Downed by Dengue

The part of my brain where science and art collide always found this to be such a pretty carrier of deadly disease:

This is the Aedes mosquito and has been responsible for me being bed ridden for almost 4 weeks.  It carries a horrible virus called Dengue – kindly nicknamed the ‘bone breaker’ because of the pain it causes.  On the positive side, I have been working in Dengue and malaria prone areas for 15 years and this is the first time I have got seriously sick, on the negative side it was a 5 day trip to Mumbai and seems highly unfair!

But recovering now and desperately scrambling to promote the beautiful scarves made by the amazing women from the slums of Mumbai.  Ready for the perfect Christmas gift: http://etsy.me/1q1TDpz

Winter Silk Scarf and Block Print by Just Clothing Company

And at the same time, starting my friends and family funding round so we can build the marketplace in the new year.  Four weeks to make up for, so no sleep between now and Christmas!

It’s complicated.

I was recently taken on a tour of an arts project in the largest of Mumbai’s slums.  The focus of this amazing work is engaging the community in a conversation about violence against women and sexual health.  The Dharavi Biennale is the brainchild of SNEHA, a wonderful organisation I have had the privilege of working in partnership with for a number of years.  Alongside their life changing work in maternal and newborn health and brilliant prevention of early childhood nutrition projects they also have one of the world’s largest prevention of violence again women and children initiatives, headed up by the amazing Dr Nayreen Daruwalla.

 

Nayreen and David Osrin (a Wellcome Professor who has been collaborating on some groundbreaking research projects with SNEHA for many years) recently published their research on classifying women’s death from burns in India.  This is a horrific issue, on more than one level, that particularly affects the poorest communities in India; most of these deaths occur by accident in women in loose fitting saris and shalwars, often made from cheap-flammable fabrics, cooking on floor-standing hobs with open flames.  However, a small but significant number occur are due to homicide and suicide strongly linked to spousal/family abuse and a phenomenon known as ‘Dowry Death’.

Whilst Nayreen and David were showing me round the Dharavi Biennale, a journalist arrived to discuss their recently published research.  There was a clear agenda attached to the interview.  The journalist wanted a headline-grabbing statistic on the number of women victims of ‘Dowry Death’ and the general inadequate response by the police.  Firstly, this was not the aim of the research, it was a case study, not looking at large numbers but rather concentrating on detailed interviews from a small number of participants.  Secondly, it was not assessing the effectiveness of the police response but rather assessing how burns victims’ deaths were classified (e.g. as accidental death, homicide or suicide).  To try and draw out population level statistics from this: “XX% of women admitted to hospital with burns are a case of Dowry Death” is both inaccurate and irresponsible.

And most important of all, Nayreen’s prevention of violence against women and children initiative relies on working closely with the police for to safeguard the lives of many vulnerable women and children.  By associating the work they do with allegations of policy inadequacies, such potential assertions made by a journalist could have a very real and dangerous impact on her work.

Scientific research rarely supports a simple yes/no hypothesis.  Trying to over-simplify and use headline-grabbing tactics to present this work only deepens the distrust between the scientific and the wider community and at times this can have life-threatening implications.  As with everything in life it is multifaceted, however this doesn’t mean it is too complex to understand, just complicated…

Why can we not be better in business?

I’ve just read a truly depressing article about the Phones4U scandal by Alex Proud – the poignant quote of which is: “Phones4U was bought by the private equity house, BC Partners, in 2011 for £200m. BC then borrowed £205m and, having saddled the company with vast amounts of debt, paid themselves a dividend of £223m. Crippled by debt, the company has now collapsed into administration.  The people who crippled it have walked away with nearly £20m million, while 5,600 people face losing their jobs. The taxman may also be stiffed on £90m in unpaid VAT and PAYE”

How can this be acceptable business practice? How have we come to live in a world that values making money above all else? It’s not the making money part that I object to but it is when maximisation of profit is the only driver, no value is placed on the wider influence of employment and social impact.  Maybe it’s the board/shareholder herd mentality, there is no connection between the investment and those who they are investing in – and because there is no personal connection and understanding of the business, maximisation of profit is all that draws them together.  There seems to be an ever-growing, widening chasm between big businesses and investment firms only interested in maximising profits and those who are taking a more holistic approach to business practice.

