We can divide businesses up into two camps; those who broadly do good(and hopefully do good broadly), and those who don’t. In today’s ‘Fashion’ industry, most fall into the latter camp.
In the past, without necessarily meaning to, most businesses we bought our stuff from did a whole lot of good for people here; making good quality things that increased our enjoyment of life; supporting rewarding jobs locally; creating a strong sense of community and personal and civic identity; and crucially making a large positive contribution to the broader UK economy, and to the public purse through the payment of income taxes, national insurance, business rates, corporation tax etc. We bought our clothes from businesses who were based here, made their product here, and thus our spending directly paid for our schools, hospitals, etc, and all sorts of other things we as a country are now struggling to fund. Also, the owners of those businesses lived locally, so surplus profits stayed local too. In Blackburn where Community Clothing is based public philanthropy paid for large parts of the public realm, from the Technical School to Corporation Park. In 2025 those people who own the businesses we buy from (in fact own the great majority of the world's wealth) are concentrated in a few enormously wealthy global cities, or in offshore tax havens. Some are generous, giving large sums to charities, but spare wealth no longer flows into our local towns as it once did. Despite taking absolute bucket loads of cash from the good folks of Blackburn,Jeff Bezos, Chris Xu (Shein’s owner) and their like are not spending their billions building new schools and hospitals in the borough. There’s no Jeff Bezos Way in Blackburn.
If we want a stronger economy and happier and healthier society we need to spend our money with brands who make a positive and direct contribution to both. But how do we know who the good guys are? Especially when the bad guys spend so much money trying to look like good guys. One sure fire way to know that your spending will do good is to buy from an accredited Social Enterprise. Today is Social Enterprise Day (hoorah), a global day of celebration of the social enterprise movement and its positive transformative impact. Social Enterprise UK(our certifying body) has 131,000 UK members, covering everything from supermarkets and coffee companies, to housing, beauty and health, and clothing brands (like us). There are some amazing UK social businesses (I met a whole bunch at last year’s Social Enterprise Awards) and collectively we contribute £60 Billion to our economy, and our indirect economic impact (harder to quantify)will be much greater still. These businesses are powerful forces for good and as we wake up to the reality that how we spend our money really can make a difference the movement is growing. Happily more and more of us are now realising that giving all our hard earned cash to billionaires like Bezos may not be such a brilliant idea, unless we care more about seeing pop stars going to space than being able to see a GP.
