such traits.

It won’t be the only time De Schryver asks for certain statements to be handled discreetly or withheld from the newspaper. She is wary and has prepared her interview notes thoroughly. It says a lot about the bad experiences she already had in her career in the fashion industry and as an entrepreneur. 

Nevertheless, she’s determined to change this sector from the inside out. With COSH!, De Schryver has created a platform that helps consumers shop more consciously. The company has collected a huge amount of data regarding the sustainability of fashion labels, clothing items, and accessories, as well as the shops where you can buy them. It recently launched its ​“digital wardrobe”, an app that offers users insights into their wardrobe habits and the sustainability of their clothing. The ultimate goal is to eliminate so-called ​“fast fashion” – cheaply produced disposable clothing that contributes to mountains of waste and poor working conditions.

De Schryver’s fascination with fashion and entrepreneurship emerged at an early age. ​”My father owned a fur tannery in Gentbrugge, and my mother had a knitting wool shop on Brabantdam in Ghent, with a workshop employing 20 women who still knitted by hand.” After her parents divorced, she moved house regularly. She lived in various countries in the Middle East, spent two months in Peru, and eventually ended up in West Flanders. ​“All that travelling has given me a lot of cultural baggage. Fashion fascinates me not because of the glitter and glamour, but because it brings people and cultures together in a creative and beautiful product.”

Too little freedom for my entrepreneurial drive

As a child and young teenager, De Schryver learned to make her own way. In Turkey, she guided European tourists around, and back in Belgium, she commuted every day between Stuivekenskerke (Diksmuide) and her school in Bruges all by herself. Due to a difficult home situation, to say the least, she decided to move into a student residence in her fourth year of secondary school. ​“But I didn’t have enough freedom there. I had a sewing machine to work on my own clothing line, but at ten o’clock the lights went out, and we had to go to bed. I wanted to keep going. Even now. A 9‑to‑5 job is not for me.”

The solution was quite radical: at the age of fifteen, with the consent of the family council, she moved into a purchased townhouse in the centre of Bruges. It had no running water or plumbing, but it did have three electrical sockets. Just enough to power her laptop, a small stove and a lamp. De Schryver would combine the rest of her secondary school years with a complete renovation. And after that first house, five more renovations would follow. ​“Real estate is my second great passion,” she smiles.

During her bachelor’s degree in fashion technology, she was already thinking about how she could pursue an international career. With her fully renovated house, she was able to set up a home exchange that took her to New York. De Schryver studied at the renowned Parsons School of Design and did internships at several well-known fashion houses. Until she discovered that in New York, you have to do four years of internships before you can get a paid job. 

“That wasn’t an option. Through my school, I was able to find work in Belgium as a production manager for fashion designer Bruno Pieters (former artistic director of Hugo Boss, ed.). I was responsible for the production of his designs and negotiating contracts with agencies that worked with factories in Eastern Europe.”

After only a year, De Schryver became COO (Chief Operating Officer) and was given a crucial role behind the scenes of the fashion designer. ​“At the age of 21, I was doing sales, organising fashion shows and overseeing the production and logistics of all the collections – women’s, men’s, knitwear, shoes, bags…” It was hard work for a moderate salary, but she was proud to be working for a major designer. ​‘Sometimes I would get tears in my eyes from the beauty of his creations,’ she says. 

As Pieters’ right-hand woman, she also learned about the flaws in the fashion industry. ​“By the time a design is translated into a garment on the racks, it has passed through ten intermediary stages because there are always agencies involved. And at each of these stages, you suffer a loss of quality. This results in a lot of unsellable stock, which is costly and a waste of the materials used.”

Couldn’t that chain be simplified? Yes, if everyone takes responsibility and makes their own products, De Schryver replies. ​“The problem is that every product in a fashion collection – from shoes to handbags – requires its own machinery. And even within each of those product categories, there are many different variants, all of which require different skills and technology. To create a complete collection, you need so many suppliers that it is difficult to integrate a complete collection vertically. At COSH!, we work with robust studios that also have their own shops and produce on a much smaller scale, but in a single product category.”

