Can a fashion app change the world?
Isn’t it wonderful how life brings you opportunities when you start following a path you love? The day after I launched this blog, my friend Caroline sent me a link to a kickstarter page for a fashion app I KNOW I want in existence.
Friends, meet Not My Style, an app that will tell you how much your favourite fashion brands share about how they treat the women and men who make their clothes, so that you can make better decisions about where to spend your money.
I immediately backed them and then messaged them to find out more. The team wrote back quickly — because they’re awesome — and a few days later, I was in a coffee shop in London Bridge to meet Jess, one of the cofounders.
Jess is an Aussie — it turns out the theory is true that Australians living in London have just two degrees of separation rather than seven — and it was a joy to meet her. She was immediately charming, sparkling with enthusiasm about her mission to make brands more accountable and consumers more knowledgeable about how their clothes are being made.
She told me the story of how Not My Style began. She was sitting with her friend and former manager, Alisha, at the Trust Women conference last year. They were listening to a talk on the appalling labour conditions of women working in the garment industry in developing countries and asked: “So, where can I shop so that we’re not supporting this?”
And there was silence.
They were then told there wasn’t a clear answer. There’s currently no easy way to find out information about brands’ supply chains and, more worryingly, brands don’t think consumers care enough to check.
There and then, Not My Style was born. Drawing on their complementary strengths — Alisha in strategy and fundraising, Joni in responsible business and Jess in monitoring and evaluation— and their common love for good fashion, they set out to help high street shoppers find and buy clothes that don’t cost peoples’ health and wellbeing.
It’s the human side of clothes production we’re most interested in. Brands don’t think consumers care, but we do. And we have a considerable amount of power.
“If you wonder about the power consumers have, you just need to look at how we buy food. Thanks to a groundswell of consumer interest back in the 90s, our tuna is now dolphin-friendly and we know how the chickens who give us eggs are treated.
“We want to create a consumer movement that pushes brands to be more transparent about their supply chains, with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of the women and men who make our clothes,” Jess said.
A year after coming up with the idea, they were back at the 2015 Trust Women conference, launching the Not My Style kickstarter. Here is Alisha, with green fashion icon, Livia Firth, who pledged to support their initiative:
Once the Kickstarter is funded, Not My Style will be developed as an iphone and android app to be used whenever you’re out and about and don’t have time to time to read a report on supply chains. Using a rating system, it will help you make choices that match your values about where to spend your money. There’s a great infographic on their Kickstarter page which takes you through the process.
Jess said, “We’re now more than half funded and we need more support. Even if people just pledge £1, we will have more and more people saying to brands: we want to know where our clothes are coming from. It will show brands that we DO care.”
We will know we’ve been successful when more brands tell the full story so that savvy shoppers can make informed choices about where to spend their money.
We want to see that too which is why I’ve backed their Kickstarter campaign and hope you will too. Maybe this fashion app can change the world — don’t you want to be part of that?
