SAFIA MINNEY combined her passion for promoting social and environmental awareness with her sense for business and ended up developing the leading brand in fair trade fashion.
People Tree is fashion with a conscience and counts Sienna Miller and Minnie Driver among its clientele.
Ms Minney worked in marketing and publishing in London for eight years before moving to Tokyo with her husband, James. Shocked by the lack of environmental awareness, the mother of two launched a non-governmental organisation called Global Village.
“I was employed by the first Body Shop in Tokyo and I realised that there was very little information available for consumers on recycling, fair trade or organic food. With the help of two university students, I began producing and publishing a small leaflet that provided consumers with green information, including environmental and organic listings.”
Global Village operated from her home for nine years until 2000. When it grew into an operation with 17 staff co-ordinating events, campaigns, a catalogue and sales to 500 shops, Ms Minney moved into commercial space.
In 1995 she formed the Fair Trade Company and opened a shop in the fashionable Jiyugaoka district in Tokyo.
Two years later she added a fashion collection using eco-textiles including organic cotton — which means that the clothes have not been made with the use of pesticides and chemical dyes — and People Tree was born.
In 2001 Ms Minney launched her company in the UK. “We sell our products through mail order and it was harder than I expected to get the business off the ground in the UK. In Japan, we already had a market presence through the Fair Trade Company. We weren’t as well known here,” she says.
After hiring two full-time members of staff, Ms Minney bought commercial mail-order lists, but quickly realised that this was not the way to go.
“We couldn’t get across what was special about the product,” she says. “We were determined to highlight the difference between us and other mail-order clothing firms. It was a difficult nut to crack. We then decided to work in partnership with like-minded shops such as Aveda, which worked well.”
Their early catalogues — printed on 100 per cent recycled paper, of course — were well received. One was even picked up by Wayne Hemingway, the designer, who has been a supporter ever since.
The company grew 50 per cent in the 12 months from spring last year and Selfridges showcased its first People Tree collection — a significant milestone for the fair trade fashion industry.
The company’s products are now available by mail order and in fair trade shops throughout the UK, Italy and Japan, which is also home to its only flagship store. Ms Minney is looking for partners to open the first shop in Britain.
What sets People Tree apart from its main market competition is that it pays its producers a fair price, provides technical assistance with product design and quality control and commits to ordering regularly. Ms Minney says: “Fair trade helps people to revive their livelihoods and develop their communities. We work with 70 textile artisan groups in 20 developing countries to help them to meet environmental standards and develop market potential.”
People Tree now has five full-time designers on the team, which consists of forty employees in Tokyo and eight in London.
The company pays 50 per cent of the operating costs of two primary schools, in Nepal and Bangladesh, and is in the early stages of supporting a third school in Tirupur, the T-shirt capital of India, where child labour is rife.
The women’s co-operative being established around the school will help mothers to provide for their families and will also help to fund the operating costs of the school.
Last year Ms Minney’s commitment to long-term sustainability resulted in her selection as one of the world’s most outstanding social entrepreneurs by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
She says that the 10,000 people around the world working for People Tree receive up to 70 per cent more in wages than they would earn otherwise. Ms Minney now hopes to educate consumers and show them what they are capable of achieving through the choices they make when they shop.
“We are able to offer our products at competitive prices compared with the middle market because we spend little on marketing and focus more on targeting our primary audience. Consumers are beginning to realise the suffering that occurs as a result of unfair trade policies and they can spend their money in a manner that supports what they believe in. Fair trade empowers both consumer and producer.”
