WHERE

Last week we were very happy to see Katie from “What Katie Wore” wearing a pair of Tressa studded shoes!

Don’t know What Katie Wore?

Well, she’s got a fella called Joe. Joe challenged her to wear a different outfit every day for a whole year. And she took him up on it. Each day Joe documents Katie with a pic and a blog post.

Or as they put it simply, ‘Joe writes the blog. Katie wears the clothes’. Apparently this was meant to be his ultimate love letter. How sweet is that?!

For all London’s fashion obssesion, you don’t often see people that look that different. But Katie has a very unique style, she is super adventurous. And she obviously is not scared of colour and knows very well how to combine it in the outfits she puts together. A colourful love letter!

Katie is based just around the corner form WHERE’s design studio, in East London.

A few of our styles & sizes is already sold out, but from today were offering a further 50% off. We’d like to sell out completely.

Have a look in our shop where the most expensive item is now only £35.

If your a WHERE Twitter follower you would probably have seen our promotional code which makes you eligible for a further 20% off the sales price (an effective 60% reduction on the retail price). Simply enter the promotional code on the checkout and bob’s your uncle. If you don’t have the code, simply send us a Twitter message or @ reply for the further 20% discount code.

A few days ago we were notified that we were not shortlisted as finalists for the Innovation competition organized by the Ethical fashion forum. Which is a shame…

Some of you will remember we entered the competition with our design theme and a new concept in shoes and accessories called “Walk like and Egyptian”.

This is the rather nice email we received from the Ethical Fashion Forum, which we still decided to make public as we feel very proud about what we have achieved in a year as WHERE fashion.

Unfortunately you were not selected by the judges for the shortlist, however the judges were impressed by the overall standard and professionalism of your application.

The quality of all applications were extremely high and the judges are very pleased by the standard of emerging ethical labels out there.
The judges would like to encourage you to apply again next year and have provided some feedback to nurture and develop your ideas:

“I’m very impressed by what this brand has achieved in the last 14 months. They have some strong stockists, good price points and a very clear vision for their brand. They have managed to achieve an incredible amount in such a short time and their brand philosophy, use of innovative sustainable materials, working with IFAT partners and general strength of the design is a welcome surprise”.

WHERE is going to India tonight in preparation for the development of the Spring/Summer 2010 collection. So WHERE thought it would be interesting to re-visit the last trip to India. It focused on the development of our Spring/Summer 2009 collection.

The trip was hectic, packed with visiting the workshops in the cities of Jaipur and Delhi as well as working & developing with artisans in rural areas.

This is because every WHERE shoe consists of hand crafted elements or recycled parts.

We spent more than a month in India working on the project, and I wish we had taken more pictures, but at that time we were not (yet) into blogging as we are now. This time it wont be the same. Promise.

Thank goodness for Pooja, our Indian connection traveling with us from CFM (community friendly movement).  She has such a bubbly and easy-going approach, apart from being an excellent translator.

India is a whole new universe. Some of the things that we found very interesting, apart of shoe making, was visiting block printing and textile workshops (block print stamps and block printer master below).

Right across India you will find small companies, organizations and factories that are intensely involved in product development, whether it is fabrics, shoes, leather work or jewelry. And its not only in the cities but in rural areas as well.

When jobs are provided for those living in rural areas it helps to keep families together. Normally in rural areas there are not many jobs, so usually the men move to the cities to work in big factories and spent months away from the family to be able to send money. Very often this is what happens in developing countries.

We would like to contribute to keep this from happening in India where possible. And in conjunction with our IFAT partner, Community Friendly Movement, we ensure that workers received fair wages and received rational contributions.

We are not able to produce a whole shoe in the rural communities, because to make shoes some special machinery, skills are needed, but we can make some of the components in rural communities, specially for the summer ranges.

We then transfer the components to a small size organized workshop, where the shoe making and leather work is still done by hand, but with the correct tools and skills needed.

WHERE is looking forward to more sights and sounds and stories from India. And of more ridiculously hot temperatures (40 degrees to estimate), mad traveling plans and even more interesting product designs!