There is a postive trend for business to be more engaged in their employees and customers, more aware of the impact they have on this world and wanting that impact to be positive.  NotOnTheHighStreet is a case in point, they are supporting 5000 small businesses on their site, six of whom have made £1 million directly through NotOnTheHighStreet sales.  And yet they are still a highly profitable business, last year they turned over £87 million.

Winter Silk Scarf and Block Print by Just Clothing Company

I had a meeting with an investor recently, we were discussing the options of wholesale product purchase from our artisan businesses and that of building a platform that would allow them to sell directly to the consumer.  The former has a much larger profit margin for Just Clothing Company, the later would increase the profit margin for the artisan business.  In our model, both are needed, many artisan businesses from some of the poorest communities of the world are not established enough to sell directly to the consumer, by purchasing wholesale Just Clothing Company can support the business to grow until it’s independence.  But a key driver for us is impact – by using the marketplace model we will be able to scale across many communities and, having just come back from a visit to the slums in Mumbai, I can assure you they need to greater profit margin far more than Just Clothing Company does.  But we can still make money, we can still grow the business – it’s just that our profit is not just valued simply in monetary terms, social impact is at its heart as well.

The investor?  He simply could not comprehend the concept of reducing profit margins – no matter what the social cost.

How do you afford to keep your daughter safe?

In some communities young girls are vulnerable every time they leave the house.  The older they get the more at risk they are. As parents, more than anything you want your children to be safe – often in these communities children are withdrawn from school at 16 – the risk of them walking their each day is too much (or perceived to be).  However, not allowing these girls to leave the house puts the parents under economic stress.  In traditional patriarchal societies the solution has always been to marry them off.  A married woman is (perceived) to be less vulnerable and it is one less mouth to feed.

Leaving education early and marrying young is not ideal – with less economic opportunities preventing her from accessing health care and birth control, and lower status increasing her risk of living within an abusive relationship. Children born to young mothers are at higher risk to malnutrition and morbidity.  None of these scenarios work out well.

Economic empowerment really is the key.  I heard an amazing story yesterday.  Sushma left school at 15, her parents were ready to marry her off as soon as they could, but she found out about an embroidery class and her parents agreed she could attend.  She works for a garment manufacture making boutique hand-stitched goods.  She can do this safely from her home and is now the highest breadwinner in the house.  Her parents have agreed to delay any marriage and her new economic power means she now is involved in any marriage negotiation.  The work Just Clothing Company does will support beautiful, unique handcrafted products but also revolutionise the lives of those engaged in their production.

Why Women?

Here’s three facts for you:

• WOMEN PERFORM 66% OF THE WORLD’S WORKING HOURS;
• WOMEN EARN ONLY 10% OF THE WORLD’S INCOME;
• WOMEN OWN ONLY 1% OF THE WORLD’S PROPERTY.

“Strong growth can not be sustained without gender equality and the empowerment of one half of the world’s population. Gender equality is smart economics and a key driver of global development”

Dr Jim Yong Kim, President, World Bank Group

 

“By investing, by allowing [women] to create businesses that create profits you are creating a self sustaining loop. It goes way beyond philanthropy because it yields profits”

Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs

 

And here’s the real incentive:

ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN TRANSLATES INTO GREATER INVESTMENT IN CHILDREN’S EDUCATION, HEALTH AND NUTRITION, WHICH LEADS TO ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE LONG TERM.

 

The barriers for women-led artisan businesses to reach the global market are many and varied, including lack of finance to purchase quality materials, lack of knowledge of international consumers taste and trends, technological and financial barriers to establishing an online shop and lack of access to international payment facilities. By providing a marketplace to showcase their products and process online payments, whilst providing design and technological support, Just Clothing Company can enable these communities to increase their revenues and grow their businesses.

 

The First…Board Meeting

Last night, in the glorious surroundings of the Grosvenor Lounge was the first time we all sat down together.

I felt relief that I am no longer on my own, gratitude that such talented and busy people will willingly give up their time for this and proud that I had managed to achieve taking the next important step into making Just Clothing Company into a successful and sustainable business.

