Designing for Fair Trade
Creating livelihoods from sketches
In some ways, our fashion designers are fairly typical; they're passionate about good design, obsessed by detail and they love experimenting with new fabrics and materials. They won't rest until they've created a garment that's truly beautiful.
But People Tree designers have another goal in mind when they sit down with an empty sketchpad; creating work in developing countries. They know that each and every choice made in the design process effects the lives of the producers – and work their designs to be of maximum benefit.
So, if there's two ways of creating something, and one way uses more labour (such hand weaving the fabric), the People Tree designer will specify that method. Not only that, but they'll actively seek to add product features to create work. For example, they might add embroidery to a simple top, providing income to a family-run business in India.
All this takes time, which is why we use designers equipped with incredible powers of fashion foresight (!) – because the design process starts over a year before they hit the high street in order to give producers time to do create them without being overworked.
So, throughout the shopping bit of our site, you'll see the following symbols. They're there to tell you when a labour-intensive hand crafting technique has been used. That way, you know that a time and skill, has gone into making that garment. (Using hand-production techniques also means that the items have a much smaller carbon footprint than conventional methods.)
Hand Woven
Hand weaving uses nine times more labour than material produced on a power loom. That's nine times more people provided with an income they can use to feed their families and send their kids to school.
People Tree's partner Artisan Hut in Bangladesh works with 250 producers. They earn up to double what they would earn in the conventional garment sector – allowing the to escape poverty.
What's more, hand looms don't use electric power – which keeps running costs down -and they don't suffer from power cuts, so they can be sited in small towns and villages, where the weavers' families live. So they can stay together rather than move to overcrowded cities to find work alone.
There are over ten million hand weavers in Bangladesh and India on starvation wages, and so many of most interesting fashions are made from handwoven textiles.
Hand Knit
Knitting might be your Granny's favourite pastime, but it's also a powerful tool for economic change. At People Tree, we use it to provide underprivileged people all over the world with the income to escape from poverty.
In Nepal and Peru and India People Tree works with over 1500 artisans. They hand knit and crochet natural fibres such as merino, alpaca, cotton and wool.
In Peru, our knitters hand spin and hand knit organic alpaca, and pass these skills down to their children. And, Kumbeshwar Technical School (KTS) provides training and employment opportunities to disadvantaged people in Nepal, at the same time as using the profits from Fair trade to run a school for 260 kids.
Hand Embroidery
Artisans in India and Bangladesh have passed embroidery skills down through generations. People Tree uses this rare talent to produce beautiful garments like the anya dress and shirt dress (which use a traditional embroidery style called nakshi kantha, a technique use originally to stitch together old saris into quilt).
The beautiful evening dresses are hand embroidered by artisans working with Sasha handicrafts, who are based in Kolkata, India. People Tree and Sasha work closely with producers to provide design and marketing assistance, revive traditional skills, and create livelihoods. The embroidery on each dress takes 36 hours to complete, so you can feel really special when you wear it!
