We're cutting up fine dress shirts and sending them to Asia

In order to show our producers, DEM Collective and Watabaran, what shirt quality we strive towards we have bought fine dress shirts on Second Hand. The plan now is to cut them in half and send one part to South Asia and keep the other part here as a reference.The shirts we are sending are Gant, Stenströms, Eton and Hugo Boss. It feels a bit strange to run a pair of scissors through such fine garments, but what else to do?

Lina, my wife, is in charge of sales for The Fair Tailor and yesterday she started calling companies that might be interested in doing business with us. It didn't take long for her to book two meetings, with Göteborg Energi and Semcon. I'm impressed by her and convinced that she will sell a lot of shirts.

We are in the process of registering the company The Fair Tailor, on Thursday we plan to send the forms needed to the government agency.

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Our sample shirts are here!

We have finally received our sample shirts and I must say that it looks promising.

These are the first shirts we have received from our suppliers DEM Collective and Watabaran so far so it was really exciting to open the packages and see what they looked like.

This was of course the first samples, so they were not perfect, but it looks promising. When we start production I believe that we will have excellent shirts.

The future looks promising for us, I am really looking forward to our start of production.

Stay tuned for the next news letter, you will have it in your inbox shortly.

You can read more about the shirts in our Swedish blog at Veckans Affärer.

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-DRESS RESPONSIBLY

Yet another post about DEM Collective

Yesterday I med with Annika Axelsson from DEM Collective.

She had traveled for two days and almost missed her connecting flight in Amstedam so she was a bit tired and confused since she came straight from the flight to meet with me.

She told me about the factory they are building in India and the working conditions for people working in the factories that make clothes for the big brands like H&M and Zara. The storys make me very happy that we have chosen a different path with our project.

I am amazed by Annika, she had hardly slept for 2,5 days and lost her luggage and her passport but she was still full of energy when I met with her. She has worked with Fair Trade and organic materials for quite a long time and it must be frustrating to see how slow things are mowing forward. But she still manages to keep her spirits high. Amazing. 

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

The bank and DEM Collective

Yesterday Lina and I went to meet Marja, our bank contact.

We discussed The Fair Tailor for over an hour an she likes our project.

She will now talk to her colleagues at the bank and with ALMI, things might actually go our way.

Yesterday we had a breakfast meeting with Annika at DEM Collective. I have written about DEM in earlier posts and I'm impressed by their work, we can learn a lot from them. They have their own factory in Sri Lanka and they are hard core about ecological and Fair Trade issues. Annika had for example a plastic bag filled with buttons for the next three months production. She buys the buttons in Borås, Sweden, and then she brings them when she goes to Sri Lanka. Impressive.

Fair Trade and business

Today we met Ingemar for lunch to discuss fair trade in general.

He had some interesting tips on what to consider and other companies that we could learn from. DEM collective is a company that everyone can learn from, but Ingemar, and his colleague Caroline, also mentioned some other companies that we hadn't heard about before, as for example White t-shirt.

Later today we had our first meeting with our business coach Christian Zanders from Jetshop. We sat down together for a couple of hours and both Lina and I feel that Christian knows a whole lot of things that can help us. Very promising! I am really exited about this.

Fair Trade students

Tonight I met with a group of Swedish Fair Trade students who are in Nepal to see how fair trade and fair production works in real life.
We talked for four hours and they gave me a lot of good information, including the name of some people I should meet when I'm here in Nepal. They had actually met with Watabaran here in Nepal and with Bjorn Soderbergs mother back in Sweden.

One thing we discussed was Ekobanken, a social banking bank. We will definitely try to meet with them when I get back to Sweden.
Ekobanken helped to finance a company called DEM collective, a Swedish fare trade company. What DEM has done is really impressive and we hope to learn a lot by studying what they have done.

Tomorrow I'm changing hostels, I'm moving to an are north of the tourist area. Hopefully it will be a bit more quite there.
Right now there is a guy playing trombone just outside my hostel, it is 11pm and tomorrow is a work day here... I've been to almost 40 countries but I think this is the loudest one =)