About two months in to running Just Clothing Company full time I found myself overwhelmed and finding it very hard to prioritise what I needed to do to take the business forward.  I needed a board of advisors.

I had a very clear idea of the skills that were needed.  Given I am a start up running on a lean budget which is reliant consumers, I know that driving awareness and sales are a priority – but in the most cost effective way possible, with a key part of consumer engagement being the stories behind the products.  Social media and PR skills along with SEO,PPC online and offline marketing will be a core constituent of making the business a success.  But that, in itself is not enough – I needed support from successful entrepreneurs, people who have established their own business and supported others in making their businesses a success.

So back to the board: MEERKATWorks, an wonderful media buying company, Jeannie Shapiro with her amazing business skills and social media guru status, Rebecca Mayo, one of the leading lights in PR and Judith Blair with her incomparable experience in both technology and establishing successful start ups.  I am honoured that, despite how busy they all are, they all agreed and Just Clothing Company will benefit immensely from their involvement.

There’s a long way to go but all the easier by having company for the journey.

From Concept to Reality

Anyone who’s anyone in the world of start ups will tell you that you need to be flexible enough to adapt and change.  That the original concept will very rarely reflect the final business model.  This, in itself, is a challenge because egos have a habit of overriding good advice.  My salient advice would be to hold true to your key aim, everything else can move and shift but what matters is achieving this key objective:

“Economic empowerment of women from some of the poorest communities in the world using a sustainable and scalable business model”

So I’ve started with Just Clothing Company, tentative steps to testing the market and using the profits to get some women’s-led artisan businesses off the ground, but this model is hard to scale.

Where I want to take it is much, much bigger so the concept must evolve.  I want this to be the ‘Amazon Marketplace for artisans from all over the world’.  A one-stop-shop for consumers wanting high-quality, unique clothing and accessories that reflect their values and ethics.

So the business model changes but the core concept remains true.  Here’s to a long and prosperous future of staying true to your values and keeping egos in check!

Social Media and Paper Boats

I’ve already broken the first rule of blogging (being the opposite of Fight Club) by not posting last week, but have been buried deep in business planning, so deep I was concerned I would never arise again – but here I am, business plan (another updated version) is complete and being reviewed as we speak.

Two weeks are a long time in the world of a start-up and have learnt a lot, including:

1/ Facebook is an evil genius

2/ Twitter is challenging

3/ How to make a paper boat

Just Clothing Company is in its ‘soft launch’ phase.  We are testing the processes of marketplace, alongside testing wholesale market but a priority must be building up our social profile.  I feel a huge part of Just Clothing Company‘s success will ride on our customers feeling a sense of connection and loyalty to us – to quote from the executive summary:

“We want to create a profit-led sustainable business that can fulfil a growing consumer appetite for more personalised, unique products that reflect their values and ethics, whilst establishing and collaborating with local women-led businesses from throughout the world to provide them with a long-term and growing income.”

Social media is a wonderful forum to do this, just one of the amazing technical advances of our time that enable a company like ours to flourish.  So my first tentative steps into this world have been through Facebook.  We have set up a company page on Facebook, we have boosted our audience through a Facebook campaign (they let you select age, sex, and geographical location, down to a region) for relatively little cost.  

In a flush of zeal when setting up my first campaign, I didn’t take in all of these categories and merely set it to send to adults over age of 21 living in the UK.  Current cost per follower acquired is 11p.  My next campaign will be far more targeted so shall be interested in (theoretically) seeing the price of acquisition drop.

I am a Twitter novice, so this is a far more challenging proposition for me.  There are easy ways to attract an audience, using variations of the #FollowMe, but from everything I’ve read this does not give you an audience who connects with you, merely a large number of spammers and people who collect Twitter followers as a popularity contest.  So it is a longer, slower process of building up communities who you are interested in and then commenting and re-tweeting until you get noticed.  However, I have finally been able to confirm myself as a real person on Twitter (took them nearly 2 weeks to send my confirmation email to me) and this should enable me to run a marketing campaign there.  Whether it is as easy or quantifiable as Facebook I shall endeavour to find out this week.