Produced in India under the control of  our IFAT partner, Community Friendly Movement; this strappy wedge sandal called Amour is a must have accessory for the summer.

CFM ensure that all the workers involved receive fair wages & that Fair trade terms are followed throughout. 

Amour is completely hand made using local Indian leathers & silk from Kashmir.

The striped wedge cover is hand woven from recycled VHS film & cassette mixed with dyed cotton from a community specialising in this work.

WHERE technician’s help the producers cut the initial paper patterns & supervise the hand cutting of components.

The shoe is sold in a printed cotton bag made by a community in Delhi called Sahara. Sahara uses disadvantaged workers including Aids & drugs victims.

Amour is available in this silk mix & also a brown leather mix colour.

We hope you like this & the other styles we are selling for Summer 2009.

Produced in India under the control of  our IFAT partner, Community Friendly Movement; this toe thong sandal called Liefde is a must have accessory for the summer.

CFM ensure that all the workers involved receive fair wages & that Fair trade terms are followed throughout. 

Liefde is completely hand made using local Indian leathers & components.

Liefde toe thong

The natural raw edge leather used on the straps is colour washed by hand & then wrapped with copper wire.

The sock is edged with a veg tanned strip which is hand thonged by a local village community.

WHERE technicians help the producers cut the initial paper patterns & supervise the hand cutting of components.

The shoe is sold in a printed cotton bag made by a community in Delhi called Sahara. Sahara uses disadvantaged workers including Aids & drugs victims.

Liefde is available in Purple mix & Yellow mix colourways.

We hope you like this & the other styles we are selling for Summer 2009.

Produced in India under the control of  our IFAT partner, Community Friendly Movement; this round toe ballerina called Meil is a must have accessory for the summer.

CFM ensure that all the workers involved receive fair wages & that Fair trade terms are followed throughout.

 

Meil is completely hand made using local Indian leathers & components.

The leather is woven with leather strips by hand.

The original round toe last is supplied by WHERE to ensure an excellent shape & fit is achieved.

WHERE technicians help the producers cut the initial paper patterns & supervise the hand cutting of components.

The shoe is sold in a printed cotton bag made by a community in Delhi called Sahara. Sahara uses disadvantaged workers including Aids & drugs victims.

Meil is available in Red powder finish & Tan pull up effect leathers.

We hope you like this & the other styles we are selling for Summer 2009.

Questions around fashion and the ethics of production are becomming more and more… fashionable, for want of a better word.

In London the ethical fashion forum has been spearheading thinking around this issue by organising various talks. WHERE fashion attended one of the talks called “Fashion + How fashion can change lives – Working with co-operatives & ethical marketplace”.

Here follows some of our observations.

The event was packed. Clearly fair trade and fashion is now high on the agenda.

The panel of speakers were: Safia Minney, founder and director of People Tree; Richard Stubbs from MADE, Christina Archer from Body Shop. All of them very interesting.

But Christina Archer from Body Shop made some of the most telling points, namely that:

• Body shop has been working with some communities around the world for more than 22 years; and
• Currently they work under fair trade conditions with 30 different cooperatives in 22 countries;
• Their emblem is “Trade not Aid”.

And this is something that we at WHERE fashion also strongly believe in. That is – fair prices for the suppliers, creating stability of demand and giving back to the comunities we work with, but – and this is important – still trading and not aiding.

Christina Archer named the benefits of working under fair trade conditions for Body Shop as:

• Traceble ingredients  and confident of provenance;
• Direct link with the workers, so being able to understand what the needs of the community are;
• A more secure supply chain, because it is a supply chain based on trust.

This makes fashion and business sense AND makes us sleep more easily.

The audience asked some pertinenent questions.

One of them was about child labor: “What if you are a small company that is starting to work with communities under fair trade conditions and suddenly you find out that there are some kids working – at times – in the factory.”

Safia Minney answered this question very clearly:

“What we don’t want is to have a system that penalize the small producers…” and she went on to set out a framework for dealing with this.

First find out what the government imposed minimum age is. And whether the kid had gone to school. If they had worked at this factory full time it would be unacceptable. But if they had – after attending school – come to help their parents, for a reasonable amount of time (not several hours) -  it could be acceptable.