“When I worked for Bruno Pieters, we eliminated those middlemen by producing directly in Morocco, in a village south of Casablanca. We picked up the workers every day and paid them a fair wage. You could immediately see the quality of life of those people improve. And they learned a profession. Initially, many of them couldn’t sew, but three years later they were making clothes for Lady Gaga.”

De Schryver then worked for another company for a while, but she doesn’t want to say anything about it, except that she ​“saw a different world that didn’t fit with my values and standards”. When Pieters approached her again with the proposal to start an ecological and ethical label, she did not hesitate. She did the research for ​“Honest By”, a label launched in 2012 that pioneered complete transparency in the production chain, materials, working conditions and pricing of each garment.

When she went through a difficult period in her family life and was forced to work less, her contract was not renewed. Doesn’t that say a lot about the way people are treated in the fashion industry? ​“It’s no better in other sectors,” replies De Schryver. She can testify to that first-hand, but would rather not do so in the newspaper. She has nothing bad to say about Pieters. ​“I really enjoyed working for him.”

Her career then took a few different turns. She launched and sold a webshop for children’s toys, teaching herself the ins and outs of marketing and e‑commerce. That led her to a job at the Sportline sports shop chain, where she built up the digital sales channels from scratch and integrated them with the physical shops. ​“Yes, there have been times when it all got too much, but I’m resilient. I find it difficult to sit still. And I don’t worry about whether something will work out. Whatever project I throw myself into, I give it my all.”

The Pokémon Go of locally shopping for sustainable fashion?

De Schryver got the idea for COSH! in 2018 at Hack Belgium, a kind of collective brainstorming session aimed at tackling major social issues. ​“I heard a lot of proposals that would create even more competition for existing start-ups. I decided to build something that would help those small businesses scale up. My initial idea for COSH! was to create a kind of Pokémon Go for sustainable shoppers.”

It was not easy to convince people outside the sector of her idea. ​“With a grant from Vlaanderen Circulair, we had market research conducted. In the final report, they accidentally left an internal memo in there. It basically said, ​“This woman is crazy, she’s not going to succeed.” But I thought, ​“I’ll prove to them that it can be done.” They strongly underestimated my resilience and persistence. ” COSH! is now the only company that emerged from Hack Belgium that still exists, she points out subtly.

The start-up is also slightly profitable, although it remains a constant search for the right financing mix. For the traditional venture capital world, a mission-driven company like COSH! is not an obvious investment. ​“I put my energy into what works,’ she says resolutely. ​‘We are looking for people who are truly intrinsically motivated and who can contribute financially, with a vision that goes beyond five or seven years.”

Ridiculous Sales

Fast fashion has had the wind in its sails for years, partly due to globalisation. A whole new set of laws is coming that will force fashion players to make their supply chains more sustainable. At the same time, the established players are lobbying behind the scenes to protect their interests. 

“It will introduce extended producer responsibility, requiring textile companies to contribute to the recycling of every kilogram of textiles they put on the market. The problem is that everyone has to pay the same amount, whether you are a large company or a local maker who does upcycling. That’s not fair, because the mass of clothing that fast-fashion companies put on the market is much more burdensome for the entire recycling network. We want to use our data to show that these clothes are worn for much shorter periods of time and therefore end up in the waste chain much faster,” says De Schryver.

Later this year, Europe will also introduce a ban on the destruction of unsold clothing, initially for the largest companies. ​“There is an overproduction of about 30 per cent in the sector. Retailers systematically buy too much because they want to have enough left over for the sales period. How absurd is that? I am extremely frustrated by the typical media reports that the sales period has been a success. In fact, you should encourage the sector to better estimate how much they can sell at the right price before the sales.”

On paper, the ban on destruction is a good thing: companies are obliged to sell surplus or returned clothing, or to process it into new clothing. But the law has too many loopholes, she says. ​‘If a company can prove that processing the surplus is too expensive, they are still allowed to destroy it. And small businesses are exempt from the reporting obligation on what happens to unsold goods.”

De Schryver does not want to be seen as fighting a losing battle, however. ​“Many pioneers in this sector believe in COSH! and call it the solution we need. That gives me energy. But we also need a war chest. With strategic acquisitions, we could unite people who are currently working on the transition on a quasi-voluntary basis and remunerate them properly, thereby growing into a global network.”