So after two weeks of studying social media and writing a business plan, I was left feeling as if I was climbing the Escherian stairwell.  I found an effective solution to this in learning how to make paper boats, which my 3-year old son then used to test the optimum load of dinosaurs they could withstand before sinking. I highly recommend this as a relaxing past time – my top tip being choose either a massive paper boat or very small dinosaurs…

And to finish last week on a high, the wonderful people at WAUWAA launched us on their site, complete with a blog with the tag line ‘Just Clothing Company are definitely one of the baby brands to look out for this year’.  Happy with that!

 

Our first blog

Just Clothing Company was officially launched in late April with our first collection appearing here: http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/justclothingcompany/.  It has been a long journey to get to this stage and now an even longer journey starts to make it a success.

The driving force of Just Clothing is that oh so English sounding phrase of ‘Fair Play’.  Born in the UK, I have had every opportunity afforded to me, free health care, free (or heavily subsidised) education, freedom of expression and belief and economic empowerment.  Of course, it is not a perfect system and we as a nation are still struggling with equalities for all, but what if I had been born into a society without this?  There is a strong chance that I or my siblings would have died before the age of 5, that my mother could have died in childbirth; that I would have had no access to education, living the life of a subsistence farmer with little or no rights; married at 15, first child nine months later; no access to family planning leading me to have child after child with little means to feed, cloth, educate them or provide adequate care for them when they were sick.  A mere roll of the dice, luck of the draw has landed me here, sitting in the sunshine in my back garden in Brixton drinking coffee and typing these words.

So how can I, in a very small way, do my bit to redress this imbalance?  Is there one factor that we can hope to impact that can influence all the other inadequacies?  Could this be economic empowerment?

My charity http://womentowomen.org.uk/ has been working for many years with a wonderful organisation in Mumbai, SNEHA http://www.snehamumbai.org/.  In an area where around 50% of under 2-year olds suffered from malnutrition, we worked with mothers on nutrition education projects, including cooking classes and health awareness campaigns.  Malnutrition in children has long-term impacts on not just their health and wellbeing, but society as a whole.  If a child has suffered from untreated chronic malnutrition this impacts on their growth, health and educational abilities; effectively preventing them and therefore greater society, from ever achieving their potential.

SNEHA: Inspirational group working to improve the lives of those living in poverty

Throughout this education programme, we consistently measured greater awareness amongst the mothers of risk factors for malnutrition and yet we were not seeing a reduction in malnutrition rates in their children.  Why not?  Because the mothers were often not at home for 12-15 hours a day. Much of their income derived from insecure, sometimes illegal work and with no affordable childcare available to them, they would often leave their young baby or toddler at home with the next oldest child (often no more than 4 years old) and without the ability to cook, these children often ate biscuits until their mother came home to cook for them. And so http://www.snehamumbai.org/ started a creche for those most vulnerable, with both an educational and feeding programme. It is a wonderful success and is now being expanded with support from The Wellcome Trust (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/) and Dr David Osrin http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slms/people/show.php?UPI=DOSRI65 and his colleagues from the Institute of Child Health.

If these women in Mumbai had better paid, flexible and more secure work then the risk of their children suffering from malnutrition would be far less.  The children would be healthier, better fed, better access to health care with the ability to reach their academic potential.  This brings me neatly on to Just Clothing Company.   Currently, Just Clothing is selling a selection of own brand products through marketplaces including http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/justclothingcompany/, http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/justclothingcompnay and https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JustClothingCompany?ref=shop_sugg.  All profits from Just Clothing will be used as incubator funding for women’s enterprises, providing them with materials, technological support and supply chain management.  We are working with http://www.snehamumbai.org/ to set up our first women’s group in the slums of Mumbai.  Just Clothing will then sell any products produced on their behalf.

Baby Blanket: One of our best selling items

Our longer term goal is to set up our own marketplace where women’s groups from around the world can sell their products to an international audience.  There are many technological and logistical issues involved in this which can wait for another blog!

My first blog is now complete (phew!), I hope you found it interesting and am always interested in feedback or ideas.

Jen (Founder of Just Clothing Company)