Establishing A Fashion Business To Support Sustainable Cities And Communities

Polly Swann, co-author of the Power To Change working report, "Saving The High Street: The Community Takeover" joined us to explain further on what a community business is, how they can help shape a regenerative high street, and how to work with the local authorities and organisations around you to make an impact that will benefit local residents, and those visiting from outside.

As a fashion or creative business, is working on a community model for your local area more in your interests than being an outright social enterprise?

Traidcraft Exchange's research, funded with the help of TRAID, into the informal garment industry in Bangladesh offers an insightful vision of the potential to reduce textile waste and increase creative income for local entrepreneurs in a country where the global ready-made garment sector dominates the economy. In this Lesson, you'll learn more about the backyard garment industry in Bangladesh.

This is a segment cut from a full interview with Maveen Pereira, Director of Programmes at Traidcraft Exchange. 

This is a 20 minute lesson from the founder of Incremental Urbanism, a community development and design workshop that partners with under-resourced communities and engaged clients to activate the unrealised potential in their neighbourhoods and cities. Charlie Palmer brings to light the challenges facing both urban and rural spaces globally, and how a holistic and circular approach to design can help to bring sustainable solutions to the fore, and ultimately ease social inequality. Charlie instils wisdom from his experience in architecture and international development to encourage you - as someone in the fashion and textile sphere - to consider how integral all sectors are to the innovation of one another.

This 23 minute Lesson from Zedify, a zero emission delivery operator in the UK, will assist in your understanding of how urban logistics work in practice. Sam Keam, a co-founder of Zedify will take you through explanations of terms like 'last mile delivery', what circularity looks like for packaging, how the pandemic and rapid shift in e-tailing has affected consumer habit, and what you can implement to reduce overall supply chain and garment production emissions.

Sam instils insight into how using a low or zero emission logistic network will aid in your building of a sustainable business, for example, by establishing personal connections with your customers and helping to relieve your environment of congestion and pollution. No matter what size business you are, or where you are in your journey, this is potentially the future of fashion e-commerce and so it will pay to apprehend the solution early on.

A 25 minute Lesson from Dr Francesco Mazzarella, Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Design for Social Change at the Centre For Sustainable Fashion, where he brings to life the year-long Making For Change: Waltham Forest social project led in partnership with London College of Fashion and London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Here Francesco explains the project's goals and outcomes, and outlines advice that will help you build your own social change project or even social enterprise. He helps you recognise where community engagement, social innovation and design for social change meet in order that you can build a business supportive of long-lasting legacy across cities and communities.

Note, any takeaways from Francesco not in regards to the Making For Change: Waltham Forest project are his own perspective and advice, rather than necessarily that of Centre For Sustainable Fashion.

A 31 minute lesson from the women's advocacy organisation Women In Prison, to support in your understanding of what the criminal justice system looks like for women, and how your fashion brand can sensitively become a mouthpiece for the issues surrounding women in prison.

Kate Fraser is the Northern Development Manager for Women In Prison, a national UK charity that is centred on women's experiences and advocacy for radical change in the criminal justice system. Purdy Sutcliffe is a Project Worker for WomenMatta, a Manchester-based women's centre that provides intense, holistic support to women affected by the criminal justice system and to those at risk.

In this Lesson, hear what the issues are within the criminal justice system specifically for women, and why support before, during and after is crucial to reducing unnecessary convictions and future additional trauma to those imprisoned and their families. From the outset this does not shout out "fashion business", but we also explore thoughts and facts on prison labour, employment in prison, and what steps you can take as a fashion entrepreneur to raise awareness and compassionately advocate for women's rights everywhere.

This 33 minute Lesson from the Co-Founder of transdisciplinary design research lab and consultancy, Post Carbon Lab, will address notions of design theory that you may have heard of, though not had the chance to put into practice. Dian-Jen Lin (or DJ), is both a designer and researcher with a background in fashion, who started developing a microbial dye and photosynthetic coating that could be used commercially. Starting with the question of "how can fashion be ecological", this biohacking consultancy have been able to apply speculative R&D to this thinking, and enable projects to come to life that nudge consumer habit into also asking these bigger, holistic questions.

Without being in the academic space, often these questions about design theory feel irrelevant. You're just a designer, right? Jump into this lesson to appreciate how integral it is for you and your business to recognise the role it can play in activating systemic change within fashion and other sectors. You will also hear about the really cool microbial dyes and photosynthetic coating.